Make It Easy On Yourself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DirmGKf8Ndo&app=desktop

A few days of easterly airflow preceeded a trip to the coast where we met up with Rich Baines and Jo Ruth for a family catch up.  Wells was a good choice with a bracing walk, beach for the kids, a cafe and a bit of passive birding to enjoy.  Just around The Dell a young Red-backed Shrike, all rich browns and gingers was hawking beetles from the field edge and fence line.  Although close, everytime I tried to film it the reeds just got in the way - I gave it up as a bad job.  

There was general excitement as we got regular updates from Jono about the Humpback Whales he was watching off the Great Cape, Flamborough Head - Rich's company Yorkshire Coast Nature pioneering the increasingly popular Whale watching trips off the Yorkshire coast.

On the beach we had a ludicrously speculative gaze at the sea and pottered.  Me and Rich gave ourselves quarter of an hour to find the Red-breasted Flycatcher which we did, pretty pronto, and enjoyed some good views.

Ice Creams and play parks beckoned, I picked up the original "Firsts for Britain" Poyser - for a price and checked the Starlings optomistically.  We ambled back down the seawall having had a very relaxed non-birding, birdy day.  We'd made it easy on ourselves.

So I went and spoilt it a bit.  After we'd said bye to Rich and Jo I left the family to get fish and chips and twitched down to Warham Greens where I just about saw the Brown Shrike, from below, in silhoutte roosting up in the centre of a hawthorn and a much better Pied Flycatcher flicking down the lane in the gathering gloom.  

MothErf

 With the Summer nearing an end, there is time to set up the moth trap to see what's still flying in the lengthening night. My previous forays into this moreish pastime yielded nothing much of interest - but at last I managed a catch of epic proportions. Here's a list of what I found lurking under the egg-boxes in the dewy morning........

Pungent Right Angle

Deflater

Migrant Savage

Crimson Tide

June Emanation

Blatant Dangler

Extremist

Ruddy Hole

Mrs Artichoke's Bosum

The Strangler

Early Doors

Ingrown

Doosra

Scarce Doosra

Pale Shitstorm

Shiny Melons

Coin Purse

Blunt Finger

Marxist Dialectic

Shady Merchant

Autumn Racist

not to mention a Greater Hedge Sedge, a Lesser Sedge Midge and three French Crickets.

What an unbelievable haul.

Long Lunch

A freshly moulted Chiffchaff sparkled in the tangle of bare twigs, calling and twitching in the sunlight. Great tit's chatter, unseen somewhere in the hedge. Looking through the bramble fountain that has been slowly drowning the Elder bush for the last few years, I noticed the movement of a larger bird. Moving to a different window, where the angle afforded a clearer view, the young Sparrowhawk apprehensively stripped a Goldfinch until the unfortunate gilt edged soul was bereft of its essence. Sans wings, sans head, sans tail, sans feathers, sans life.