Zitting Cisticola, Turtle Dove and Caspian Gull - shotgun on someone else's Big Year
300 species in the UK in a calendar year in 2025 was a fun, stressful, exciting challenge. I loved it and I never want to do it again. But a Big Year leaves a part of itself in your veins and sometimes you want to have a little of the buzz without all the pressure. This was my Saturday: I rode shotgun while Kris tried to pick up some species of birds he's struggled for this year. A vicarious Big Year? Well, in a small way, I suppose.
Kris has worked hard to see Turtle Dove all year, putting in two full days in Yorkshire and Northumberland after two days in Suffolk, and failing to see any sign of them. So today was really all about Turtle Doves, no matter the rarity of other species we saw. One of the quirks of a Big Year is that some of the species you expect to see turn out to be those that avoid you. In my own attempt last year I failed to connect with Red-backed Shrike and Red-breasted Flycatcher which I had assumed were nailed on autumn scarcities. It took me until November to see Black-throated Diver - not an easy bird but not one that I thought I'd have to work super hard to see. For Kris, Whimbrel, Turtle Dove and the cursed abomination that is the Caspian Gull had all remained elusive (despite us having a decent local occurrence of Casps annually). This, combined with the news of the Zitting Cisticola's successful fledging formed a plan for him to spend some time with those four species on a tour of East Anglia.
My job was to doze in the car and add my dubious skills to identifying juvenile Caspian Gulls - something regular readers will know isn't necessarily so much of a weakness of mine, but more of an unwillingness to waste mental space on. Given that I did the BBC football nicknames quiz on the journey down and remembered 90 out of 92 league clubs nicknames before 7am, I'm not sure I can make a case for the usefulness of what actually is in my mental space. Grimsby and Exeter, sorry, you were the ones I forgot.
A 6am set off had us at Black Bourn nature reserve in Suffolk just after 9am, a new place to both of us, former agricultural land left to rewild. The resulting meadow, marsh (when not totally dried out) and heath looked incredible and I was quietly confident we'd find Turtle Dove. However, two hours of walking and searching and we'd had no sign bar a fleeting glimpse of a slim pigeon shape dashing away. Half a dozen Green Woodpeckers, a day flying Barn Owl, two Sparrowhawks, Kestrel, Red Kite and Buzzard were good consolation and knowing we had Snettisham as a Turtle Dove contingency plan we continued to Walberswick to try and lay eyes on the elusive Zitting Cisticola that have famously had a small explosion of juveniles this summer.
A windy pebble beach viewing area over the grassland on the seaward side of the river Dunwich is becoming a familiar year listing location and this was my third visit for the Zitting Cisticolas. In those ten or eleven hours of searching, I still haven't had anything like a good view of this bird. I mean, it was enough to identify them, but I've never managed an image, a phonescoped view and I certainly haven't got my camera on them. I don't know if it's because I've seen so many of these birds in France and Spain over the years, or if the environment around Walberswick doesn't allow great and engaging views, or if the birds themselves just don't excite me, but I just don't get any of the adrenaline of seeing a rare bird when I watch these. It's obviously a remarkable record and incredibly significant in terms of climate change and colonisation and I can appreciate that in an academic way; I just don't have any feeling of excitement. I was much more enthusiastic about the Whimbrels flying close by and landing to feed on the pools by the pebble ridge.
So, two target birds seen and we decided to drive to Cromer, which has long felt like the capital (Caspital?) city of Caspian Gull juveniles in August. I was dreading this part for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I was worried that I'd not be able to identify the bloody things; and secondly, as someone who writes a blog I have a general low-grade fear of confidently posting photographs of a bird which I have misidentified thus opening myself to that worst of all social media experiences... being corrected by gull-nerds. However, a man has to learn and having experts check my working out is part of the process, so I grasped the nettle and began to squint at gulls on the distant and incoming tide. No more than 30 seconds had passed when both Kris and I said, "I think I've got one," at the exact same time. As it happens, the first one I saw was actually a juvenile Great Black-backed Gull, but Kris had picked out a Caspian Gull and we saw that they were confidently sitting within 20 metres of the general public. No better chance to see them close up and in detail, to compare them to juvenile Herring Gulls, so we walked out to where we could see them clearly and spent an hour studying their shape and plumage and bills etc.
It was a surprisingly engaging hour. I've always found the field guide descriptions mixed in terms of how useful they are - it's so subjective to judge the slope of a forehead, the length of legs (especially standing in water of unknown depth), the gonys angle of the bill and so on. Those eloquent experts have wasted their words on my obtuse mind. However, once you know you're seeing Caspian Gulls and have juvenile Herring Gulls to compare them with, you slowly get a sense of the Casp feel. Of course, these could have been all manner of hybrids, interstate plumages or whatever and I would never know it (nor care, really), but I got the sense that this was the best view I was ever going to have of a Caspian Gull and I enjoyed the experience. I learned a lot from this, helped by a man sitting on the beach who asked how many Caspian Gulls we'd seen. We thought we'd seen five and said so, and he agreed and then checked over our photos, comparing them to his own huge album of Caspian Gull photos from various places where he'd been in search of them. He confirmed our ID of the five birds and it felt like a step forward for me in terms of bird ID. Of course, 24 hours later, I probably wouldn't know a Casp if one bit me on the arse; there's just no mental room for the Grecians and the finer points of juvenile gull knowledge. As I said to Kris, at least for that one day I wouldn't casp aspersions on his identification of these charismatic gulls.
With the day drawing on we had a sudden brain wave. We'd planned to visit Snettisham to find the Turtle Doves there, but to be honest I was flagging. We'd already walked a good seven miles and I wasn't looking forward to the additional six at Snet in the heat. Remembering that Kelling Heath is only 20 minutes from Cromer, we decided we'd give two hours search for Turtle Doves there and if after that failed we'd head to Snettisham for the long slog. It was almost 3pm when we arrived at Kelling and we went to check the location where I've always seen Turtle Doves. An hour of wandering the heath and no sign at all. Starting to feel the impending pressure of Snettisham we set off at random across the other side of the heath noticing a small flock of Woodpigeons feeding on the short, dry, heat-stunted scrub. We circled them slowly, checking for the smaller, darker forms of Turtles and then one burst out of a small tree directly in front of us, swooping in to land with the Woodies. Finally, after a good five days of searching, Kris had caught up with a Turtle Dove for 2026.
This regal beauty flew up into the under canopy of an evergreen tree and sat in the shade keeping an eye on us for ten minutes before vanishing over the scrub. Things I learned today include that it is much easier to find Turtle Doves in spring when they're very vocal. In August they seem much more quiet and there are so many places for them to conceal their colourful plumage on a sun-drenched purple-clad heath.
So with four Big Year target birds under our belts, a lot of learning experienced, plenty of miles in the legs and a lot of laughing at ourselves for how inept we are at Caspian Gull ID we set off for home. On the way I reflected that it had been a fun day, that I had missed birding after a hard focus on butterflies, and that I did not miss doing a Big Year of my own at all. It was interesting to ride shotgun on someone else's, but the sense of having to go and see some species simply to have it on a list reminded me of the pressure of last late summer where I burned myself out. I'm flippant about Caspian Gulls, but this was a really interesting learning experience and I'm glad I had the chance to try and get my head around it.
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