March 5th North Norfolk

My friend, David, surprised me with a birdwatching outing today. He wanted to find some odds and ends around parts of North Norfolk. However, it wasn't exactly the warmest of days. An icy cold wind was blowing and it was absolutely freezing. A complete opposite to yesterday. It was like the middle of winter again, not early spring.

First up on our birding tour was the lake at Blickling Hall where apparently a ruddy shelduck had been hanging about. It was a brief stop (mainly because the car park ticket machine was requesting £5 for a long stay) and we left empty handed. No ruddy shelduck here.

Turnstone

Next up was Sheringham for a spot of sea watching. We actually sat in the cold inside the shelter much longer than expected, at least an hour, before the cold really got to us. Using our scopes, we scanned up a reasonable haul of gannets, gulls and divers. One of these divers seemed a little bigger than the majority of the several red-throated divers we saw and appeared much more blacker on its upper side and white underneath. We decided that this was a black-throated diver, a bird I've actually never seen before, though it was just too far away and fast to photograph for my bird photo collection.








Purple Sandpiper

When we eventually got too cold to sea watch, we went for a walk along the front. Turnstones were everywhere and we also found a couple of purple sandpipers on the rocks. But the real talking point was my scope. As we were making our way back to the car, the legs of my scope's tripod fell off. The main scope part, the head, had some how unscrewed itself and had remained strapped to my shoulder, while the legs of the tripod fell to the ground. For some reason, the filament that attaches the head to the legs was too short to reattach it again. Tried as we might, we could not get the head back on. All we could do was put the two pieces in the car and sort it out later.

Kelling Heath was our next stop. David wanted to search for Dartford warblers that call this heath home. Unfortunately, the weather conditions weren't exactly favourable for these birds and, despite some time spent searching, we left disappointed again.

After lunch, our final stop was Cley. The main reason of coming here was not just for the reserve, but to sort out my tripod. The Cley Spy shop behind the visitor centre/café is our best bet to fix it as it specializes on optic devices. Thankfully, the guy working there managed to make the filament long enough again to attach the head back on in no time at all. Problem solved!

With the scope functional once more, we drove down to the beach for another spot of sea watching. We were hoping to spot the great northern diver that had been reported. The sea was much rougher than it was at Sheringham and the wind felt colder than before. The birds were being partially covered by the stormy-looking waves and were harder for me to spot, but we did manage to spot plenty of gannets, a few divers, a large raft of scoter ducks, some passing eiders, two oystercatchers and various gull species. No great northern diver, though.

As the chilly wind finally forced us to leave, we made our way to the central hides of the main reserve, seeing flocks of golden plovers, lapwing and greylags on the fields along the way. Inside the hides, it was even colder than it was while we were outside sea watching. Forced to open a flap in order to see out of the hide, the wind was quick to blow right into our faces and suck the heat out of our bodies instantly. It was so cold that we didn't wanted to hang around inside them for very long. We saw avocets, black-tailed godwits, wigeon, shovelers, shelducks, redshanks, a distant marsh and a few gulls and geese. I was glad to leave for the warm comfort of David's car on the drive home. What a strange, yet chilly, day it has been!