Ross Back Sands, February 3rd 2025: A long walk for a beautiful American Pipit

 

Three weeks ago I arrived home from a fantastic day of birding in Northumberland and Durham to news that an American Pipit had been seen half an hour north of where I’d been.  Friends travelled to find it and came back saying that it had been a difficult bird to locate in the saltmarsh, even with thermals and numbers of people putting in the time.  I mentally shrugged and gave up hope of seeing this charismatic pipit; lacking time, a thermal and a team of birders.

Over the next three weeks, the bird relocated to the shoreline where it was feeing on wrack around the base of one of two brick obelisks and showing – for some people – really well.  I decided to venture across and tackle the long walk based on directions kindly given to me by the online community, and at 3.50am I set off north and east, planning to arrive at around 8am and perhaps walk to the obelisk by 9 or 9.30 when the Pipit would be actively morning feeding.

I’ve been to Ross Sands a few times over the years, on family holidays and the odd visit for birding, and the thing I love the most about this place is that such a beautiful beach is almost always completely deserted.  It’s a huge space, and in the four hours I was there I encountered fewer than ten people – admittedly on a cold Monday morning in February.  The walk to Guile Point is long.  From where I parked outside Ross village (a grand term for a maximum of ten houses!) to the beach through sand dunes, and then north to the channel that separates Holy Island from Guile Point, rounding the headland was around 4km.  Nothing for a healthy young person, but a fair old march for an unfit middle-aged man with bad knees! 

I was lost in thought on the walk.  Seals, Brent Geese and a variety of seaducks and waders were ever present as I wandered north, and I took them in without stopping every thirty feet – walking has a rhythm of its own and sometimes it’s good to march to that beat.  I think people have a need to move like this, stretching back to past nomadic lifestyles and maybe even a driving factor in us ceasing to be brachiating animals who emphasise movement on two legs.  For years I’ve had to pace when I’m really thinking, transforming physical movement into intellectual effort.  I let my mind drift, loosely focusing on the way light played on the pale sand, letting my thoughts stick in the moment when I was conscious of thinking, and otherwise allowing them to run free.  My stream of consciousness gradually latched on to a thought: why do I do this?  Why do I watch birds?  My pub quiz team thinks I’m unhinged (though one is golf-obsessive, one collects guitars they never play, and one paints Warhammer minis so I’m not sure they’re qualified to judge).  Eventually, my brain returned with some answers, like a dog reluctant to come back to its owner with the stick they threw. 

I like to see birds because they’re beautiful.

Well, so far, so basic.  But this seemed a profound thing to me.  I was walking a round trip of 8km and driving 7 hours to see a small brown speckled bird that should have been somewhere in Central America or the southern states of the US, or on its way north to the Arctic tundra to breed.  Is this enough to justify my effort?  Or is there an element of finding beautiful places as I seek the beauty of the bird?  The wildlife draws me to places I would not otherwise see, and whether this is a ditch in an industrial estate or the glory of a windswept North Sea coastline at sunrise, the beauty of the place is in experiencing and exploring somewhere new.  Knowing it, knowing about it, understanding geography and natural world in a way that isn’t theoretical is a surprisingly deep-seated need in people.

Part of the beauty of the American Pipit is that it should not be here, and I probably would not have another chance to see, to know, to experience this bird.  Putting the effort in to understanding this tiny, feathered wanderer has a beauty all of its own.

Rounding the headland and seeing the brick obelisk produced a sense of relief and drew me back from the wool-gathering of my meditation.  Camera ready, binoculars primed, I scanned the area around the base of the obelisk carefully.  No other people there.  No dogs.  Nothing to disturb a feeding Pipit.  But, though the cooing of Eider and the weird calls of Brent Geese were entertaining, after ten minutes there was no sign of the American vagrant and I decided to sit and wait. 

Some birders seem to really struggle with this element of birding, and especially when targeting species to see.  I understand the frustration, but I think part of it is caused by the trend to want more and more specific information to pin down the exact location of a bird (as if the most mobile creatures on the entire planet will stay in one spot!) and there’s a palpable sense of disappointment if the bird isn’t waiting exactly where it was last seen.  It seems personal, like the bird has decided to let them down, when sometimes all that is required is patience to sit and wait, or the field craft to search nearby likely habitat.  Knowing all the information about where a bird has been seen is useful, and it can be considered good field knowledge to be as prepared as possible – I use Bird Guides and the odd Whatsapp group, but I think it’s more about how those things are used.  They’re tools to help me find a bird I want to experience, while already experiencing the wild world; not a guarantee that I will tick another species off the list.

Having set off before 4am, driven 200 miles, hiked 70 minutes along the beach and found the location the American Pipit was last seen, I had to deal with the fact that it was not there.  I set my optics down on my bag, opened my flask, and just as I did, a flash of movement like a Wagtail flight low down caught my eye.  The American Pipit had just emerged from the wrack and perched no more than two metres from me on a rock!  Caught between pouring coffee, picking up my camera to document the moment, and just observing the bird, I stood stock still and watched as the Pipit walked up to my right boot tip and pecked at something on the sand.  It stayed so close for so long I began to get cramp in my arm from holding the flask completely still!  Risking it, I slowly sat down and set the flask on the floor.  The Pipit flew – but only three metres, and there it wandered between shells and kelp strands, unconcerned about my presence.  Picking up my camera, I spent half an hour taking hundreds of photos, just me and the American Pipit. 

I thought about beauty in the environment, beauty in the colours of the bird, beauty in the thought of being completely alone in this experience, this proximity to a wild creature.  Seeing where the breast feathers dimpled in, and watching the pale bill open to take food, noticing the pattern of black and white on buff on the throat and breast and comparing the motion of the Pipit to familiar wagtails occupied my mind as I simply stood and watched.  Eventually joined by another birder and his very well-behaved dog, the Pipit continued to feed within phone video range for another half an hour before flying onto the saltmarsh.  We looked at one another with joyous disbelief at the experience, before I set off to walk the 4km back to the car.

I took 1100 photos of the American Pipit, though as usual only a very small number are worth keeping.  Most of us are not very good photographers – I’m fairly hopeless most of the time and many days wonder why I carry 5kg of camera and lens for miles and miles.  Many birders (and me especially) dismissively talk about their own photos as record shots, and to be sure, most shutter clicks do not produce saleable works of art.  But this is a dry way of saying what these photos actually are: they’re glimpses of beauty.  Sure, some people at the “business” end of twitching are only bothered about proving their latest tick for the league table, so they can derive some value from how much and how many and how impressed other people are with 400 or 500 or whatever ticks.  But a better way to view these images is as a record of the experience, a record of the place, the people, and the bird itself that is an aide memoire on those days where you can’t walk the glorious beach at Ross, or you miss out on the latest sighting on Bird Guides because you have to work – they are a memory of beauty experienced in wild spaces and therefore a memory of the reason why we experience the natural world.