Northumberland and points North, January 9th 2025

 

There are days in birding that will stick in your mind as long as you have the capacity to consider.  This day in early 2025 is right up there with my best.

January 9^th 2025, during my time away from work, I decided to escape the North Western funk and cloud and aim towards Northumberland on the hunt for three amazing birds; White-billed Diver; Grey-headed Lapwing; and Ross’s Gull.  A solo trip, this had all the ingredients to be either a monumental dip, or a spectacular success, with various grades of freezing cold satisfaction in between.  With low temperatures of minus eleven degrees Celsius, the tricky drive through snow flurries over the Pennines was slippery and slightly fraught; not helped by a 4am start, but a Greggs breakfast north of Newcastle and pulling up at Druridge Bay park at first light to news that a fellow Manc had seen the Diver brought slight euphoria.  If possible, I’d like Greggs to sponsor that sentence, because their bacon rolls don’t usually bring euphoric sensations.

Walking carefully on the ice to the lake edge, my new Manchester buddy began to swear that he had seen it, that it had been right there, it must have dived… No sign.  Twenty minutes pass.  He shouted every Cormorant and every Coot, making me twitchier than a barefoot parent in the middle of a Lego-spill.  I was hoping to catch the waking Hen Harriers at a roost nearby that a local birder had kindly pinned down for me, so I was beginning to get a little antsy.  As he assured me for the thirteenth time that the Coot he was watching was the White-billed Diver, I finally caught a glimpse of a huge shape submarining under the flock of Common Gulls roosting on the water.  Truly bulky, the Diver swam, submerging regularly, towards us and eventually showed down to a range of ten metres, giving the growing crowd some incredible photography opportunities.  A bill that seemed formed from some ancient Viking scrimshaw blade, a beady and watchful eye, and glistening dark plumage showing hints of the vibrant blacks that would show through in summer; this was a bird to savour and it was worth the ninety minutes I invested in watching the world’s biggest Loon on a lake north of the Toon.

I picked up a gorgeous male Hen Harrier at the roost on my way to the Lapwing, even though my tardiness at the Diver had meant I’d missed the rest of the Skydancers leaving the area to hunt.  The Grey-headed Lapwing was an incredible find in May of 2023 at Newton Steads.  At the time, I begged off work an hour early and blasted three hours north on a sunny afternoon to get eyes on this first for Britain.  Eighteen months later the beauty was back, wintering in Northumberland and not two miles drive from the White-billed Diver.  Though it’s not a “lifer”, I wanted to see this gorgeous bird again, to the derision of many of the other birders at Druridge who thought that with no report of it that morning I should be heading south 40 minutes to South Shields harbour to find the Ross’s Gull.  That had also not been seen, and it was my most wanted bird – not just of the three in the North East, but top of my “must see” list; but sometimes there’s a draw about a bird that makes you reevaluate your priorities.  

I pulled up near the last known location of the Grey-headed Lapwing and as I opened the door, caught a glimpse of a birder focusing on the centre of a field just past the layby.  Slipping on every frozen puddle, I made my way to him and he said, “Lapwing’s here.”  That was it.  One of those birders who seem to avoid showing any excitement at any sight.  There’s something in me that makes me a sort of social chameleon, and I replied with a neutral nod and a brisk, “cheers.”  Sometimes I find this bizarre need to not express how happy something makes me leads to a spiral of trying to one-up the other guy in a game of too cool for school, where we risk utter desiccation into a dry, joyless, purely-here-for-the-science pretence.  Secretly, I was joyous – I love this bird, the combination of colours, the rare factor, and how exotically odd it looks in a frozen field thousands of miles from home.  The sun shone full and fair and the blue sky, green grass and brightly coloured Lapwing combined to make me feel positive for the first time in a long time.  This was an almost physical lift in terms of my mental health, with pure sensations of contentment, of an almost tangible mindfulness present in that moment.  I felt for a second like Buddha stretching his hand to the ground and feeling the trembling of the creation in enlightened connection.  Then I needed a pee, so I got in the car and aimed at South Shields (the car, I aimed the car at South Shields.)

A jaunt through the Tyne Tunnel led me to park on the front at South Shields.  I’ve always loved the coastline of the North East, the combination of gorgeous sand, turbulent North Sea, and the thought that there’s nothing between that coastline and all points North, East and South for miles and miles.  There’s always a sense of potential along this stretch, and the 150 miles from Berwick to Scarborough have provided me with some seriously memorable birding experiences; from Pied Wheatear to Black Scoter, to King Eider to Greater Sandplover, via Bridled Tern, American Black Tern and many more.  This place feels like a spiritual home on its best days, and my affinity with the wildness of the landscape and the seaside shabbiness of the human endeavour evokes memories of my own family background around Blackpool.  

All of which was poetically blown away by the coldest wind I can remember in my life.  Not a cloud in the sky, and it was minus five degrees, with a wind chill that made it feel like minus 10.  I was blue with cold in the five minute walk to the harbour.  Not one report of the Ross’s Gull that morning, despite a crowd searching.  Not one glimpse.  When I arrived, everyone else had either gone to thaw out, or given it up for a bad job.  One local guy arrived after ten minutes, and we walked a desultory circuit, searching through the flock of 400+ Black-headed Gulls.  Nothing.  I was consoling myself, reaching back into that store of zen I’d tapped at the Lapwing, enjoying the Twite fly-by and the Eider on the sea, while pretending that frostbite was only taking extremities that I could live without.  I was failing to convince myself that I would wait another hour, when a vision of rose drifted past; a chimerical gull/phalarope/tern with a diamond tail and a dove-benign face, and settled on the sea.  I managed to stutter through frozen lips that I had seen the best gull that can be seen in the UK (other opinions exist, but frankly, why give credence to anyone that could dispute the supremacy of Ross’s Gull?).  The local frozen man managed to see it, and we tracked it to a smaller gull flock further into the harbour, where we got a couple of other birders on it. 

I forgot the cold, briefly.  I stood, watching the gull feed on wave tops, phalaroping in tight circles and out-bulked by Black-headed Gulls, reflecting that this had been pretty much the perfect sequence of birds.  I couldn’t have improved the circumstances or the planning.  I couldn’t have made the day any better if I’d tried.  Every target, in clear sunshine, in the order I’d predicted.  A once in a hundred birding day.  Probably my best day’s birding in 2025, and it was only the 9^th of January.  Driving home, with 2000 photographs of three of the best birds available in the UK across the whole winter, I was buoyed in a way that felt deeply appreciative of the powers-that-be for gifting a day of such restoration; where I deepened my love of wildlife and had time to think; where I reflected on the good that can happen in the midst of a time of utter crisis personally; where I cried a little because I’d finally seen two of the birds I most wanted to see.  There was no way this day could have been any better.  No way.  I shook my head in the car, said it out loud.  “No way to improve today.” 

It wasn’t until I parked at home that I saw that an American Buff-bellied Pipit had been found half an hour north of the Diver; my third most wanted bird…