Iberian Chiffchaff, Zitting Cisticola, American Golden Plover: The "East Anglia" Weekender 2026

One of my favourite weekends of the birding year, I've done a long weekend in Suffolk and Norfolk every spring since 2021.  With a varying itinerary, the point is to explore some places I rarely get to, and to see all those species that we simply don't get in the north west of England; the likes of Turtle Dove, Nightingale, Dartford Warbler, Stone Curlew.  This year it was Lee driving the narrative (and the car - thanks mate!) and we set off a couple of weeks earlier than previous years.  This had an impact on the number of migrant birds we saw, with only a single Hobby and a single Swift seen, and no Turtle Dove.  However, it did coincide with some interesting rare birds and a trip list of almost 130 species is respectable.

Friday began early, a 2.45am alarm to get me to Lee's by 4am and a long slog to Weeting Heath to break up the southward journey.  Stone Curlew was pretty much the first bird we saw (and we saw five of them altogether including some courtship displaying and standing tall), and Woodlark was next, with at least three singing away and perching distantly on small trees.  Mistle Thrushes, Shelduck and a mixture of woodland birds including Siskin got us off to a brilliant start, and we continued our journey to Westleton Heath happy and refreshed.  I'd never been to Westleton before, usually starting my weekend at Dunwich, but the presence of the loud-singing Iberian Chiffchaff persuaded us to change plans and spend some time on the other side of Minsmere.  Nightingales seemed to be singing everywhere, with at least five in an hour along a path, fleeting views as we tried to untangle Chaffinch, Blackcap, Whitethroat, Garden Warbler, Robin, Wren, Nightingale, and thrushes all singing at once.  Each song is distinctive, but as a chorus it felt like a wall of sound at times and I loved it.

Walking the footpath towards where the Iberian Chiffchaff has been singing we picked up the distinctive song from quite a distance.  I was sceptical of my ability to properly pick it out, wondering if the familiar "chiff" notes might meander off into a mumbled version of the song, but it was very clear and obliging, sitting only ten feet above us and moving from exposed twig to exposed twig.  The light was in the wrong direction for photographs, but I did my best and then just settled in to listen to that weird and beautiful call.  Walking back towards the carpark we asked a very helpful RSPB staff member doing some maintenance on a fence if there was a good place for Dartford Warbler and immediately I'd asked we all heard the call of the bird as the male popped up on top of gorse 60 metres out.  The photos were very distant and through heat haze - a theme of the weekend - so I've included one from last year.

Being so close to Minsmere is always tempting, so we nipped in and did a loop, picking up all the usual species we would expect to here.  Bittern booming, Bearded Tits in flight, terns on the scrape, but sadly no sign of the Pectoral Sandpiper that had been there the day before.  Minsmere often feels like a bit of a trap when doing these big days out.  It's a gorgeous reserve and I can literally spend days there, wandering, seeing so much and experiencing a whole raft of wildlife, but for me, the point of these days is to try places I haven't been to before.  Minsmere is familiar, setting the blueprint for the other flagship RSPB wetland reserves, and I always feel I could be seeing much of the same wildlife elsewhere but without the crowds and the consumer temple at the entrance.  With this in mind, we quickly left for Walberswick to try and find the difficult to pin down Zitting Cisticolas.  A nice walk along the beach top began with hearing the plaintive call of a Whimbrel and I couldn't believe how close in this one came, walking and feeding only 40 metres away.  A gorgeous bird that I tend to think of as slender and delicate, but seeing it close up made me realise what size of bird it really is, and it's only slim and dainty in comparison to the frankly big Curlew.

Bar-tailed Godwits in a range of plumages from pale winter birds through to brick red summer flirts gathered in the pools, and Dunlin, Redshank, Ringed Plover and Lapwings all dodged Black-headed Gulls and Shelducks.  We came down off the sea wall to stop the noise of the wind and the tide rolling the pebbles of Walberswick beach and thus drowning out all possibility of hearing the "zit!" call of the bird formerly known as Fan-tailed Warbler.  We'd had discouraging news from everyone else we met on the beach: no sign of the Zitting Cisticolas.  We gave it an hour, and aside from the odd call that we thought sounded right but which was too distant to focus in on, we were on the verge of giving up.  Lee has spent some time in the last couple of years in Italy where Zittings are common and something he sees a lot.  With that knowledge ingrained in him, he picked up the distant flight of the Suffolk Cisticolas over the reeds and for three minutes we watched one fly back and forth very far out across the grass and foliage on the far bank of the river Dunwich.  Reasonable scope views confirmed the ID, and we walked back to the car hyped on success: two British lifers for Lee and one for me, and some really good wildlife for us had us upbeat.

We checked into our hotel (the Westleton Crown) which was faultless, with incredible service, amazing breakfast, a good bar and the best room I've stayed in on a birding trip.  Two pints in the sun and we decided we wanted a wander at Dunwich to find Firecrest and Green Woodpecker.  Bizarrely, we missed both these birds the whole weekend, but there always has to be an obvious miss, or else what would you talk about?  A fancy dinner, an early night, a good breakfast, and we set off on Saturday morning to Landguard - in the opposite direction for what we had intended - to try and catch up with a female Serin.

Serin has been on my to-see list for some time now, being a south coast occasionalist, and hard to get eyes on in the UK.  Though they're fairly regular every year in parts of Kent, and on the Scillies, they rarely stay still in a predictable place and I can't justify a 10 hour trip to maybe see them.  Arriving at Landguard I immediately liked the place: open grass with good cover and on a migration route.  It was like a small, flat Flamborough and I felt right at home. A local ringer gave us hope: he'd heard the Serin just 20 minutes before we arrived, and suggested we scan through the (absolutely massive) Linnet flocks for the smaller finch.  So we did.  Three hours of searching and scanning and we'd seen plenty... but no sign of a Serin.  In fact, as far as I know, it hasn't been seen there since.

What was great to see was a small handful of Wheatears and a very obliging Ring Ouzel that has been reported as a well-marked female, but I think my photo is of a male.  We set off for Lowestoft with a dip, but a sort of successful dip preparing us to finally end Lee's Hume's Leaf Warbler hoodoo.  The Hume's has been calling and singing from the Sycamores west of the tennis courts at the Oval in Lowestoft possibly since the dawn of time, or so it feels, and there are YouTube videos and photos and sound recordings galore of this bird.  We did not hear it, or see it.  It's starting to become a legend for Lee, a nemesis, a bird he's missed on four occasions at long-staying locations.  We gave up in favour of a look at Ness Point for Black Redstart (not present) and Purple Sandpipers.

We'd got a little down having dipped two target birds that morning, so when we discovered the Turnstone flock but no Purples we were prepared to assume the worst and just keep trekking to Norfolk.  A short scan in the very far corner of the sea defences just for completeness sake, and there on the rocks were six roosting Purple Sandpipers.  Spirits lifted, we aimed at Hickling Broad and a second walk to Brandon's Marsh in four months; this was where I'd mud skated to see the Black-winged Kite back in January.  

The weather throughout the weekend was glorious, wall to wall blue skies and sunshine and my fears of another mud bath were allayed quickly as the ground was baked hard in April - worrying in itself as we approach drought conditions.  At Hickling we quickly picked up Crane bugling and briefly flying, and then Spotted Redshank and one of the influx of Wood Sandpipers that has swept across the UK at the end of April.  The sun and the reflection from the mud, and the obscuring reeds made finding and identifying the Wood Sandpiper much more difficult than it needed to be, but I was pleased with our detective work to pick it out in hard conditions.  A single Hobby, our only one of the weekend, chased Swallows over the marsh distantly.

Arriving at our hotel in Warham to check in we began a 16 hour experience of offhand brusqueness and weirdness that meant I wouldn't go back to stay there again.  It was a shame, because it's a beautiful location and potentially very good base for birding across the north Norfolk coast. Tired from a long day travelling we dragged ourselves in the late afternoon to Cley where we heard Bittern, and picked up Black-tailed Godwit.  Interesting to have similar sized flocks of black-tailed on the north coast and bar-tailed on the south.  We were flagging by 8pm and decided the last light wasn't worth waiting for, driving back for another early night.  A shame, because we missed a reported Desert Wheatear only half a mile away by a matter of 20 minutes.  You win some and you lose some!

Sunday morning began with a walk at Stiffkey out to the coast to see the Brent Geese drifting over in small groups.  Spoonbill, Marsh Harrier, Whitethroats everywhere and we stretched the aches out of our legs before a mediocre breakfast at the hotel.  With news of Dotterel coming in at Southery in Norfolk and the only Turtle Dove report at Snettisham we decided to forgo Titchwell.  A tough choice.  I love Titchwell, and always enjoy a couple of hours exploring.  As it turned out Snettisham was a total bust - the tide was well out (which we were prepared for) but there was no sign of any Turtle Doves in a two hour walk.  A little despondent at how our Norfolk visit was fizzling out we aimed south towards the Dotterels, hoping that a couple of glamorous species now would give us some spark back.  The unassuming patch of rough ground off a single lane farm track which the Dotterels had chosen to spend their day on wouldn't have grabbed my attention at all, and it just goes to show how important it is to really interrogate the places that you go birding.  Without a local really looking we would never have known that four Dotterel including a gorgeously bright female were there.  Sadly, heat haze and distance rendered our reasonable scope views into so much fuzzy mush for the camera and phone scope, so we set off for Frampton Marsh and the last stop of the weekend.  Yellow Wagtails swooped around the van and news of an American Golden Plover buoyed us on our drive north.

Frampton Marsh is my favourite RSPB reserve, bar none.  I have affection and nostalgia for Leighton Moss, I've seen some very rare and interesting birds at Burtonmere, and the pilgrimage to Titchwell is a bi-annual event.  Lakenheath is gorgeous, Minsmere is, well, Minsmere, and Marshside is my most visited.  But none of them are as good as Frampton in my eyes.  It's just a brilliantly designed and kept reserve.  The people who look after the place and the visitors are clearly birders and they're clearly aiming to help people see as much as possible.  At some places the volunteers and staff are so programmed into their sales pitch they can't cut to the chase: where is the best place to see the birds that live in this excellent area?  The young gentleman and the older lady who greeted us at Frampton immediately asked us if we'd been before, and if there was anything we particularly wanted to see.  Within two minutes of the start of the conversation I had directions to find both American Golden Plover and Little Stint, plus Wood Sandpiper, Spotted Redshank, Cattle Egret and Corn Bunting.  Don't get me wrong, sometimes you just want to visit and find what you can find and let there be some mystery, but at this point in a long weekend, with 35+ kilometres in the legs and tired from the constant sun, we just wanted a nice, easy, rare bird to see.

American Golden Plover was exactly that.  "Find the cows," they said, "the Plover is near the cows."  And it was.  It was a pied chequerboard of monochrome beauty darting between daisies and sedge, no more than 40 metres away.  Even the heat haze couldn't stop me from taking some reasonable photos.  Chased by a Lapwing, the AGP flew over the road and landed even closer, though in much worse light, calling as it flew.  What a bird!  Easily my bird of the weekend, out of a long list of species; I've never had especially good views of one before.  My first was at Seaforth where I don't hold a permit, and am reduced to squinting through a basically impenetrable fence for views of birds hidden over a small rise on the lagoons.  Four hours of searching in September 2022 finally got a rubbish view and a phonescope picture, but it wasn't the delight I was hoping for.  This put that to bed in a heartbeat, and an hour in the sunshine wasn't enough for me to drink in all the details I wanted.

Walking back towards the carpark, too aware of time and pressure to be home to see our various children we'd written the Little Stint off, only to find it on the nearest island of flat mud at the third scan.  We'd completely missed it close in, and it was only as it flew away from us that we picked it up.  A brilliant end to a weekend with 128 species of birds, great company, amazing food and, thanks to the generosity of Lee, a real pick me up experience to help me with some recent bouts of depression.  The lesson of the weekend is to pay attention to the environment.  No amount of plans or itinerary, eBird hotspots and app pins on Google Maps is ever going to replace having your attention on the environment that you're in.  

So that's the East Anglia Weekender for another year, and another year of gratitude for those who make birding better.  To friends, to finders, and to Frampton Marsh: may you see all you deserve to see.