After a relaxing break over Christmas and New Year, last Saturday was one of the most eagerly anticipated events of the year; the Northumberland Winter Bird Race.<\/p>\n
A simple set of rules; start any time you like after midnight, teams of four (or three…or five…), three members of the team must positively identify a species for it to be counted, get to the Three Horse Shoes<\/a> between 17:00-17:30 and be ready to declare your team total at 18:00.<\/p>\n The starting point for our, vaguely planned, itinerary for the day was to be the NEWT office at 06:00.\u00a0 As Sarah opened the door at 05:45, when our other team members (NTBC<\/a> Field Trips officer Trevor, and local legend the Liverbirder<\/a>) arrived, bird #1 was added to the list as a vocal Tawny Owl<\/strong><\/em>sang his haunting melody from the churchyard opposite our house.\u00a0 #2 Barn Owl<\/strong><\/em> (the first of at least five found around dawn and dusk)joined the list as we headed north in Gordon’s car for our first ‘only one chance’ species…Red Grouse<\/strong><\/em> duly obliged and we’d made a flying start.\u00a0 Down on the coast a stunning sunrise also brought Little Egret<\/strong><\/em> for the list, as well as occasional good-natured banter with two other teams that had started in the north (including ‘The Tiddlers’) and three more hours in North Northumberland, coupled with Gordon’s local knowledge of Cramlington, which brought us a Kingfisher<\/strong><\/em> that we pointed out to several curious dog walkers, saw us reach #85 by midday.\u00a0 The afternoon proved much more testing, and some excellent birds including Smew<\/strong><\/em>, Slavonian Grebe<\/strong><\/em>, Mediterranean Gull<\/strong><\/em> and a fly-by Bittern,<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>took us to a total of 105 by the time we’d eventually given up on trying to tick Goldfinch<\/strong> <\/em>on call in the dark \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Four of the other five teams were already at the Three Horse Shoes by the time we arrived.\u00a0 Species missed were being compared and there was a general feeling that it had been a difficult day.\u00a0 We were only one species short of our best winter bird race total (achieved the last time that we didn’t have an itinerary planned to the n<\/em>th degree…) but were expecting to be somewhere round 5th out of 6 (historically we’ve been a much stronger Spring bird race team).\u00a0 With other teams declaring totals of 98, 101, 103, 104 and 108, we’d exceeded all expectations and finished 2nd, with 105 species out of a cumulative total across all 6 teams of 129 \ud83d\ude42 To put the day in context, the highest total for Northumberland in a Winter Bird Race is 126 for a single team…<\/p>\n Looking forward to early January 2014 already!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After a relaxing break over Christmas and New Year, last Saturday was one of the most eagerly anticipated events of the year; the Northumberland Winter Bird Race. A simple set of rules; start any time you like after midnight, teams of four (or three…or five…), three members of the team must positively identify a species […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9,5,141],"tags":[97,567,103,120,193,208,177,538,78],"class_list":["post-1835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birdwatching","category-druridge","category-northumberland","category-northumberland-coast","tag-barn-owl","tag-bitternlittle-egret","tag-goldfinch","tag-kingfisher","tag-mediterranean-gull","tag-red-grouse","tag-slavonian-grebe","tag-smew","tag-tawny-owl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1835"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1836,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1835\/revisions\/1836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}