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?

Or Cat’s Back or, most prosaically of all, Black Hill. But in any case the easternmost spur of the Black Mountains, which puts it in Herefordshire and thus in England. Which is rather exciting because the bird I heard yesterday (and Allan and Heidi saw, lucky them!) was only my third English record for the species. It follows the Forest of Bowland in 2003 and somewhere in Northumberland in 2006. Both a long time ago and it’s even nearly three years since my last encounter in the Pentlands. That’s what you get for moving away from Scotland.

Lagopus lagopus, which makes red grouse the nominate species of the ptarmigans. Yup, it’s really a willow ptarmigan and not a grouse at all but not many in this country bother with that.

So, it was a good year bird and several of those have started appearing lately. Today was my earliest wheatear, on the Severn Estuary coast south of Dowlais but north of Blake’s Pools. A distant grey plover was also new for 2011. Three days back, Upton Warren had my earliest little ringed plover and not quite earliest avocets. My trip to the Midlands also brought one peep from a tawny owl at the aunt’s place in Kidderminster.

Last week at Chew Valley the spotted sandpiper was showing well, the wintering garganey was still around and the Somerset list went up by one somewhat junk bird. An Egyptian goose has been hanging out by the picnic site for a while. I didn’t go for it but it found me as I scanned the causeway end for the long-tailed duck. No duck, but the one goose.

On 178 species Somerset now ties it up with Angus, which is a county with plenty of red grouse.

From February 18:

“A beautiful, if somewhat crisp at the start, day in the foothills of the Cairngorms. There wasn’t much bird activity but the Glens are like that. I wonder if they were any better when they had trees?

“Anyway the end of the road up Glen Isla does provide a few Scots pines and a small plantation of other conifers. These held most of the day’s birds, the most notable being one brambling in amongst the numerous chaffinches. It’s always nice to see mistle thrushes too and even better to hear them sing – a rather more melancholy tune than a blackbird’s, I think.

“A few ravens cronked overhead and bothered the lone buzzard. No eagles, of course. And no red grouse this time. However, that other gamekeeper’s favourite, the magpie, did surprisingly appear – only my second sighting for Angus.”

From Monday, July 19:

“This morning on my way into town past the university a small bird flew overhead. It was singing and I had heard that song before in the same place. Then I had identified it as an aberrant greenfinch but today I realised that it was a redpoll. Apart from the oddness of the urban location there are no conifers for miles around. This being the second sighting suggests that the bird may be
nesting in the area, so it is doubly strange.

“Yesterday I checked out the sand martins at their new home in Broughty Ferry. They must be doing well. Dozens of them zip past your head as you walk towards their nests. I think that the only other city where I have registered sand martins is San Francisco, where they nest in the cliffs below Fort Funston. Bar-tailed godwits were also foraging in the Tay Estuary at low tide – again not a common city bird.

“Four days ago the fire station at the back of Forest Park Road was host to a crow that was certainly more hooded crow than anything else. The pale underparts and back were interspersed with patches of dark feathers. I had seen this bird before too but thought that it was merely a juvenile. However, none of my field guides shows juveniles as being anything other than black. This time there was another crow with it, carrion but showing some paleness that could be attributes to hooded genes.”

Lists are all the rage these days, especially those to tick before you die, so here’s my contribution. But with a difference: not for me the plain old best but, as a rabid lister, the locations to deliver the most varied bag of species. The concomitant geographic spread should also make this Top 10 truly British.

Close to Pokerbird WHQ, Somerset’s
Chew Valley Lake holds many freshwater species as well as the prospect of birds, chiefly herons, that are colonising from the continent. It’s especially good for small numbers, but a wide variety, of autumn migrants.

Over the Severn Estuary pine plantations in the Forest of Dean provide the setting for the next stop. It is not so much a location as an area, round Parkend and New Fancy View, that holds the highlights of both hawfinches and displaying goshawks. Nearby RSPB Nagshead completes a trio of spots within a two-kilometre circle.

Further north and inland, where Wales excels, Lake Vrynwy, only 60 miles west of the Black Country, is a breeding ground for many of our passerines. Away from its encircling deciduous woodlands, roads also lead up to the moors and their specialist birds.

Actually in the Midlands and easy off junction 5 of the M5 is the little Worcestershire Wildlife Trust reserve of Upton Warren. Its species list belies its small size as a mixture of salt and fresh water pools attract waders and seabirds as far inland as you can see them.

Even London gets in on the act with its excellent Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) reserve at Barnes Elms. In terms of adding to the species, it really only supplies a couple of invaders – rose-ringed parakeet and Egyptian goose. But its proximity to such a mass of population alone makes it worthy of the Top 10.

The least controversial site is RSPB Titchwell on the North Norfolk coast, where just one day’s visit can yield more than 50 species. Its scrapes and lagoons hold a first-rate selection of waders year round to add to species offshore.

The RSPB reserve at Bempton on the Yorkshire cliffs, provides a maternity ward for Britain’s important seabirds. The spring and summer months really see the colonies come alive although a visit any time of the year is good for the surrounding farmland.

Another WWT reserve at Martin Mere fills the northwest England gap, apart from being a fine day out and not just for waterbirds. The site holds a small colony of tree sparrows and the neighbouring farmland has corn buntings.

Scotland offers unique Caledonian pinewoods, home to capercaillie, crested tit and Scottish crossbill. Few places are better to see them than Abernethy, which is primarily famous for its ospreys. Yet another RSPB site at Loch of Strathbeg, coupled with nearby Rattray Head, promises Scottish coastal watching. Here are Britain’s more northerly pelagic birds and waterfowl, especially in the winter.

10 sites and the possibility of 200 species by my calculations. That’s why I call them Top.

From Friday, July 9:

“Well, technically not Angus. Dighty Water in Dundee, to be precise. But in the birding world the two are lumped together.

“I have been living here for over a year and have visited Old Montrose Pier many times without ever catching up with the birds there, so it was getting frustrating. Indeed the day before this sighting I had pretty much frozen to death in the same spot looking for a non-existent ruddy shelduck and of course there was also no sign of the kingfishers. Incidentally isn’t it supposed to be warm in the middle of July? Maybe not with an Arctic wind blowing off Montrose Basin.

“Anyway I had just about given up at Dighty Water when I caught a flash of that metallic blue fly up to a branch, registered the rusty breast and then clearly spooked the bird into departing as quickly as it had come. I loitered for a while hoping that the bird would return but only managed to register a female blackcap in the process.

“The location also provided a singing sedge warbler to give me a Dundee list of 75 – not bad for about six months. There is quite a way to go to beat my best city list of 134 for Mountain View but that’s in California and it has the advantage of being on San Francisco Bay. It also took me three years.

“And it was considerably warmer.”

I figured there should be cliffs at the end of the Quantocks and therefore seabirds to either side. Stolford seemed a good bet but as I approached and was clearly passing Hinkley, I knew I’d been there before. It was flat then and it still is. It also looks a little Godforsaken so I didn’t plan on hanging around.

If seabirds weren’t on the menu, shorebirds certainly were. The site is next door to the rather more famous estuary at Steart. Why the difference in spelling? That’s English for you.

Anyway the tide was well out so there was plenty of mud for them. Little egrets were obvious but the others required my scope. Enter Somerset‘s 155th species for me. The actual bird shouldn’t have been a surprise because they’ve been everywhere lately. Yes, more whimbrels.

This puts the county on a par with San Mateo and now comfortably second to Angus in the UK. There’s a way to go to catch up with the three years I lived there (plus two years regular visiting from Edinburgh).

Hmm, having double checked my San Mateo list on Birdstack, I now see it’s actually 154. I’d logged my first yellow-rumped warbler as a default myrtle, which was probably not correct. This listing business… it’s an approximation at best.

And for Portbury Wharf a real prize of a tick, perched on a nest box at morn’s end.

The first of the migrants was a slight puzzle, an exercise in fuzzy logic, although it looked so right with its long wings and slender build that I was 90% certain of it. The bird also showed a yellowy wash to its underparts, which the chiffchaffs that are now piling through do not.

The second migrant was easy, clouds of sand martins hawking over the pools, everywhere really. There must have been dozens, if not hundreds, of them. I couldn’t turn any into a swallow though.

Then I caught the sweet descending song of my puzzle bird and it became 100% willow warbler. A day earlier than my 1999 record at Upton Warren, which coincidentally had also been my earliest for sand martin.

Then the day’s prize was given to me by the one other birder on the Wharf. I’d bumped into him twice and was on my way back home when he put me on to the bird. I needed to manoeuvre to a more suitable spot to get the nest box in my sights and fortunately was toting my scope. Binoculars didn’t distinguish anything, so well disguised is this species against wood. But at maximum zoom the scope gave cracking views of a tawny owl surveying its domain in the sunshine.

This deserved a good few minutes’ soaking up. Not just new for the site, but new for Portishead too. And when was the last time I saw a tawny? The back end of 2006 at Montreathmont Forest in Angus. In fact that had terminated a purple patch of my only three sightings: the other two being at Glen Mark that year and Hermitage of Braid, Edinburgh in 2005. Truly a sight to soak, then.

It’s in what I described as “the beginning birder’s starter pack.” In my case because I used to tramp the Munros round Loch Awe and Loch Leven in the early 90’s and the most ignorant non-birder could hardly fail to notice the grouse-like things he was almost stepping on. My first encounter was up Ben Cruachan although my Wildlife Recorder sighting has it as Glencoe. That’s something to do with wishful thinking about a red kite. I need to scrub that one from the log.

Either way I hadn’t located the site in Birdstack so ptarmigan wasn’t registering in my UK list. Now it is and the list is up-to-date to mid-2007, which is where the import has got to. Just to belt-and-braces the species, I’ve also pinpointed Glen Feshie and Cairngorm as my other ptarmigan locations. In fact a nice side-effect of accurately identifying Ben Cruachan is that the species enters my Argyll & Bute list. That’s where the mountain is and it ain’t moving.