Our good Cheshire friend, Phil Woollen, was my next pick up at 1.30 by the end of the M54. He hopped in and lifted all our spirits with his never ending enthusiasm. Now for the 3.5 hour drive. SatNav had us arriving at 5.10am but we made good time, helped along the way by our fave Pork and Stilton pies, and arrived at Dungemess at 5 with only one other car of birders present.
It was a very misty morning and all you could hear was the glorious sound of the Skylark, but you couldn't see a bloomin thing so essentiallyh we all hads to wait for the sun to come up and start to burn off the mist. Malc Curtin had joined us, he had slept overnight in his motor and was creaking a bit when we met him but once he'd woken up off he went hunting for the lark.
A misty Dungee sunrise.
The local warden showed his face and told us that the Crested Lark seemed to prefer to feed on and around a small "disused" railtrack. It was still misty at this point but several birders went for a look at this track. I had sloped off for a pee in the mist and whilst in full throw thought I could hear a train. I later learned that the disused track was in fact used and several birders , including Malc, had almost been hit by a train!
Eventually the mist cleared and the call went out. Malc had the bird fly over his head and was on it. A sprint over shingle (not nice and knackering) ended with a very good scope view of my first Crested Lark. We were ecstatic and me and Yoda did our customary tick sound in celebration.
The bird was flighty and kept a good distance from the crowd but showed well enough for us all to see its key features. I checked the time, it was 7 ish and I knew it was a 4hr drive to Portland. I was thinking out loud when both Malc and Phil just said "You've got to go for the flycatcher!!!". This made my decision so I rounded up Yoda and Rob and off we went on our next quest!
Twitching has gone off the rails.
It was at this point when our spirits were on a high that we developed a new system for measuring levels of Dudeness. The Dude-atronometer allows birders to now put a value on types of Dude (See example below which shows you possibly the highest level!). We will now be looking at using this device at every twitch and will report back our findings in subsequent posts.
This scores a 10 on the Dude-atronometer!
So Red Bull in hand we motored off toward Portland. Were we going to make it in time for me to then get back to Shrewsbury by 4.30. Portland to Shrewsbury is just over 4 hours, we arrived in Portland at approx 11.40. This gave me about 20 minutes to see the flycatcher. My cohorts had already seen this bird a few days before but had kindly allowed my little indulgence. The crowd were looking expectant, the bird had been seen but not that often and essentially there was only a very narrow viewing angle of the apple trees the bird was using. Approx 50 birders were stood in front of a bungalow looking left into a back garden 2 doors away. The owner of the bungalow was not happy and came out to protest at us "Saddo's". Most of us ignored her, keeping our eye on the prize, I was in a panic by now as the clock in my head was ticking away but luckily for me suddenly the Collared Flycatcher flitted into the top right area of the main apple tree. It then slowly dropped downwards enough to give me a very clear view of its key ID points to be happy with what I'd seen. I turned, fled to the car and set off for home. After 698 miles we rolled up outside my house exactly at 4.29pm. My mission was complete. What a day, 2 Mega's in the bag, 2 lifers each!
However, it could've been 3 if I hadn't been limited on time as on our way back an Eastern Bonelli's Warbler was discovered on Portland Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!!! so frustrating.
