Eastern Black Redstart

I had a day off yesterday and despite feeling a bit under the weather I decided I'd go see the Eastern Black Redstart at Sheringham. Being a sub species I've never really bothered to twitch one before despite there having been some twenty plus records. 

Eastern Black Redstart (Phoenicurus ochruros phoenicuroides) is a bird that inhabits Asia with a range creeping into Eastern Europe so to find one on our shores is quite remarkable and with this one being around two hours from home I thought I would try for it. The Jims were otherwise busy being Christmas and all that so it was a solo run. There was a police incident on the A11 that caused me to divert around Thetford but otherwise the journey was fine. I decided to stop at Ludham seeing that it would make a shorter original travel plan and pulled into the car park before first light to find the car park had just one space left. Walking along the river bank I could see the twitch in the distance and hurried along to join it. With news that the bird had roosted last night the "presumed" bushes had been staked out but as the light came up there was no sign of the Black-winged Kite. By about 8.30 the mood had dipped until somebody picked up the Kite hovering in the distance some way west of us. For the next hour or so we watched as it hunted and sat up in distant trees before it eventually was lost to view. My second Black-winged Kite in Norfolk following the Hickling bird of July 2023. (The same bird? I wonder.)

I got back in the car and made the 25mile journey north to Sheringham parking up on the promenade where the news wasn't good as the bird had gone missing just before I arrived but within a couple of minutes it appeared on the sea wall and then moved down onto the beach to feed among the stones and on the wood groynes before heading back up and away into the buildings behind the promenade. Luckily there is a shingle road behind the buildings and I managed to find the bird sitting high on a gutter where it would stay for about an hour resting between the gutter, the warm boiler flue and the window cills. After an hour it got active again and would drop to feed on the floor a few feet from us and would take regular trips to bath in a garden out of site. I don't like these residential twitches which always feel a bit intrusive although we did everything we could to not be and I have to say every single local that came out of the houses showed nothing but interest in the hobby and the bird.

I headed home satisfied that I'd added my 250th year tick (including the Green winged Teal they stripped me of but not the Eastern Black Redstart of course which at this point has never been a full species but maybe one day one of these splits will go my way ) but by the time I arrived home the man flu had got into me so it was an early night and a good rest up to recover for new years day if I can.

Year list 249 (plus GWT=250 😉)

The very distant Black-winged Kite