Pied Wheatear, just in time on Meols, Cheshire

Video footage taken

Pied Wheatear

Concept shot of how close bird was

Sometimes even closer

Staring at the audience

It was great to see wind blow the feathers of our eastern visitor

Sea Wall & Pied Wheatear

Look at those tail feathers

Side on shot

Down on Station road

Thumbs up for a good day

Rounded off with a drop of the good stuff

It's certainly been an excellent Autumn for seeing an amazing variation of birds. I was a tad disappointed that the first winter Pied Wheatear found at the top of the Wirral wasn't twitchable on the Sunday as it was too late to get there with it getting dark much earlier. The chances of it sticking seemed limited however as the days past the bird appeared to be quite settled giving us hope we may be able to see it. I had a crazy week with photography shoots at work which was to be followed by a weekend away in Devon, going Friday was the only real option.

We waited for news before setting out in the Rollymobile with Chris & the Squire. Heading to the North West is never easy but despite a few 50 mph limits we made good time. As we turned onto the sea front in the car, we could actually see the bird on the sea wall. That's definitely the first lifer I've recorded from the car.

This species of Wheatear breeds on high plateaus in eastern europe and migrates to east Africa over Jordan generally. I'm sure it got quite a shock when it heard the local scouse accents. Two locals on horses stopped and shouted "what the el is that" in their thick accents to offer some humour to the cold biting wind. How these birds make such journeys is quite unbelievable, this specices only weighs 16-20 grammes. 

The bird showed ridiculously well and very often seemed to take extra interest in looking at its admirers when someone else new arrived. Apparently the previous day the bird had been fed meal worms but there was no evidence of this during our visit.

Since I've been interested in rarer birds I can only remember one of these bird being twitchable & that was a good number of years ago, so we were all very pleased to connect successfully. The timing of our visit couldn't have been any better as the bird departed that evening to leave many weekend twitchers disappointed.

We headed down to RSPB Burton Mere where we added a few species on the day list including Marsh Harrier, Kestrel, Stonechat, Black-tailed Godwit, Great White Egret but with the weather closing in and the threat of Friday traffic he headed off back down the M6 having had a very good day indeed.