Spotted Sandpiper: one out of four ain't... bad?

 

From 13^th to 15^th May 2022 there was a Spotted Sandpiper at Elton Reservoir in Manchester.  An American shorebird, Spot Sands are a 3 or 4 per year bird in the UK, but very rare locally.  I should have made an effort to go and see this lovely wader as soon as news broke on the Friday, but my kids and I were booked into an important family evening and that meant that I couldn’t get there after work.  I would have gone on the Saturday, except that I had a job interview on the Monday, and badly needed to do some prep for it. On the Sunday there was a family medical emergency – which ended well, and the only lasting damage was to my levels of frustration at not being able to get to Elton.  But I consoled myself – my interview on Monday 16^th May was with a place very close to Elton Reservoir.  I could feasibly go before the interview and possibly connect – though the risk of muddying a suit before the day wasn’t necessarily the best idea.  I decided to wait until after the interview. 

Of course, the Spotted Sandpiper flew on the Sunday afternoon, but I hadn’t checked if it was still there due to a combination of last minute prep and nerves.  Arriving at Elton after a 6 hour interview process, feeling wrung out and a little wired from lack of sleep and too much coffee, I walked a slow circuit hoping that the sad face on my bird app would be mistaken and the American bird would appear.  It did not. To compound the misery, as I got back into my car, I received the “you came a close second” phone call from the interviewer.

The next opportunity for Spotted Sandpiper came when a very long staying individual took residence in 2024 in Fife.  This bird was found the day after I had come back from a break near Edinburgh, and stayed until two days before I was due to visit family north of Glasgow.  Talk about failing to strike while the iron is hot…  So when a Spotted Sandpiper in adult summer plumage began to show very well at Grafham Water in Cambridgeshire this week, I jumped at the chance to try and connect with it.  Planning to swing by Ouse Fen to see the Great Reed Warbler which had been singing in the same place where I saw it last year, K and I set off with further positive news about the influx of Red-footed Falcons that suddenly seemed to be everywhere across the south of England.

The Spotted Sandpiper had been favouring the dam at Grafham, but was nowhere to be seen when we arrived.  There was a momentary sinking feeling as I processed the lack of wader, wondering if this was going to be my next bogey bird, but then we saw a small group of birders with optics and cameras raised a couple of hundred metres further down the shoreline.  Apparently the Sandpiper was not, for one morning only, favouring the slope of the dam.  Five minutes wait and then this beautifully marked bird flew into a small bay and perched on moss-covered cut tree stumps in the water 30 metres away, and fed for an hour around an inlet.  What a bird – delicate but with a strange proportion to its features – something I’ve felt when looking at American birds in particular.  The distance between beak and eye seems somehow stretched, elongated compared to the Eurasian birds I’m familiar with.  I had the same sense (only with wing shape) when I watched the Laughing Gull in Devon a few years back.  I wonder if any American observers seeing Eurasian birds feel that they’re strangely compact or proportionally odd?

Moving on to Ouse Fen, the weather changed.  The promise of sunshine and calm conditions vanished, and it was a cold wind that blew across the observation mound opposite the Great Reed Warblers’ perch.  Despite calling loudly and constantly, after two hours of waiting, I had not got even a glimpse of it.  Turning away to check on the location of the reported Red-footed Falcons I apparently missed the GRWs only cameo of the morning when it hopped up to the top of the reeds behind the front line and then dropped back down barely 5 seconds later.  Knowing that I’ll be back there on Friday to try again meant that I didn’t feel too bad about giving up after “only” two hours of cold standing around.  Moving to the area where the female RFF was hunting, I spent another hour scanning every raptor that moved across a vast and inaccessible area.  Hobby after Hobby hawked over the trees, but I never managed to see the RFF.  Deciding to try at Baston Fen where a young male RFF had been reported and break the journey home, we left and then repeated our two hour wait in the cold, missing the bird by ten minutes when we arrived and finding it had returned half an hour after we had left.  One of those days.  Still, the pleasure of seeing my first Spotted Sandpiper wouldn’t be dampened by missing two great birds, and there are sure to be other days where I’ll see the targets.

News of a Golden Oriole singing at Woolston Eyes yesterday morning had me scrabbling for my key and permit, and I was on site an hour after the news first filtered in.  An hour of searching and still nobody had laid eyes on it, or even heard it after its initial bout of singing that had been recorded and shared.  Another hour passed, and then as we were headed to the gate to leave, K and I both heard a snatch of song and both instinctively stopped in our tracks and said “Golden Oriole!” at the same time.  We followed the sound and scanned for another 45 minutes but never got eyes on the bird, eventually convincing ourselves that there was a continental Blackbird that was mimicking an Oriole and we just couldn’t tell the difference.  Six hours later, the first photo of male Golden Oriole was shared from the site, and the bird went on to show well for a couple of hours.  Making quick arrangements to be back on site at 5.30am, I went to sleep fitfully, hoping it would stay overnight.

It did not.  Three more cold hours and no Golden Oriole.  Four species, three missed, one seen.

I suppose the lesson is that, no matter how nailed on a bird appears to be, no matter how other people are seeing it, there will be times when we miss things.  That can be to do with not taking our opportunities – like me in May 2022 when the Spotted Sandpiper was so close; or it can be to do with weather conditions keeping birds hidden away like with the Red-footed Falcons; or it can be an unfortunate error of timing like the Great Reed Warbler.  There can be disappointment at missing 3 out of 4 species I was aiming for, but on reflection, I won’t waste much time rueing the dips.  When I think about May 2025 in the future, it will be the Spotted Sandpiper, the Cuckoo, the Cranes, the Hobby, the Bearded Tits, the Wood Sandpiper that I recall rather than the hours I spent hoping to see more.

Besides, wouldn’t it be dull if we saw every bird we went for, first time every time?  Where would the stories, the triumphant overcoming of circumstance, the sense of satisfaction be if we never missed?  The Spotted Sandpiper was a great bird to see in part because of my failure to see it before, and that narrative will be in my mind if I ever see one again.  Birding is better because of the stories we tell - the one that got away, again, is more entertaining to tell in the pub than the one that showed well, again.  We laugh together as birders more and remember more because of how we cope with and overcome the things we fail with, and surely that's worth the occasional dip.  Only the occasional one, mind.  Wouldn't want it to become a habit.