Another weekend in Fife

Inevitably the Wryneck I missed during the week ended up staying until the weekend. I say inevitably because on Friday evening I left London and came up to Scotland again to enjoy some autumn birding in Fife. On Saturday morning I woke up to two things.

1) An impenetrable haar covering the entire Kingdom of Fife.

2) Innumerable WhatsApp messages from Wanstead telling of Pied Flycatchers, Tree Pipits, Wheatears, Whinchats, Redstarts, and of course a long-staying Wryneck.

Excellent. It is an oft-encountered phenomenon whereby birders want to be in several places simultaneously. One permutation of this is wanting to be everywhere on the patch at first light, being able to see all the ponds in those crucial first few moments before all the waders fly off. Another is wanting to be at several sites first thing but instead having to choose just one. And for me it’s countries…. Not really. But at the beginning of this year I made the conscious decision to ensure I would be in Fife for some of the best dates in the autumn calendar. Obviously this would ideally mean spending the whole of August, September and October up here, but I was limited to a handful of long weekends. The first, over the August Bank Holiday, coincided with what I hoped would be peak sea-watching conditions. Naturally it was sunny westerlies and I saw very little. This past weekend was for more seawatching and the possibility of the first autumn rarities. For most of the weekend I couldn’t even see the sea and the fog was as far inland as my parents’ village. I also knew when I booked that I might miss out on some good local patch birding, and of course this is exactly what happened – this trip to Fife coincided almost perfectly with a Wanstead Wryneck, a bird we get perhaps every two years. I wondered briefly about the involvement of the Birding Gods. Then again I am glad I am not so terrified of missing a Wanstead year tick that I never go anywhere, but I admit to being a bit peeved. It could be worse though, just imagine if someone found, oh I don’t know, a roosting Nightjar or something.

Letham

Despite the crappy weather I ended up having a decent weekend. On Saturday afternoon the fog finally lifted at about 4pm to leave the Eden Estuary bathed in simply beautiful sunlight, a rising tide pushing hundreds of waders towards the hide. Mostly these were Lapwing and Redshank, but amongst the throng were five Curlew Sandpipers and a Ruff, whilst two Ospreys sat on posts a little further out. Earlier on I’d seen two juvenile Spotted Redshanks and also obliterated my previous high count of Little Egret with 31. As the afternoon progressed to evening I tried Fife Ness in the hope that if St Andrews was clear then maybe Crail would be as well. Crail was indeed clear, but just down the road at Fife Ness you still couldn’t see in front of your face. Instead I spent the final hour of light at Cameron Reservoir, a nice site that I don’t often get to. From the dam and in the same lovely light as Guardbridge I picked up a Short-eared Owl quartering and a group of three Spotted Flycatchers – presumably local breeders as this species is scarce in Fife and I’ve had them here before. A nice way to finish what had been a largely frustrating day.

Fife Ness

The following day was still fogged in but it seemed to be patchier. I initially thought about heading to Pettycur to see if I could see into the Forth, but at the crucial roundabout turned the opposite way and headed for Letham again, easily my favourite local site even though the water levels are useless this year. As I drove through Freuchie I emerged from the haar into a clear landscape and for an unknown reason decided to go and check out Angle Park GP, a site I only rarely visit. Perhaps the Birding Gods were somehow involved once more as the first bird I set eyes upon was a Great White Egret having a preen in the middle of the shallow part. Bingo! This was a Fife tick, and whilst it can’t be said to be an especially rare bird anywhere these days it was probably the best bird I’ve ever found in Fife. Except for that Ring-necked Parakeet over the garden a couple of years ago obviously. I put the news out quickly but the bird managed to do a runner without me noticing before the first person had even managed to get there. Just as Simon arrived it flew black in, talk about timing, but in the seconds between him getting out of his car and walking to where you could view from it disappeared into an invisible and inaccessible part of the lake. All’s well that ends well though, as about half an hour later it popped up again in some trees before flopping down into exactly the same place in the lake that it had been when I arrived.

Angle Park

I birded a couple of other local sites – Letham and Lindores – before a message about a Wryneck at Fife Ness lured me over to the east coast. Fife Ness was still in a cloud of sorts and the Wryneck had disappeared by the time I got there, so after a short and unsuccessful stake-out I had a mooch around nearby Kilminning for a bit in the hope that I might find another nice migrant or the Wryneck might pop up again. The former did not happen but the latter duly did, and this time I got it. Another Fife tick, and apparently the first away from Isle of May for a decade or so. So yeah I missed the Wanstead bird but seeing one in Fife is definitely far better from my perspective. And a Scottish tick for good measure.

Phone-scoping is one of my specialist disciplines

The weekend had one more gift to give, and this time it was from the sea, which had become visible for the first time in two days. This was a Roseate Tern for my third Fife tick of the day. To my great fortune I had been joined in the hide by Ken S, a Fife birding legend and finder of a silly numbers of rarities over the years, including the earlier Wryneck just up the track. You know how some sea-watchers have been doing it for so long that where you see dots they see specific features that enable them not only to ID a bird but age it as well? Well it was like that, just phenomenal. Better than that though, with only he and in the hide I got a one-on-one sea-watching lesson as to why these dots were adult Little Gulls, why the one behind it was a juv, that these ones were Common Terns, and why this one in with them was an adult Roseate Tern. And it did actually make sense, and whilst the range was at times really quite extreme, with time you could zone in on the black underwings of the Little Gulls, and you could see that one Tern was clearly much lighter than the others as it dipped over and under the horizon. Get in! I can only hope that some of this kindly imparted knowledge sticks as I do really enjoy sea-watching and wish I was better at it. And that I had more opportunities to do it - a self-fulfilling prophecy as the only way to get good at sea-watching is to go sea-watching.

So that was my weekend, during which I also managed to top 150 species in Fife for the year which I've never done before. I am as you know a big fan of round numbers. Of course come Monday morning the haar had vanished and various Fife birders had a nice session at Fife Ness with Poms and so on, but I can’t get over there and be back in time for work to make it worthwhile as it’s a 1h20 round trip. Instead I went back to Angle Park where the GWE was still present, and then spent half an hour at Letham not seeing a great deal of interest and getting quite cold in the process. The foggy weekend seemed to mark the progression of the seasons as it is distinctly chillier this morning, as also foretold by an influx of southbound Pink-footed Geese. I have one more autumn trip up here lined up, and then it will be back to winter birding, which in Fife is good to excellent.