Zitting Cisticola and Black Stork

Sometimes you get the feeling that the birding gods don't want you to see a certain bird.  It took me decades to see a Wryneck.  I still haven't been right time and place for a Capercaillie.  I have waited years to see a Black Stork.  Twice I missed the one that lingered at Frampton saltmarsh in Lincolnshire in 2023, and I've been keen to see one ever since.  Of course, the one that lands and is incredibly showy in Suffolk does so when I've booked and travelled to Penzance, and I do not have the endurance to camp and bird and drive that far when it would add 12+ hours to my already difficult journey home.

No matter, I think to myself, this bird, like many juvenile storks, seems to be sticking around, and in the same hundred metres of dyke in Suffolk.  I'll share a ride with a friend, and we'll have a good day out.  An old fashioned twitch, like we used to.  Except that from Manchester, Suffolk is a bitch to twitch.  With no updates on the presence of the Black Stork the day and evening before we were due to set off, my friend understandably cancels the trip, saving his precious time for a more guaranteed bird.  I wake the following day to more than 25 reports and messages and photos of the Stork showing incredibly well - indeed, almost tamely.  I decline a lift from some good friends the following day because their itinerary was way too much for a middle aged man still tired from Penzance and Scilly.  Of course, this is the day the Zitting Cisticola was found in Suffolk, a 45 minute drive from Boyton RSPB where the Stork stalked.  A need to be sitting looks to have cost me a Zitting.

The second confirmed Zitting of the year following one in Kent (and a reported possible in Cornwall a little later in the year) these are the first Cisticolas here since 2015, and only the 11th and 12th in the UK ever.  A serious rarity, and a difficult bird to connect with.  They can be skulking and inconstant, mobile and quick to move on.  I rack my brains to find a way to get there.  I set off on Sunday morning in the pouring rain that represents the storm front of the latest record-breaking early named storm of the summer, and quickly find my journey stymied.  The satnav timing goes from 4 hours 40 minutes to nearly 8 hours.  I wouldn't arrive at Walberswick until 6pm earliest, and wouldn't get home until after midnight.  Sadly, cursing my luck, I turn around after two and a half hours of M6 carpark and go home.

Monday is my son's birthday.  He's 15.  Independent, and pretty much the same height as me.  His all-night gaming and WWE-fest with his friends means my younger daughter will be kept awake by their noise.  So I solve all the problems.  After a day of celebrations with my lad, I announce that my daughter can camp in my bed for the night as I will set off for Walberswick at 8.30pm, with sleeping bag in tow - the plan is to catch 4 hours of sleep in my car and be at the Cisticola by 6am.  Plenty of time for the Stork and a slow drive home to be able to take my daughter swimming and help my elderly parents with some heavy items in their garden, then take my son to karate.  An interesting drive with some road closures meaning a tour of the area around Bury St Edmunds and some roads surely not meant for actual vehicles left me at Walberswick car park at 1.10am, wrapped in a sleeping bag and entirely too wired to sleep.  I do a little detective work on the photos of the twitch on Bluesky to work out where people were standing to look for the Cisticola the previous day, and watch the clear night sky wheel above until sleep finally takes me.

I open my eyes at 4.40am as the first light nudges the horizon awake.  By 5.10am, I am waiting where the crowds of the previous days have evidently been.  By 5.12, over the noise of the waves on the shingle and pebble beach, and the constant calls of waders and the indignant sound of gulls, I hear the "zit zit zit" that gives the bird its (frankly ridiculous) name.  

I spend the next seven or eight minutes trying (successfully) to locate this sound - obviously mobile as it calls, the Cisticola never stayed still at all in the hour or so I watched it.  Hobby and Marsh Harrier cruised the area, panicking various prey items, but the mega rare passerine just kept flying back and forth across the reeds 120 metres away.  As nice as it is to see a UK mega, and a difficult one to see at that, I have seen dozens of these birds in Europe.  That, and the distant nature of the experience meant I was already feeling a little downbeat (mixed with extreme tiredness!) about the whole thing.  The first people who hadn't been awake all night began to arrive, and after getting a couple on the bird, I left to try my luck with the Black Stork.

The tiny carpark at Boyton Marshes RSPB had room for just my car when I arrived, and there was nobody else around.  I loaded my gear, having seen it was a 2.5km walk for the Stork, and set off at a brisk pace.  In the wrong direction.  Almost three quarters of a mile away from my car I finally encountered a local farmer who asked if I was looking for the celebrity bird.  I said I was, and he smiled in the way that only someone who gently relishes handing out slightly bad news will smile.  "Wrong way, lad."  He said.  "Turn round."  Already tired, hungry, and now getting very warm (no storms in the sub-tropical Suffolk) I now had to undo my walk and still had at least 5km walking ahead.  

But it was a beautiful walk.  The reserve at Boyton Marsh is gorgeous - moths and butterflies and dragonflies everywhere, terns and waders calling, Marsh Harriers and Kestrels hunting across the landscape.  I walked the flood defence wall, checking every ditch and dyke until I finally found where the Black Stork was supposed to have been.  Nothing.  I walked on yet further.  Nothing.  No people, no Stork, and seemingly nowhere to hide.  I spent an hour searching, scanning every bush and tree in case it was roosting high up.  No luck.  I started the long walk back to my car, right heel beginning to really hurt, camera and bins and bottles of water weighing heavily.  I swore under my breath in a creative and prolonged stream of invective about birds that show well to everyone else but that the birding gods don't want me to see.  I stomped and hobbled and muttered until a lovely bloke further down the path waved at me and pointed.  He had the Stork.  I picked up the pace, all pain and weariness forgotten.  He had his scope trained on the shadows underneath a distant bush which had its roots in the very edge of the dyke.  There, in the darkest shade, was the Stork with its head tucked in, fast asleep in the hardest to see position in the whole dyke.  I punched the air.  This bird had come at some significant cost and caused me some headaches!

Within five minutes the juvenile Stork woke up, and wandered through the shallows until he was less than 15 metres away, fishing.  His orange bill caked with the pale green ooze of the murk in which he fed, and his ivory legs at least partially stained with the mud of the Suffolk marsh, his iridescent feathers caught the morning light and all my cynical swearing turned to poetry as I finally watched Black Stork.  

It all worked out in the end.  Far from missing out on a bird I have always wanted to see, I gained the sight of a British Zitting Cisticola and eventually got amazing views of the Black Stork.  As brilliant as these birds are, I really hope the next rare birds are more local to me.  Suffolk is gorgeous, but even Penzance feels easier to access.