Eastern Black Redstart, Black-winged Kite and winter in Norfolk

Late on Friday night Kris decided that he would finally take the plunge and travel to try and see the long-staying Black-winged Kite in Norfolk.  It was a noble decision to accept his offer of a lift, but I managed to bear up under the weight of responsibility and passengered to a reasonable standard throughout a long day.  Having had an immensely enjoyable but very tiring long day the previous weekend to see the Killdeer, we decided that 5am was a decent set off time for the day, and we luxuriated in arriving on site after sunrise for a change.

We took a slight detour on our route in order to see a group of about 20 Bewick's Swans mixed in with a dozen Whoopers on grass near Ludham air field, and as someone who spends time in Lancashire with tiny numbers of Bewick's it was brilliant to see a small herd in the sunlight.  Ten more minutes and we arrived at the Hickling Broad visitor centre.

Hickling Broad NNR is one of those places whose name has been made famous by connection to various wildlife and conservation projects, being one of the best places in the UK to see Swallowtail butterflies in summer and Cranes year round.  Though the sun was shining and the weather was unseasonably warm, the path for the 2.5km walk to the viewing area for the Black-winged Kite was an absolute wreckage of mud, and it was easier to sort of mud-ski parts of it rather than try to actually walk.  By the time we passed a Muntjac deer sitting in the corner of a field, my boots were twice their original weight with clinging mud.  We reached half way to the bugling of the Cranes which was the backing track for me hoping the mud on my trousers would dry and drop off quickly during the day.  A steady stream of people walking back from the viewpoint included a few familiar faces, but I am nothing if not absolutely terrible at faces and names - apologies if we marched past you and didn't stop to speak; it was entirely my fault.

Arriving at the pumping house from which people had been viewing the Kite, we were given excellent directions to find the bird perched in larches a long way distant.  Thankfully, as in summer 2025 when I first laid eyes on this bird, it was mobile and occasionally flew in closer for good scope views (and rubbish scope footage).  I wrote at the time that this is a beautiful bird, and its Barn Owl-like flight and bold plumage meant I could have watched it for hours.  At this point, the Cranes that had been invisibly trumpeting their presence all morning took to the skies and two flocks of them flew overhead followed by ones and twos drifting late into the reedbeds.

A returning mud-ski back to the car and, knackered knees aside, happy with what we'd seen we worked on the principle of birding our way home.  This meant a choice between Sea Palling for Iceland Gull and Purple Sandpiper, or Sheringham for the Eastern Black Redstart.  The Redstart won out and we set off an hour north from Hickling to search for this charismatic and confiding little subspecies on the esplanade.  Arriving and parking there in the strong sunlight, it was clear that about half the people present on the front were searching for this bird, and half an hours' thorough looking had produced no sign.  At this point someone mentioned that the bird had flown south towards a play area and a low-roofed garage around forty minutes previously, and Kris noticed that nobody was searching that far away from where the GPS pin in the map had showed the bird to be.  We've had some interesting conversation about this phenomena in recent weeks.  People seem to have stopped asking for approximate locations of birds where they have to use some fieldcraft and skill to find it in the landscape and practice some identification skill to know what they're looking at and instead ask for a precise pin, unable to exercise any initiative to look more widely for a bird.  Instead I seem to see a large number of people with big cameras and expensive binoculars looking intently at an iPhone screen and looking confused about why they can't see the rare or unusual bird they seem to have been promised.  

Complaints from people who were expecting a guaranteed sighting at a specific location, a nailed-on experience because, "I've got the exact pin from someone who was here last week", have been a recent feature of birding conversations.  Of course these GPS coordinates are helpful, and I'm no technophobe, happily using GPS devices and accepting advice and directions from people who are being kind in providing the information.  But such pins are limited by their lack of accuracy - human error in inputting the information in the first place - and by the birds tendency to move away from a fixed point.  Perhaps another aspect of the way that certain technologies are eroding human agency to think and act without guidance from AI, or how useful tools like Merlin can stop people learning birdsong and calls by doing the hard work of ID for them.  Useful tools, but they have to go hand in hand with fieldcraft and common sense or else there's bound to be disappointment.  It was simple logic that drove Kris to search in the corner of the area to which the bird had been seen flying, and it was good fieldcraft from him to know that the low-lying garage roof would give the Black Redstart a promising area from which to flycatch.  And there, less than 100 metres from the "official" location of the Eastern Black Redstart, we had the bird to ourselves in bright sunlight perched openly on the garage roof.

After firing off a few shots I went back and told the main group of despondent birders (almost all on their phones) that the Redstart had been relocated and then I laughed at the speed-walking of those with the biggest cameras to get into prime position to take photos of a bird that was easy for all to see.  And what a bird!  A strange chimerical confection of Black Redstart, Robin and Common Redstart, this vivid and bright bird was so distinctive as it dived off the peak of the roof to catch flies and returned over and over to this same perch.  This was my favourite bird of the day, on a day with exceptional wildlife.  We watched for half an hour, before it flew to a higher vantage, and then we made our way to find a Red-necked Grebe at Burnham Overy.  The pin for this bird was precise down to the metre...

While keeping an eye on the Red-necked Grebe asleep on the small water body it had chosen I was impressed with the sheer numbers of geese.  In Lancashire we get huge flocks, but in Norfolk they're at the landscape scale.  Brent Geese filled the fields off the salt-marsh to the horizon, and Pink-feet were mixed throughout.  Greylag lumbered around the ponds and Barnacle Geese daintily nibbled at grass.  The biggest surprise though was five Tundra Bean Geese wandering in and out of cover distantly.  I could have spent days just searching through the wildfowl there and the seeds of a plan for a week-long Norfolk stay in January of 2027 have been sown.

Flagging slightly as we approached Titchwell I realised that I could reach 170 species for the year with just five more species.  This added a bit of light hearted motivation to the walk (limp - my recent issues with mobility were annoyingly slowing me down) to the coast, and we were in high-spirits as we saw the resident Tawny Owl off the fen boardwalk.  A pair of Russian White-fronted Geese flew in low overhead, and we searched long for the Spotted Redshank that was present but without finding it.  Grey Plover, Bar-tailed Godwit and Avocet all showed really well for year ticks, and the group of Long-tailed Ducks on the sea obligingly stuck around long enough for us to get good scope views.  So that was 169 for the year, and 100 for the day.  The possibility of a Black-necked Grebe on the sea or a Firecrest in the woodland still remained, and, though we birded into dusk with great views of Barn Owl, we failed to see either of the species that would have pushed me to 170 for the year.  Bizarrely, though we saw Crane, Spoonbill, Cattle and Little Egrets we failed to find a Grey Heron across the huge wetland sites we visited.

The quality and scale of wildlife on show across this special county is often inspiring, and my unrealistic childhood dream of moving to Norfolk one day to experience more birds lives on in a small kernel of hope tucked away deep inside my inner being.  One day, Norfolk.  One day.