Christmas Birding

Following a long calming down after the previous 'fishermen' rant I had a spot of writers block coupled with a lack of birds and the start of a two week freezing spell. Unfortunately the writers block cleared, though the weather stayed freezing and disappointingly didn't seem to cause any hard weather bird movement.


Christmas week stared with a night out with a selection of local birders where we spent the evening putting the world of local birding to right and somehow getting roped in to writing a set of rules for a forthcoming local self-found league. Hopefully by the following morning everyone had forgotten about any commitments that I had made.

For a change this year Jo and I decided on a different Christmas day location - Scarborough! Nothing flash just a day out in Scarborough with perhaps a little bit of birding thrown in. A walk around the harbour produced no birds of note - apparently gone are the days when you could rely on an Iceland or Glaucous Gull being present. A walk up to the castle and a quick look at a dead Bronte's resting site was followed by more unintentional Ice skating session around the harbour. Around midday we ended up at Scalby Mills scanning through the gulls and scanning the sea for divers/grebes and sea duck. What we didn't expect was a White Stork, that appeared over the bay being mobbed by gulls at 13:00hrs
.

Wild or not it was certainly a nice change from Turkey

Riding our look we decided to head home via Holbeck where we picked up at three smart Med' Gulls.


The three days following Christmas day were poor with nothing of note, despite a five hour stint around Pit-house West and RV on the 27th.

With the 28th probably being my last birding day of 2009 I dashed round the house like Mary Poppins cleaning etc to earn some vital afternoon birding brownie points. Unfortunately the birding gods were not pleased (clearly they thought that I should have been out sooner) and unleashed their wrath on me - in short whilst walking down the track towards the Chinese Bridge at Pit-house West I went arse over tit and landed right on top of the Sigma which implanted itself in my ribcage. The next thirty minutes were spent hobbling round holding my ribs. I then decide it might be a good idea to pop to A&E and get them looked at having failed to do any real birding - though through my agony I did have a brief snatch of Cetti's Warbler by the Chinese Bridge.

Fortunately the ribs were just badly bruised, probably saved by the protective layer of excess pie fat! More importantly the camera and lens are still in one piece!!

Many thanks for reading this rubbish for the last 12 months.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Mark