Oct 9th Great Yarmouth and Cley

Great Yarmouth Cemetery

This weekend saw a massive influx of migratory birds. All around the Norfolk coastline, rare and scarce species were recorded almost everywhere. Blakeney Point is apparently the place to go right now with a Blyth's reed warbler being the main highlight. However, only the fit and able can go see that as it is quite a long old hike for someone like me. Another hotspot was Great Yarmouth, in particular, its cemetery. Yellow-browed warblers, ring ouzels and pied flycatchers were seen there in the last couple of days. So, that's where I decided to go this morning with Mum, to a cemetery in a seaside town.

Grey Squirrel begging for food right by my feet!

Though we've been to Yarmouth plenty of times, this was to be our first visit to the cemetery there. It took us a bit of map reading and street by street navigating to get to it, but at least we found it ok. Now that we were there, I thought we would see plenty of twitchers somewhere behind the gravestones looking for the same things as I was. But to my surprise, there were only locals casually taking a stroll with either a kid or dog in tow or enjoying the peaceful atmosphere by themselves. Squirrels and pigeons were begging for food by our feet around each section of the cemetery. There was nothing here that resembled a scarce bird by sight or sound. I rang up my friend David, who is often in the know when it comes to rare birds. "Nothing reported yet this morning, Sean. Sorry." A local on a bench then told me that twitchers told him yesterday that birds like this are normally here today and gone tomorrow. In other words, I've wasted my time yet again!



Feral Pigeons



Magpie

Red Admiral

Small Copper

Common Darter (and Greenbottle Fly)

We walked back to the car with my head hung low in disappointment. Then, Mum decided that we do something crazy. We were going to Cley! For those who don't know, Great Yarmouth is on the east coast of Norfolk and Cley is several miles away on the north coast. Most people would travel to these two places on two different days not both on the same day! So today we travelled from Norwich to Great Yarmouth, then back towards Norwich to then travel north to Sheringham and then finally to Cley. Amazingly, we still managed to get there by 1pm for lunch!

Birds galore at Pat's Pool!

After lunch, we made our way to the central hides to see what's out on the pools. From our first hide (the one on the right) overlooking Pat's Pool, there were thousands of birds feeding on the mud. The majority of them were wigeon and teal with smaller numbers of lapwing, black-tailed godwits, ruff, shelducks and dunlin. A hobby and a pair of marsh harriers did cause them to take flight in a large murmuration-like display over the pools before settling back down again like snow inside a snow globe.

Wigeon

Wigeon

Teal

Black-tailed Godwit

Lapwing

Ruff

Shoveler

Marsh Harrier

Green Sandpipers

We then moved on to the central hide and were surprised to bump into David! He was also surprised to see us since he knew we were in Great Yarmouth after speaking to him on the phone a few hours earlier. He then told me something I didn't want to hear. "Did you see the yellow-browed warbler? One was reported not long ago." I could not believe my luck! It was there after all!! I would have gone crazy in that moment, but thankfully a pair of green sandpipers, a flock of meadow pipits and a mass arrival of pink-footed geese distracted me. The geese in particular provided the biggest buzz amongst everyone inside the hide as more and more and more arrived in a never endless stream of skeins as each group plummeted down to Pat's Pool, but not the other pools for some reason.

Meadow Pipit

Pink-footed Geese

Kestrel

Buzzard

Jack Snipe watching!

Before heading our way home, I made my way down to the pool at Walsey Hills, which is just down the road from the car park at the end of the East Bank. A large gathering of people had caught our eye as we were driving to Cley. We made a quick investigation before making our way to the visitor centre for lunch and discovered that they were looking at jack snipe. I thought I had taking photos of it, but I soon realised that they were all photos of common snipe. An easy mistake to make. So I returned to try again. There was still a large crowd looking at the snipe and they proved helpful as I eventually got the bird I wanted to photograph despite it being a bit distant and the sun shining directly at me. Not the best photos in the world, but at least I got it. There was even the added bonus of a water rail.

Jack Snipe

Common Snipe

Water Rail