In my late teens I remember a cracking May weekend in Norfolk with the York YOC group led by a dear old friend and local birding hero Harry Hulse, sadly departed many years ago now. The wind was easterly and the skies clear, a ploughed clifftop field at Happisburgh was full of Wagtails - Pied, White, Yellow, Blue-headed and Grey-headed. Accompanying this cosmopolitan Flavafest were 2 rosy chested Red-throated Pipits, it was a fantastic treat and I've seen nothing like it in the UK since.
Yellow Wagtails are the passerine version of the large white headed gull complex but for one reason or another the spiders web of complexities and riddles in their identification just don't do it for me - aside for spring males, on aesthetics alone. Chiffs, Gulls, Golden Plover and Redpolls, yes, but Canada Geese, Stonechats and Yellow Wags - show me them but I won't linger, someone else can collect their DNA. I'm sure if my patch were some eastern med fish ponds with shores teeming with flava then it might be different but until then....
The recent BB paper and subsequent enthusiasm for identifying Eastern Yellow Wagtails has somewhat passed me by so when the variant of Blue Headed Eastern Yellow Wagtail popped up on the news feeds for Norfolk I didn't think much about it, perhaps burying my head in the sand as I didn't really know they existed. The photo's looked nice though and it was a very distinctive bird. Following the Xmas festivities we usually head to the nearest coast for a family blow out if the cobwebs, often in Yorkshire. This year we stayed in Ely so popped over for fish and chips at Hunstanton and took an afternoon walk in the Harrier infested gloom to the beach at Titchwell, where we bumped into Ade Long again with Andrew and Ben Balmford. Fortuitously, the composting mound frequented by the Wagtail was en-route and it would have been churlish not to have a peek as it strutted atop it's chosen heap.
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