Twenty months since my last lifer and six since my last British species, this one was a corker. Perched openly in a tree with its long black-bordered plumes, the heron put me in mind of Rod Stewart. (Did I ever tell you my Rod Stewart story?…)

So what’s a squacco heron doing in Somerset? And what does squacco mean? The bird is a Mediterranean migrant from Africa so this one has overshot. The Bay of Biscay looks to be the most northerly colony. The species is in the same Ardeola genus as Chinese pond heron, which I saw in Singapore. That puts it before the cattle egrets and true herons, and after North America’s green heron.

Squacco seems to come from the Italian name for the bird. Some chap called Francis Willughby coined it but, more important, got the serious taxonomy ball rolling in the process. Ball rolling is an apt metaphor because he also gave an early description of the game of football. And with no end to the trivia he was born at Middleton Hall, now an RSPB reserve.

Betcha you’re glad you learned that.

Chew Valley was quieter but Herriotts held a splendid drake garganey, a couple of shovelers and still a goldeneye. I completed the three reservoirs at Barrow Gurney, where I first heard sand martins then, with delight, found their nesting bank. I have a dim memory of hearing about this. It’s artificial of course but makes the yomp round both tanks worthwhile in the summer.

So a fine day out after recent incarceration to get new versions of Let the Time Come and The Honeyeaters’ Tree to the printers. Still working on ‘em though…

Away from Santa Clara County on April 22:

“Large straggly flocks flying north close to the water were Brent geese. There were also birds very high and in some kind of strung out formation. They may have been Brents but I have seen cormorants like this – although not in their hundreds as these flocks numbered.

“Other groups had about a dozen per flock, flew close to the water and looked like divers. I fancied red-throated from a slight drooping of the heads. Large straggly flocks of smaller birds completed the procession – scoters?

“None of these was really close enough to get any more than an impression of their general colour scheme. The sun was also coming round to behind them to make matters more difficult.

“Ideas, anyone? In any case it was certainly a sight worth seeing.”

This is like a lifer for me. I have one dodgy heard-only record from Rutland Water in 1999 but today’s bird by the South Hide, although still not seen, was unambiguous – a noise I can’t recall hearing before. It was more strident than I’d expected. A whopper of a grasshopper would be needed for that volume – bigger than we get in this country anyway.

True to form I was about to give up when the bird called. The morning had been good all the same with redstarts, one peregrine powering over and a brief glimpse of a barn owl, which alone would have made the day. One greylag goose was new for the reserve, as of course was the gropper. A singing garden warbler made it a hat-trick.

That took a few moments to identify but when it sank in, I realised that I’d heard one at Ham Wall on Friday. There’s a trick to separating it from blackcap that the field guides don’t tell you about. Yes, the song is quieter and more complex but I think the clincher is when you can’t decide whether you’re listening to a blackcap, song thrush or sedge warbler. The species manages to whistle through the repertoire of all these birds.

Swallows aplenty, a handful of sand martins and my year’s first house martin completed the roster for the visit.

Now the bad news. The monstrosity in the top picture is a new bridge that connects Port Marine to the Wharf. Behind it are a few of the extra houses that have sprung up in my time here. The bridge has been threatened a while and one had grown complacent that it wouldn’t happen. Now here it is. I’ve largely stopped going to the reserve because it’s already overrun with fucking dogs. Now the floodgates will truly open.

Just as bad will be the onslaught of people. The second picture shows the state of the middle hide when I got there – every single window and door open. The same was true for the tower hide. No log books in either; benches missing from the latter. We can expect worse.

And it’s certainly the end for the wildlife value of the site.

Now Somerset is my top British county with my first ever English occurrence of this white gull. Five years have elapsed since my last sighting at Fraserburgh; only Forfar and Ullapool have also contributed records. In with a distant roost of herring and lesser black-backs and the light fading fast, the Cheddar bird was nevertheless easy to pick out in its paleness.

Earlier the same day another bout of three new species at Chew Valley took that site racing past Upton Warren. I caught up with the long-tailed duck and the flock of yellowhammers while a mistle thrush sang in the distance for a surprising addition to the list.

Another theme recently has been early birds and yesterday was no exception, apart from being exceptional. Two Sandwich terns off Widewater Lagoon at Shoreham beat my 2006 record by 25 days! True, most of my sightings have been in Scotland but this does continue a trend of migrants weeks ahead of time. The weather has certainly been crazy enough this year to encourage them. Am I alone in thinking the last few weeks have been unnatural?

What with my earliest singing blackcap on the 28th of last month; blackbirds yesterday; bees and red admirals in abundance at the end of February, including one that found its way into the house in my washing basket! With windows open to cool my room the last couple of weeks. With the prospect that this will be one of the warmest UK winters.

With all that I went to what I’m calling Dowlais to try to beat my record for first arriving wheatear, which stands at the 21st. This is the Severn Estuary coast south of Clevedon and it was chilly and misty and rather more seasonal than of late. My harbinger of Spring didn’t show but skylarks and chaffinches were in song, which seemed a touch early (but not compared with 2010!)

It’s been a few weeks of not much birding since the yellow-browed warbler at Chew, as I’ve beavered on getting The Honeyeaters’ Tree to print. Job done there so I’ve toyed with the idea of putting myself back in the Machine to rescue my finances.

Therein lies the rub: they are still too robust to get a Jobseekers Allowance. I should have spent that £16,000 on drugs and guns instead of investing it. That just goes to show that the government is only interested in getting consumers back to spending rather than putting people in to work. Anyway I can think of better ways of investing my time than the rat race.

Where was I? Oh yes, recent birding: one stonechat has reappeared at Portbury Wharf; the black redstart is still hanging round by Portishead Pier; a male goosander dropped in for a day at the Marina; nine magpies sat on the roof of Gibb Towers. And I swear a female white wagtail has been wintering on Portishead High Street. She’s a uniform pale grey from forehead to rump; not even a juvenile should look like that later than the autumn. There are no references to the phenomenon on the Web and I wonder if such birds are simply overlooked.

Roll on migration anyway and let’s get the year list going.

Eight years since my last sighting, at Louth in Lincolnshire, and with only three other records before that (all around the same period), this little gem is rare indeed. Yesterday’s bird behind the Stratford Hide was perfect for spotting its striking supercilium, but even more its two wing bars and black-and-white pattern to the tertials. I was glad it had hung around through the cold snap because I’d delayed since New Years Day, when it was first reported and ringed.

Part of the reason has been not buying a permit for 2012: the office just hadn’t been open when I’d visited. But I fixed that, at a cost of £18 now. That’s a 12.5% rise on last year. So much for a 4.2% inflation rate.

To start getting my money’s worth, I spent a while in the hide, from which a female garganey floated with the usual teal flock. That made identification a little easier but it’s not hard really. Some say that the facial markings and hence its paleness are the most distinctive but I find the contrast between its flanks and back to be more obvious. There’s a definite demarcation line. The larger bill is another difference but tough to judge without a yardstick.

I have seen garganey (twice) at the Lake. Not the warbler though, which is also a Somerset bird for me. Also not on my Chew list, to my surprise, were nuthatch and siskin, which a wee stroll downriver from the dam provided. They took the total up to 122 – just two behind Upton Warren! I’d gone for yellowhammers that I’d heard about but they were not in evidence.

The Lyndhurst Hotel marked the start of the Strzelecki Track and the tarmac ended not far down it. A sign in the road-train area told of conditions for sections of the route – all open when I was there. So the way was clear to Mount Hopeless, the Moomba oil fields and southern Queens­land. Hundreds of kilometres of dirt roads plied by monster trucks bowling through the heart of Australia. Directly north the same traffic ran up the Oodnadatta and Birdsville Tracks to Marree, where they diverged for the Northern Territory and western Queensland respectively.

This was Bransbury‘s direction for chestnut-breasted whiteface. A great many grasswrens – streaky brown relatives of the fairywrens – also had restricted ranges up there, as did the gibberbird. The name alone made this honeyeater a prize for me and I was right at its limit. But not this trip. I missed most of the localised endemics, which is not a surprise: it takes Australians considerable time and effort to add them to their lists.

No, I had to turn back but did so pre-breakfast to see what birds were up and about early to scrape a living from the desolation. It’s not so desolate: enough precipitation falls to keep a low layer of scrub and the recent rains had left roadside pools and ditches full of water. One held my next lifer, a bird more accustomed to estuaries so it was a long way from home although Morcombe notes that the hoary-headed grebe is nomadic. This is in sharp contrast to most species in its Podicipediformes order, which are not known for even their short-distance flying prowess. They walk even less readily, being apt to fall over because their legs are set so far back. They’re designed for swimming and diving. So a roadside pool was just right.

World birds 925 and 926 soon followed as white-backed swallows skimmed the skies and a rufous songlark had me puzzling for ages over its scratchy-scratchy song and cryptic plumage. Then, gem of all gems, a distant blaze of gold shimmered through the heat haze – too far to make out any detail but the speck could only have been one bird. A mudflat specialist but also a honeyeater, the orange chat was my 15th for the trip and 927th species for my entire life.

A celebratory coffee followed at the Beltana Roadhouse, between Leigh Creek and Parachilna, where I stopped again. For another coffee, as it happens: the high mileage, and maybe the nights’ beers, were catching up on me and staying awake was becoming a challenge.

The Prairie Hotel gave me the day’s fifth lifer with a white-winged triller perched on nearby telegraph wires. This was another bird that I’d been half-identifying in its smart black and white plumage since Western Australia. Not dissimilar to a pied wagtail, the species is actually in the cuckooshrike family. They hunt from exposed branches, which makes them easy to catch out of the corner of one’s eye while driving. They don’t always hang around for one to stop, reverse and get one’s bins on ‘em though. The triller was a welcome finale to the Flinders. ⇐ ⇒

So it was that tuturiwhatu became my next lifer but not before tuturiwhatu had joined the trip list. You read that right. The Maoris had the same trouble with identifying species that we do and gave the same name to two plovers. Or dotterels as The Hand Guide to the Birds of New Zealand calls them. You should be confused by now. It is a minefield.

Let the IOC taxonomy clarify, which is what it’s supposed to do. Double-banded plover (Charadrius bicinctus) was the more common and widespread species I already had from Haast in 2003; the rarer, endemic New Zealand plover (C. obscurus) was my 1,055th species. The latter prefers more coastal habitat so it was only once the beach came into view that I found these plainer shorebirds. They are also bigger than the double-banded but at distance the safest way to separate these non-breeding birds was by paler heads and the lack of chest bands.

If that lifer was a slight challenge, the next, also with it on the shore, spawned a complete mystery and caused me to wonder if senior moments hadn’t been kicking in for years. Six years to be precise, being the span back again to 2003 when I can still picture wrybills scuttling by a river south of Christchurch.

These look like cleaner cut, small plovers – maybe sanderlings too – but with good views the curve of their bill is unmistakable. The truly remarkable feature is that the bill doesn’t curve down, like curlews and whimbrels, or slightly up, like terek sandpipers. No, it always curves to the right.

Why the right? That’s a puzzle in itself but my puzzle when entering the sighting that evening was how wrybill was showing up as a lifer. I checked and double-checked 2003. Nothing. And I’m almost anal about my records. How could I reconcile such a clear memory with what my software was telling me? And I also suspected that I’d seen the bird more than once. How could it have slipped through multiple times?

I’m still aghast. ⇐ ⇒

Friday the Thirteenth continued my run of bad bird luck with just eastern spinebill and white-bellied sea eagle of note right at the death. I’d drifted east to the Freycinet Peninsula by then via Oatlands and Campbell Town, the latter showing some interesting art and both being sort of old. The B34 across to Freycinet climbed past Lake Leake, only accessible by dirt track, and down to Moulting Lagoon, which defines the peninsula.

I was on the eastern seaboard Tasman Highway, heading north to Bicheno for the road down the other side of the lagoon. My target was the national park, where mid-afternoon might have been OK to find camping, but it was a Friday and the place had been booked solid for weeks. Rather than paying the entrance fee to Freycinet just for that evening, I checked out Coles Bay right next door. On the other side of the village BIG4 Iluka did have a pitch for me, and a convivial tavern.

That filled in the evening schedule. From the verandah I watched the sun sink over Great Oyster Bay, of which Moulting Lagoon is the northern extension. This was named for the swans and shelducks that shelter during their flightless late summer.

The general public is ignorant of this aspect of most wildfowl’s life cycle. Post-breeding adult birds replace all their flight feathers at once and so need a safe haven while they’re vulnerable. This is why the drakes also moult through an eclipse plumage that renders them as camouflaged as the females. Mid-February may have been a touch early to catch this spectacle but bushland in and around the campsite brought me back to native passerine species after the European domination of the central farming belt.

On Saturday morning I explored more of this bayside eucalypt scrub that stretched away north from the settlement. Spotted pardalotes joined the other Pardalotus species that had been so memorable at Tinderbox, but it was a couple of currawongs that got the heart racing. As at Mount Wellington, I was hopeful of black currawong but this time my view was lengthy enough to pick out white wing patches, which gave me clinking currawong. A great name, but only a subspecies of the widespread grey, which is almost black on Tasmania.

I didn’t retry the national park because the better idea of Maria Island had climbed my pecking order. This was some 40 miles south but 70 by road to the ferry at Triabunna, and I had to start off north past Moulting Lagoon again to get off the peninsula. This brought me Caspian tern and brown falcon to make a reasonable haul for the day already.

But before any further improvement to that list was the small matter of my ever-pressing flight out of Auckland. A detour even further north to Bicheno would take me to a wireless hotspot, I hoped. I had good reason to expect: it was listed on an Internet voucher I’d bought in the Hobart café. My luck happened to be in. That was nice. ⇐ ⇒

At first it looked like a buzzard, scattering the wigeon, teal and pintail at this West Sussex reserve. Then it banked to show a creamy white head and its true nature. It must be said that a juvenile, and maybe a female, marsh harrier has similar colouring to a dark morph buzzard so one does need the head for a positive identification. That or a good sighting to get the harrier’s quartering behaviour.

My bird landed straightaway and disappeared behind low scrub so
I didn’t get that luxury. I wondered if it had found a meal when it didn’t reappear.

This interlude followed stunning views of a female peregrine falcon, to the extent that this crappy digishot was possible (where does the yellow fringing come from?) I had to use my iPhone because my camera now discharges batteries within minutes and is effectively dead. I’ll have to work the poker tables some to manifest funds for a new one.

Both these birds of prey were new for my Pulborough list as were a couple of snipe and a calling crossbill. I may also have seen a female at the very tip of a tree but at the distance she was hard to separate from a greenfinch.

All that was on Tuesday and to continue the raptor theme, yesterday’s trip back from Steyning brought me two red kites. Not up the A34 or along the M4 as one might suppose but through the heart of Hampshire, near Old Winchester Hill. That’s my third record in that area so they are drifting south.

And they made a raptorlicious couple of days.