Unlike the Blog Post title, I'm writing this four months after the urgent need to head to North Wales. The forecast for the Sunday was for a strong June South Westerly and I headed to the Durlston seawatching hide. I arrived to find that local Birders Phil and Rob had beaten me to the hide and they confirmed there were a few Balearics in amongst the couple of hundred Manx Shearwaters that had already passed West. At this time of year, Manx Shearwaters are often passing in much smaller numbers along the Purbeck coast during the early morning or late evening. This was an impressive movement. It wasn't long before I had added my first Balearic Shearwaters to my Purbeck Year List. Later in the morning, we were joined by Ian and Andy. The Shearwater movement was still going as lunchtime approached by which time, I had seen nearly eight hundred Manx Shearwaters and fifteen Balearic Shearwaters: both of which were my highest Purbeck seawatch totals. Surprisingly, forty-three Common Terns also heading West were the only other species of note.
By late morning I was wondering about lunch, when Phil's phone pinged. He turned to me and showed me a photo of a dark morph Western Reef Heron and said North Wales. He had my full attention, until I turned to RBA for details. This new species for the UK was showing on the Foryd Bay, a stone's throw from Caernarfon. I knew it would be a six to seven hour drive, plus I would need fifteen minutes to walk back to the car. I rang Pete Moore and gave him the heads up that he would be missing his Sunday evening dinner as I would be picking him up in about an hour. He agreed that it was a meal worth missing. I dashed home, had a quick lunch whilst making hot drinks for the journey and picked Pete up about 12:30. It all started badly when we hit a really bad traffic jam in nearly Poole. It seems all the locals had thought the crappy weather was perfect for a lunchtime shopping trip to the large Tesco store. Fortunately, the roads weren't too bad after that for the rest of the journey.
As we got close, Pete was chatting to his pal Bradders to fine tune the local directions to where the Western Reef Heron was showing. It was down a narrow lane where a few cars were trying to leave. Being Birders most appreciated the urgency of our arrival and kindly pulled over to allow me through. I was mentally noting each of the limited number of potential parking spaces as we got closer. In the end, I managed to pull up right next to the crowd where Bradders was. Frustratingly, we got out to the news it had just flown up the estuary and out of sight. Bradders was able to show us roughly where he thought it had ended up and within a few minutes we were heading back down the narrow lane. After ten minutes of winding roads, we reached the estuary again and found three cars of Birders looking. I stopped and after a seven point on the narrow road, the car was ready for a quick return, in case the Western Reef Heron reappeared at its original location. Unfortunately, there was no sign of the Heron, after searching all the obvious gullies on the low tide. Bradders appeared and briefly pulled over to say he thought it had gone further up the estuary and he would move on and ring it they relocated it. A few minutes later, Pete's phone rang, which was good news, apart from I needed another five-point turn of the car. We quickly joined Bradders and a couple of other cars of Birders enjoying the Western Reef Heron. The other good news was it was a lot closer than where they had been watching it at the previous site.
I finally returned home about 03:30 the following morning. At least I could have a lazy day, before the packing and preparation for the three week trip from Holland to and around Svalbard and my early hours of the morning departure for Heathrow on the Wednesday. It was good to finally connect with a pukka-looking Western Reef Heron, having chased a couple of claimed white individuals in Devon and Christchurch back in the 1980s, both of which were later reidentified as Little Egrets.
