Caspian Tern and Pectoral Sandpiper, but no Turtle Dove in Northumberland

The day after the day after the night before is not a place a man in his mid-forties should ever wish to find himself.  This is the sad truth of two (and three) day hangovers.  This particular man had left his home at 8.30pm on the Thursday night with the intention of a quiet pub quiz, three pints, and an indulgent thirty minute lie in on the Friday morning.  Instead he had fallen in with a crowd of old friends and ended up still sipping gin at 3.22am on Friday morning.  Arriving home after sunrise, he awoke to work five bare minutes before his log on time, and worked solidly if in a certain level of discomfort for eight hours.  6.30am on Saturday and the alarm went off, and this man still felt the hangover bite.  A new low.  Even after 36 hours and a good night of sleep the hangover was winning.

Sadly, that man was me, and I was reflecting on feeling the gritty edge of the reality of middle age as Kris picked me up and we headed to Nosterfield as part one of a three stop tour.  Kris is doing a Big Year, though he won't admit it (even to himself) and his year list is both big and full of quality birds.  We'd each had a bit of FOMO with the recent spate of Caspian Terns in the country, and especially the one at Marbury barely half an hour from home, that we both missed.  It was also a bird I failed to see in 2025 during my own Big Year attempt, one of a handful of birds I didn't connect with that I wished I'd put that little extra effort into.

We were both surprised that the Caspian Tern had remained at Nosterfield Quarry over two nights, arriving on the 16th July and still present early on the 18th, so we aimed across with the plan of following the A1 north and looping home across the A69 and M6.  Our reasoning was that if it was quiet on the bird front, the loop would take us through prime butterfly country in south Cumbria and north Lancashire.  Expecting the heatwave to continue, we arrived at a cold Nosterfield, drizzle on the car window, cloudy sky above and 14C on the car thermometer.  A minute of careful scanning with the scope and we picked out the roosting Caspian Tern with its head tucked in and surrounded by a coterie of Black-headed Gulls. 

Caspian Tern is like no other bird really.  A colossus in the tern world, it's like taking a medium sized gull, making it more angular and strapping a huge orange knife to its face.  Elegant and big, Caspian Terns carry something of the lithe grace and power I associate with big predators.  In relative terms, this is the tiger of the tern world.  It sat, preening occasionally, with it's back towards us for an hour.  A local told us that it had caught a big fish before we arrived and was digesting it - we were unlikely to see the Caspian Tern fly.  

While we waited to see that day-glow carrot beak in its glory we counted through gulls, having heard there was a Caspian Gull present on site. I consider myself to be a reasonable birder, no expert, certainly not a gull-expert in any way, but picking out Caspian Gulls from a crowd of birds seems to be some sort of kryptonite.  No matter how many times I read the distinguishing features of a Casp I just can't apply it in the field.  Is that juvenile gull slender-billed, or is it heat haze?  Is it long-legged, or is the Lesser Black-backed next to it squat?  What is a slim gull when they're bathing in water, fluffing up feathers, preening, squabbling and half a mile away on mud?  Why do all these juvenile gulls suddenly have pure white heads?  The bizarre thing is that I've found Caspian Gulls so sometimes I can actually identify them, while at other times I just cannot come down on an ID.  I would say in my defence here, that there are two factors other than distance and heat haze come into effect; I was still slightly hungover, and; I can't bring myself to care about seeing a Caspian Gull.  Certainly not enough to learn about hundreds of combination intergrade colourations, ages, sub-species and so on.  So, we thought we saw a 2cy Caspian Gull, but we asked more than twenty other birders and they were split roughly 50/50 on whether it was or not.  Not exactly mourning in sackcloth and ashes, we shrugged and abandoned the gulls in favour of the better Caspian bird present, finally seeing that monster bill in profile.

Two hours after we left, so did the Caspian Tern.  We'd timed that well.  

Reports of both Pectoral Sandpiper at Druridge and Turtle Dove at Ingoe drew us north rather than trying our luck re-finding the Pacific Golden Plover at Spurn, and so we headed into Northumberland.  I have something of a weird lucky streak with Pectoral Sandpiper, usually finding them quickly whenever we look for them.  My first was at Leighton Moss on the saltmarsh hides and it had hidden away for hours in the creeks, frustrating birders.  I lifted my bins and it was literally the first bird I saw, wandering blithely around the back of a mud island.  In 2024 and on Tresco there was a Pectoral on Great Pool, but it was elusive and we'd searched for a couple of hours for it and were trying one final look from a different vantage.  Just as Kris said, "It's not here," I said "Got it," as it pootled about in the entrance to the drain at the edge of the water.  We joked about this on the walk to the screen, and I wondered if here was where I lost my reputation as Pec-re-finder General.

I set up my scope at the side of the screen.  I wonder about birding screens sometimes.  I wonder who designs them.  Are they all 5'2"?  I understand the need for, and applaud the provision of, accessibility for all people and particularly wheel-chair users and those who have aids for mobility in what can be difficult rural landscapes.  But surely the average height of a person hasn't risen so much that my universal experience in hides and at screens is that I basically have to kneel to use them?  I hate hides and screens.  My heart sinks when I have to use them because I know it will give me neck ache.  At 6'1" I'm not even that tall.  Kris is an inch taller than me, and for all intents and purposes, the screen at Druridge is entirely useless, with gaps to view at waist and chest height.  How truly tall people cope I have no idea.  Regardless, setting up my scope at the right hand edge of the screen worked out well.  The first bird I saw was a juvenile Redshank, but the second, within seconds, was the Pectoral Sandpiper that had been found the day before.  

A well marked bird, this chunky little wader spent an hour dashing back and forth between two tufts of marsh grass along the same stretch of mud.  Of course, it was always 15 metres too far for my camera to capture anything worth sharing, but the scope views were excellent and by far my best view of this bird that breeds in the Siberian and American tundra.  A host of biting insects decided that it was time for me to leave, and I dragged my hangover behind me like a little dark cloud plagued by horseflies.

The gorgeous little hamlet of Ingoe has played host to a Turtle Dove for a month, and almost everyone I know from the area has been and seen it sun-bathing on garage roofs, or preening on chimneys.  A slight spoiler: we spent over two hours searching, waiting, willing it to appear and it never did.  Kris seems to have some reverse magnetism with Turtle Doves (or the grey and cool weather had driven it to day roost in dense cover) and we gave up at 4.15pm.  Of course, the Dove was reported in the evening, but there comes a point where hanging around outside people's homes and making the locals uncomfortable about a couple of large men with serious optics means you have to give up.  We spent those hours in conversation with a brilliant birder and source of deep knowledge, an 86-year old who looked 15 years younger and was quicker than me on the uptake to find Spotted Flycatcher (which, after the initial find, seemed to be everywhere in the village).  His name was Richard, though I never caught his last name.  I learned a lot in the snatches of conversation we had, and I felt I hadn't even scratched the surface of the things he's seen and discovered.  As with the vast majority of north east birders in my experience, everyone we met and spoke to was helpful, friendly, funny and warm.  Kris found a Hobby dashing through the village in search of hirundines and we left Richard to his vigil for a local Turtle Dove, in search of the birds of the not so distant past that used to be much easier to see.  

We headed home happy with Caspian Tern, Pectoral Sandpiper, Spotted Flycatcher and for myself, happier still not to have to worry about identifying Caspian Gulls with a two day hangover.