Wednesday 23 May 2012

No300 - Cream-coloured Courser (Cursorius cursor)

I've finally done it! I have now seen 300 species of bird in Britain, and what a bird to have as my 300th species! I joined Alex Jones on the journey south to Herefordshire on Tuesday afternoon arriving at 18.15 to the highest 18 hole golf course in England!
It was a stunning day and it took about 10 minutes of walking before we arrived at the assembled crowd where we got our first views of the Saharan beauty! It ran around feeding actively, seemingly oblivious to the birdwatchers with dropped jaws all enjoying this stunning bird.
The way it fed, it weirdly reminded me somewhat of a Mistle Thrush, but it is very plover like, and the combination of the plover like walk, the V on the nape and the fact it was on top of an open hill makes this bird seem similar to Dotterel in many ways.

We watched the bird walk around for about an hour and a half taken lots of photos and just taking in what we were actually looking at. One of those birds that you look at in the back of your first bird book and think 'Wow! I wonder If one day, I will actually see one of these?!'.
I have seen some wonderful birds in the 300 species I have seen, but I am rather confident that this is the most enjoyable and greatest bird I have ever seen in Britain (Taking Alpine Swift on the Wirral and Northern Waterthrush on Scilly off the top spots).
Thanks to Alex Jones for driving and making for an excellent twitch!

I'm not sure if there is an opposite phrase to 'Every cloud has a silver lining', but yesterday applies to this as I was clearing space for more photos of this fantastic bird and accidentally deleted all my photos from my recent trip to Spain with Kane Brides. Hopefully I will be able to get these recovered in the next week, but it put somewhat of a dampener on what was one of my favourite days of all time!

1 comment:

Stuart Price said...

Congrats on the 300!