The Winter that Wasn't

To me winter feels like a special annual occasion that nobody likes, a universally hated Christmas that people never get tired of complaining about. Everybody loves Summer, Spring is always celebrated when it arrives and Autumn’s colour is famously cherished But people do their best to avoid Winter. They either migrate (like my Grandparents who spend at least one month of every winter on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, returning the colour of a mahogany coffee table) or stay indoors with the heating turned up and using so much energy that they may as well be fuelling they’re central heating with polar ice caps. The other option is to embrace it. If you choose this tactic of getting out and exploring the winter scape then you will have a far better time than you could ever have stuffing your face with Doritos in a snuggie. 

At the start of this winter (as with every winter), I made a mental note of all the bird species that I wanted to see. These included the regulars such as Redwings, Fieldfares, Teal etc, to birds I’d never seen before like Firecrest and Brambling. It started off well with Redwing and Fieldfare being ticked off with relative ease as normal. Teal, Wigeon and Goldeneye all soon followed and everything was looking good. 

And then came the Waxwing reports. They were everywhere. Websites were overloaded with birdwatchers posting about their waxwing sightings. In car parks, in cities, it was like an invasion. The country was drowning in Waxwings. Flocks so large they’d topple trees and darken the skies when they flew over. It wasn’t so much a migration as an epidemic. The United Nations were watching closely to see whether aerial intervention needed to be supplied to cope with such a vast number of Waxwings. (Note: Some degree of truth may have been sacrificed in previous sentences.) But in all seriousness Waxwings had come to the UK in very high numbers this year. These charming birds were being seen everywhere in large flocks. I’d only ever seen them once before, years ago. I would get no better chance. 

By the time I’d got home from Leeds for Christmas in the second week in December I’d still not seen any. However just the day after returning home, Waxwings were placed firmly to the back of my mind. I got a phone call from my Grandma saying she’d been told there was a Velvet Scoter 10 minutes away in part of a quarry. After agreeing to go with my grandparents the next morning, I did a bit of recon on the intended target. It had been first seen over a week before and the last records of it still being there were 3 days ago. Since then no one had reported anything. I wasn’t hopeful. I found a YouTube video someone had taken of the bird, a first winter male, and was confident I could I identify it. I just needed it to be there…

We got there the following morning and followed the instructions to the quarry and found a small lake with water so green that the only way a Velvet Scoter would be hard to spot would be if it had covered itself in glow stick fluid and AstroTurf. Needless to say, the lake was deserted. Four days later I was asked whether I had been to see it, to which I replied that I had gone to look but that it must have left. I was then informed that it had been seen yesterday and it was soon established we had been looking at the wrong lake. There was a further lake beyond the Chernobyl Lake that we never got too, a more natural lake that wouldn’t dissolve or mutate any life that came into contact with it. Returning the next day led to the terrific views of the bird and a life tick for me. 

This successful “twitch” and its relative ease made me wonder how many more birds I’d never seen I could tick off this winter. Using one of the local bird sightings websites I’d come across when looking for information on the Scoter, I saw there had been a Firecrest sighted nearby. However after fruitless searching I gave up, conceding that looking for a sea duck on a small lake is one thing but trying to find the joint smallest bird in the UK in a dense thicket is quite another. Then I heard about a Great Northern Diver sighting and figured this would be as easy to spot as the Scoter. It wasn’t. A couple of hours getting neck ache looking for Hawfinch in Clumber Park confirmed it, my pygmy bout of winter twitching was over. But that didn’t matter, because according to every birder I spoke to I didn’t need to go searching for Waxwings. All I needed to do was scan the tops of trees as I drove along and went about life and I was guaranteed to see them so I was told. What could go wrong? 

Well it turns out not seeing any at all is what went wrong. Its mid-February so there’s still a chance but after being at University the same time a flock of Waxwing’s was and only hearing about them when I got home at night, I’ve just come to accept that the Waxwing Gods’ have it in for me. 

Sadly this isn’t my only crushing near miss of the season. There’s an even worse one that came only last Friday when I was at Harewood House. I was shown pictures of a pair of wild Smew that had been on the lake for the past week. Another bird I had never seen and an absolutely stunning one at that. Sure enough they weren’t anywhere to be seen that morning but in the afternoon I was told that they had just been seen by the same person who showed me the photographs earlier. When I got there, ONLY FIVE MINUTES LATER, the pair were nowhere to be seen. We spent about half an hour searching but to no avail. 

But I did see a Brambling. Sort of. On a walk with the local bird group our leader stopped after hearing a Brambling in the hedge we were stood next too. This caused me great excitement as I thought I was finally going to break my duck (or Brambling). Then a bird flitted out of the thicket, silhouetted against the sun and flew out of sight in about 2 seconds. Now I was told it was a Brambling, and could see it’s deeply forked tail but it wasn’t how I’d imagined my first sighting. But then I guess most first experiences aren’t how we imagine they’ll be. 

So that was my winter. While it may have been poor in terms of sightings, it was anything but poor to enjoy. 

And at least I have things to chase next year.