Upon hearing that my 'arch' year-listing rival had cleaned up at Spurn on Saturday, I decided that I best head over to the peninsular on Sunday (10/10/10) and bag myself a piece of the action! Foolishly I had also been roped into a 'Rouge Juice' fuelled evening of debauchery on the Saturday evening so the chance of me crawling out of the pit early Sunday morning was in the balance! Thankfully, my alarm managed to rouse me and despite only having 3hrs kip, by 6am I had collected Mikipedia and was cautiously heading towards the coast. A necessary 'Golden Arches' pit-stop and an even more necessary stop for paracetamol ensured that our arrival in the 'birding zone' was later than we had wanted. Anyhow, instead of heading straight to the peninsular, I made a somewhat fortuitous decision to drop in at Sammy's Point and within minutes of exiting the motor, we were met by ex-Notts birding veteran Ian Smith who nonchalantly muttered that a Pallas's was knocking about a few hundred yards away. We scurried along the coastal footpath, clambered under barbed wire and began scouring the scrub for the target. A good 45 minutes passed and in that time I experienced quite possibly the largest fall I had ever been amongst! Goldcrests & Robins numbered in their thousands with slightly lesser numbers of Siskins, Bramblings & thrushes screaming thru overhead. Soon the Pallas's Warbler (282) was located some 70yds away and showed extremely well for some 20 minutes! This was c10am and high hopes were kicking in! We soon found out that Archer was bagging all manner of class up in Cleveland but despite our best efforts to dig out some rare & scarce, the best we could muster in 6hrs was a Great Grey Shrike, Ring Ouzel and a host of Redstarts, Chiffys etc...oh and a self found 'possible' OBP which I had to let go due to the brevity of the views - call was spot on tho'!
Getting bored and tired, we retired to the Crown & Anchor and as the day started to come to a close and thoughts of heading home quickly started to fill my head as I sat in the car, the inevitable 'late-in-the-day' Spurn surprise hit. A chap came cruising thru the car-park and declared that a Radde's had been snared next door at Kew & was about to be released! Thank f*ck I hadn't done one 20 minutes before! Soon after we were being treated to stunning in-hand views of this striking Phyllosc (283). A pretty rewarding end to an exciting yet frustrating day!
Above & below - Radde's Warbler being paraded to all & sundry!
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