After all the excitement of the spring, county birding in June proved predictably boring and quiet. In contrast, the first Sunday in July certainly started off with a bang! I was sitting on the sofa, idly wondering what I was going to do with myself as the rest of my family were going out for the day and I was going to be left my own devices. “If only there was a bird” to see I said to myself. At that moment my custom notification alert on the county birding WhatsApp group went off: “Night Heron Peep-o-Day Lane, Drayton, roosting in tree with Little Egrets per TW". Of course those who read my recent blog post, don’t need to be told about the significance of a Night Heron in the county. After the excitement but then disappointment of the first bird in a long time, seen by single observer at Otmoor back in the spring only for it not to be seen again by the assembled crowd of keen twitchers, here was the possibility of a twitchable bird The only trouble was that Night Herons are known to be quite skulking. As the name suggests, they generally feed at night and during the day they roost, often hidden away from view for hours at a time. There was not a moment to be lost! I quickly ran upstairs, got dressed, bundled all my birding kit into the car and sped off. I wanted to make sure that I got there while the bird was still in view in case it decided to move out of sight.
It was a nerve wracking 30 minute journey down to Drayton but I made good time and as it turned out as I was only the third person to arrive. I needn’t have worried because the bird was on show and after a nervous glance through my binoculars I was able to get my tick and relax. After that it was a question of finding a best vantage spot for some more prolonged studying of this county rarity. In the end I had to view through a hedge which was good enough though not ideal. The bird was sitting in the base of a willow on the far side of a flooded pool some 75 yards from the path. I set up my scope as best I could and took some video footage.
After that, it was a case of standing around chatting to fellow birders as they turned up, often letting them have a view through my scope to get their initial tick. As usual, in these situations, it ended up being quite a social affair with lots of chatting and banter amongst the now relaxed county birders who'd seen the bird well, punctuated periodically by the nervous "is it still there" from new arrivals. The bird proved very obliging stayed more or less in the same place all day, allowing some people who were at work or away to get back in time to get their tick so it was only people who were out of county who weren’t able to connect that day. For my part I spent about an hour and a half there, taking in this county rarity at my leisure and enjoying the company. Then I ambled back to the car and drove home to bask in the warm satisfying glow of a county tick.
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| I experimented with taking some photos through the scope on my hand-held iPhone and this one didn't come out too badly |
There is a bit more to the story however. The bird was subsequently seen a few days later one morning at 5:30 a.m, by BC at the same pond but wasn’t subsequently seen that day, I did wonder whether the bird might be feeding there at night but roosting somewhere else out of sight during the day. However, there was no further news of the bird for a couple of weeks after that. Then one Thursday morning, the bird was reported again, roosting in the Willows right next to the footpath away from the pond. With nothing else to do, I decided I would go and pay another visit, hoping to get some better views. However, I arrived to meet RW who told me that the bird had just been flashed 30 seconds before my arrival by a dog walker and their over exuberant Labrador. Talk about unlucky! Fortunately, this was not a county tick so I wasn’t too disappointed though I had been rather looking forward to getting better views of this bird.
TM who had been away up in Scotland when the bird was originally found, turned up on his bike. For him there was more at stake: this would be a county tick. The three of us spent the next hour or so peering into every nook and cranny of the willows. RW even had a thermal imaging camera to help him, but even with that we were unable to winkle the bird out. TM and I decided that we would just have one last walk up the footpath to see if we could find it before giving up. I wasn’t even bothering to look properly, but suddenly TM said:
“I can see it! I can see it! Yes! Yes! At last!”
“Where, where ?” I said.
He tried to direct me through the thicket of of Willows, but try as I might I could not see where he was looking. Suddenly, the bird flew, and I got to see it as it disappeared into the vegetation once again. TM was elated and I was very pleased for him and also pleased that I’d at least got to see the bird again albeit only briefly in flight. We knew that where we'd just seen the bird had been well searched earlier so decided the bird must be still moving around. We wondered if maybe it was trying to feed still after heavy rain the previous night. We spent a bit longer looking for it again after that, but having already seen it there was less incentive and after while we gave up and headed back to our respective homes.
