After driving coast-to-coast Filey to Morecambe yesterday and delivering a talk for the good people of Lancaster & District Birdwatching Society last night (thanks for coming everyone), today I was due to drive to Snowdonia for a talk at Plas Y Brenin National Mountain Centre - but as anyone who's in the UK presently knows, the forecasts and subsequent conditions put paid to that....
... and so esteemed local birder, musician and raconteur Dan - not content with putting me up - offered to take me birding locally by way of consolation, and some consolation it was.
With temperatures around zero and heavy rain turning to snow, and in turn to sleet (and repeat), it was a day for in- or by-car birding, and we checked plenty of local sites, all seemingly full of birds - wildfowl and waders being especially numerous. Swan-worshipping was a priority, and so we crawled along single-track lanes winding through the farmland around Cockersand, coming across more and more Whoopers in larger and closer flocks as we did so - and after pulling over to check a particularly close flock of around 60 Whoopers and a few Mutes, we hit the jackpot with eleven beautiful Bewick's.
It's been a long time since I've seen Bewick's (two in off the sea at Filey four or five years ago), and we lapped up the show through the snow as they entertained us in the presence of three other related taxa (a Black Swan wandering into view on the other side of the road). All well and good, until I turned the ignition, and.... nothing.
Which is where, frankly, this post - and the week - could have taken a terminal turn for the worse; a .... car in heavy snow and rain, and with long drives in tough conditions ahead, wasn't a great option. But within 45 minutes, the mercifully fixable obstacle of a dead battery that should've been replaced years ago was dispatched and replaced by the lovely AA man, who sorted us out while talking natural history with the swans (literally) looking on.
Add on five figures of Pink-feet, thousands of Golden Plovers and Lapwings and an array of other common wildfowl and wader action, and what could have been a memorably bad day was very much the polar opposite.
