April has already had a couple of representatives within this wholly unrepresentative and generally personal trawl (that’s trawl, not troll…) through some of the year’s top birds, so we move along to the birder’s favourite spring month - May - for another very choice selection…
Nothing could topple that amazing May seabird from the pinnacle of the Great Pyramid of Rares for 2014 but for everybody and his or her dog who wasn’t aboard the RV Celtic Voyager, the very last day of May produced for many their very own #1 choice as “Bird of the Year”.
…a bird that, for once, was an easy mainland target, often performing well and allowing many, many hundreds of observers the chance to enjoy some super views over the course of, basically, the summer. What’s not to love about that?
The sizeable rarity ball started to roll thanks to the keen eyes of local birder Paul Morton - he was the man who discovered the near-ghostly apparition of a superb Short-toed Eagle sitting a top a pine tree on the beautiful Dorset heathland of Morden Bog during the morning of May 31st.
The news spread, inevitably, like wildfire and almost as soon as the news was being absorbed and Sat-Navs being programmed for the south coast, came the inevitable follow-up question from both the genuinely interested and those online Doubting Thomas’s alike - “are there any photos?”
Well, yes there were, and unlike the infamous Lincolnshire hoax of September 2011 - more Pell’s Fishy Eagle than Short-toed Eagle - these were of the real deal in the precise spot it was reported to be in.
Andy Stoddart was the round-up writer for that week and he summed up the initial buzz to a tee…”(Paul’s) first pictures portrayed a magnificent bird with all the right features - chalky white underneath, buffy on top with contrasting dark midwing panel and flight feathers, short-tailed with a fat, rounded-looking head (a function of expanded nape feathering) and big yellow irises. To the internet-living ‘summer raptor doubters’ this bird gave a resounding ‘two fingers’”.
”Drivers, start your engines…!”
”Magnificent” is indeed the word that you’d want to use when describing this superb bird of prey and after a brief spell of moving around the site, the second-summer Short-toed Eagle was back roosting in the pines for much of the late afternoon and evening, through to dusk, being admired by an increasingly large crowd to boot.
The first few hours of the first day of June saw a sizeable gathering of a few hundred birders stretching across Morden Bog in a suitably apt snaky line straining to see the pine tops through the ethereal misted shroud. The early risers (the pre 4.30am brigade) had the bird safely “UTB” but there were a few panicked faces on those who scurried to the crowd as the clock ticked on.
No one need worry of course, the bird was present and it wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. It was a sun-loving eagle after all and with the mist coming and going for what seemed an eternity, there was little danger of the dreaded dip.
The waiting game began in earnest for more as the big hand hit the 12 and the little hand the eight, a time that, for most rational-thinking human beings, was “true” early morning - this is when “you burn off all the fog and let the sun through…” and the expectation of those longed-for flight views began to rise.
The fearless Eagle took no notice as people began to “break rank” and edge politely closer and closer and it didn’t take long to cotton on to the fact that this was a bird that played by its own rules and no one else’s. It would make a move when it wanted to - flight was solely on his/her terms and no one else’s.
A few shuffles on the pines came and went as the local corvids did their best to hoof the bird off its perch but the waiting game continued - but many present wouldn’t say anything other than the very best things about being on a supreme bit of unusual and rather special habitat whilst watching Britain’s third Short-toed Eagle with such lovely diversions like multiple Mediterranean Gulls and singing Dartford Warblers by which to pass the hours until Takeoff Time.
..and that moment came as the clock ticked around to 10am.
The skies were largely sailor-suit blue in colour, the odd wisp of hazy, candy floss cloud was to be seen fragmented high up in the atmosphere while the warmth in the air had seen all the 4am jackets, hats and gloves long since dispensed with.
With a couple more shuffles, the wings were opened, deep beats taken and the thermalling process began - to the gasps of admiration from the crowd below. Within a few moments, this glorious bird was showing brilliantly, drifting over the pines and over the crowd before spiralling up, up and away to the SSW becoming, within some 10 minutes, a tiny dot somewhere out over Poole Harbour.
That as we know, was anything but the end of the story…indeed Paul Morton’s find on Morden Bog was just the start of it…
After a few “possible” and “probable” sightings in the following couple of days after the mid-morning departure from Morden, there seemed to be a real possibility that the Short-toed Eagle had really done a bunk. Several days passed until the bird was relocated at Hatchet Pond in neighbouring Hampshire, on June 8th. Two days later, it had hopped to East Sussex, relocating to Ashdown Forest and it then flip-flopped between the latter counties through the rest of June and in to early July (it was last reported in the New Forest on July 5th and Ashdown Forest on July 12th).
That final report in East Sussex remains listed as “unconfirmed” and was made at around 9.30am. At tea-time on the same day, it was photographed over Thursley Common in Surrey - so there’s every chance it moved that day.
There was one more (major) surprise relocation up its sleeve too ~ the Eagle and its keen snake-detector senses took this wanderer further to the northeast, plonking itself quietly in to Norfolk’s Breckland a week or so after heading across the Surrey countryside ~ spending a month in the Grime’s Graves area of the county, with some neat photos to boot...
This is the run-down of dates that featured in the RBA Round-up when the Norfolk news broke…
- May 31st - June 1st: Morden Bog, Dorset
- June 8th: Hatchet Pond, Hampshire
- June 10th: Ashdown Forest, East Sussex
- June 11th: Unconfirmed report Swaffham Bulbeck, Cambridgeshire
- June 12th - 13th: New Forest, Hampshire
- June 15th - 22nd: Ashdown Forest, East Sussex
- June 24th: Reported New Forest, Hampshire
- June 24th - 29th: Ashdown Forest, East Sussex
- June 30th: Reported Stodmarsh, Kent
- June 30th - 2nd July : New Forest, Hampshire
- July 5th: New Forest, Hampshire
- July 12th: Unconfirmed report Ashdown Forest, East Sussex
- July 12th: Thursley Common, Surrey
- July 19th - August 17th: Grime’s Grave area, Norfolk
- August 22nd: Unconfirmed report Gibraltar Point NNR, Lincolnshire
Prior to this hugely appreciated bird, there were just two accepted Short-toed Eagles on the British List - the most recent being one seen over both Dawlish Warren and Orcombe Point in south Devon on October 16th 2011. The first was, of course, the legendary “in-off” juvenile on St. Agnes (Scilly) on October 7th 1999, a bird which toured all islands before making off t’ward the Cornish mainland on October 11th.
For those of us who (foolishly) dedicated ourselves to the workplace rather than plane to Scilly that year, the sight of those darned green hats, replete with the species name and date embroidered within in them became something of a fleecey nemesis for the next 15 years…sad but true...
So, Paul Morton, I for one salute you!
As a final footnote it should also be noted that the sighting of a Short-toed Eagle over the Bird Observatory at Bradwell-on-Sea in Essex on June 11th was omitted from the list above because the bird seen there was a “hooded” older bird. Seen by half a dozen experienced folk it has every chance of making it to the books as Britain’s fourth example of this true Mediterranean star.
We’re off to Norfolk next time around for an encounter with a small bird on a very big estuary…
With thanks to the many photographers who posted images of the Short-toed Eagle on the RBA Gallery through the summer, some of which we’ve returned to here ~ Chris Bromley, Matthew Eade, Dave Knight, Oliver Reville, Rob Stokes, Mike Taylor and Vern Wright. Thanks also to Gavin Chambers for allowing us to use his images of the bird when it was in Breckland.
Mark Golley
29 December 2014
Thanks to Oriole Birding for sponsoring The 12 Birds of Christmas 2014
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