It’s been three years since I was in the UK and even longer since I managed to bird with Steve Young, the mate who got me into this hobby in the first place. I was keen to get some birding in during my abbreviated sabbatical visit to the UK in June/July, and Steve and I discussed a few options for a short foreign trip of a few days in the week after my arrival in UK. In the end though, nightmare stories about UK airports and domestic issues for Steve meant we decided that although we would try to get away, we’d stay in England.
My thoughts almost immediately turned to the Farne Islands, off the north-east coast of the country. These small islands are seabird heaven, and world famous as one of the two or three best places to see everyone’s favourite, Atlantic Puffin. My only proper encounter with Puffins had been on Skomer in May 2002, back in film days. In 18 years birding in England I had never been to the Farnes. Even more surprising, in 45 years or more, neither had Steve.
A couple of days after arriving in Britain, I travelled down to Devon to see Steve and Penny at their gorgeous, sympathetically renovated house on Dartmoor. Over a few beers in the garden on a sunny Sunday afternoon we solidified our plan. It would involve a lot of driving, but no passports.
An early rise at Steve’s place was necessary to ensure we would avoid peak hour on the motorways in the midlands (I have not missed English traffic one bit in the last decade) and arrive north of Newcastle at a reasonable hour. Thus, bleary-eyed but keen for a road-trip we loaded ourselves and our optics into Steve’s Landrover at approx 3.30am and wended our way through the Devon lanes to the A38 (a young Badger part ran, part waddled its way in front of the Landrover for a while until it found a suitable gap in the hedge), then into “cruise control” as we took turns at the wheel on the M5, M1, A1M, etc. Around midday we pulled up at a viewpoint looking across to Coquet Island, site of Britain’s only breeding Roseate Tern colony.
It would have been great to get on a boat to cruise around the island, but we found out too late that the sole operator takes only 12 passengers at a time and was fully booked for the entire period we would be in the north-east. Instead we viewed with scopes, but still enjoyed the spectacle of 1000s of distant seabirds — mainly Puffins, Arctic Terns and Sandwich Terns, and a few Eider bobbing on the surface and hauled up on some smaller reefs. Unsurprisingly we failed to find a Roseate. It was heart-breaking to learn later that avian flu ripped through the Sandwich and Roseate colonies reducing breeding success to almost zero (see article here). It remains to be seen whether the Roseate colony, which was only about a hundred pairs strong, will survive.
It’s another 3/4 hour drive north of here to Bamburgh, where we were booked on a 2pm cruise with Billy Shiel’s Boat Trips that would take us around the islands and include a landing on Inner Farne. We were packed like sardines onto the boat — maybe 40 of us, mostly non-birders, judging by attire and lack of optics — with barely room to swivel, let alone move around for photography as I would be used to on an Australian pelagic trip. Nevertheless this trip was the amazing highlight we hoped it would be.
An estimated 200,000 seabirds breed here, including 30,000 pairs of Common Guillemot, 30,000 pairs of Puffins, 500 pairs of Razorbill, 1000s Black-legged Kittiwake and European Shag, Northern Fulmar, and 100s Arctic Terns, as well as Common and Sandwich Tern and bigger gulls such as Herring and Lesser Black-backed. Almost as soon as we left the quaint little harbour at Bamburgh we had auks skimming the glassy water’s surface as they flapped their way away from the boat’s bows. Then, 20 mins later as we approached the islands, the sheer spectacle — sights, sounds and smells — of 100,000s of seabirds roosting on the cliffs and wheeling around the cliff-tops took my mind off the claustrophobia of the tightly packed tiny vessel.
We lingered alongside various cliffs where we were able to pick out and start to photograph some of the specialties — Common Guillemot, Black-legged Kittiwake, Northern Fulmar, even some high-up, distant Puffins — then cruised around to the seaward side of one of the islands for a closer look at the seal colony (keeping the majority non-birders sweet).
Finally, at around 3.30pm we pulled alongside the small jetty on Inner Farne and were able to disembark. The next hour was one of the great birding experiences for its proximity to photogenic species like Puffins, Razorbills and Arctic Terns. The boardwalk has nesting Arctic Terns on either side, and they swoop punters to warn them away from the nests. We were grateful for the hats we had been advised to wear and even so I managed to get pecked on my ear. Once or twice a tern even landed on a tourist’s head!
My only previous up-close experience with Puffins had been on Skomer many years previous and that was in May, before the birds were feeding chicks. Like that occasion 20 years ago, Puffins here on Inner Farne dotted the cliff-tops and scurried to their burrows, but now in late-June their beaks were filled with Sand-eels, making for the “quintessential” image of a smart black-and-white bird with a gaudy clown-like beak filled with an unfeasible number of floppy, silver fish dangling over the sides. I even spent time testing the autofocus of the R6, trying for flight pictures of one such bird returning from its fishing grounds.
Of course the Puffins were not the only auk here, and I also tried for some reasonable photos of Guillemots and Razorbills, as well as some of the other Inner Farne inhabitants. Fancy a Shag? There were several here on the cliff-tops.
We could have spent a lot longer here, but the trip allows for only one hour, so at 4.30 or so we re-boarded and chuntered back to the high-walled harbour. Two weeks after our trip the National Trust closed the islands to visitors as a precaution about avian flu, so we’d scheduled it in the nick of time (article here).
We’d not booked any accommodation prior to travelling, expecting to be able to find a comfortable, cheapish pub or B&B. Despite the fact that school holidays had not yet started, to our surprise it proved very difficult to find anything — I guess that many other Brits were, like us, discouraged from international travel to Europe, had decided to explore their own back yard. I’d never visited the north-east before but the coast-line was beautiful, and dotted with exquisite villages, joined by scenic, windswept coastal paths and overseen by imposing castles like Bamburgh, Lindisfarne and Alnwick and that once provided protection from viking raids. As we drove past one particularly exquisite coastal town, Alnmouth, Steve pointed it out and mused it would be an ideal base. By coincidence I just happened to be looking at the Red Lion in Alnmouth at precisely that moment and amazingly it had limited availability for tonight. We took it to be a sign, so even though the rooms were getting on for twice as much as I had been hoping to pay, we booked it immediately online. Once the boat trip was over we drove south to the pub, set up in our very comfortable rooms, walked around the village, then found a cosy nook by the bar to eat, drink and reflect on a long but superb day.
Instead of an early start we both agreed to a relative lie in followed by the full English breakfast that our room tariff included. Once that was sorted we drove south again to Amble where we hoped to blagg our way onto the Coquet boat trip via a cancellation or just our sweet nature and good humour. Annoyingly we got there in time to see the 9am trip returning with only about 7-8 punters on board, and the realisation that forfeiting the breakfast would have given us the crack at Roseate Tern we’s craved. Sigh.
Next stop was just a few miles south at Hauxley Nature Reserve, where ebird records showed that Willow Tit had recently been seen. I ticked off Willow Tit as a fairly naive and inexperienced birder in the late 90s when I was unaware how scarce it is in Oxfordshire (and many other parts of the country). Back then I was probably stringing Marsh Tit, but I was also unwilling to untick my late 90s sighting until I had a better one! We spent about 3 hours here, grilling various feeders and walking to to the Willow Carr, an area the wardens suggested was our best bet. In the end I picked up a likely candidate in a hedge mid-way between the Willow Carr and Skua Hide, and we grilled it with bins and cameras until we were satisfied with the ID. Only once we were 95% satisfied with visual ID did it do the decent thing and call, instantly elevating the ID to 100% unequivocal. Later, as we returned from a memorable encounter with a day-time Barn Owl on the western side of the reserve, we found another.
The weather was gorgeous and our “Best of the north-east” itinerary now had us heading inland to the north Pennines for some moorland birding. After a longer-than-expected stop in Hexham to get some supplies (in particular, beer) for an evening on the moor, we made our way up into the North Pennines AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). Straight away we heard the quintessential sound of the moors, Curlew singing their haunting, slightly mournful song. Likewise we found several Northern Lapwing and a few Red Grouse, poking their heads above the heather.
Once again we had no accommodation lined up, but en route Steve was able to secure us a couple of rooms at the Golden Lion in St John’s Chapel. Despite the name, this was actually a step down from it’s Red namesake in Alnmouth, in quality but also in price! It was ideally situated for us, being just a few km north-east of our key destination for the evening, moorland nearby that we hoped would be good for Black Grouse. After dumping gear in rooms and agreeing a late dinner with the publican, we set off towards a couple of spots near Langdon Beck where our intel suggested we should scan.
It was warm and there was a golden evening light as we enjoyed the moorland sounds, drank our ales and scanned from the road. It was not very long before we noticed a couple of male Black Grouse loafing about in a field a few hundred metres away near the bottom of the valley. They weren’t doing much, but then we’d not expected them to be doing much. In the end we counted about 10, and decided to return the next morning.
Back at the pub our late evening meals were rather better than we’d been expecting, and a quick walk through the village yielded nice naked-eye views in the fading light of a Tawny Owl in the churchyard (if you look carefully you can see it atop a gravestone in the picture above). I regretted not bringing bins or camera, but it was a cracking end to another excellent day.
The next morning we returned to the same spot and were delighted to see the grouse were still loafing about in the same area. As we exited the car carefully, one much closer flushed and flew down to join the others. Initially I was privately berating myself, until we realised that the arrival of this bird set them off into a “semi-lek”. At no point did we see a full-on spring version with many birds going for it simultaneously, but we did several of the birds with their tails fluffed up, strutting around, occasionally popping or confronting each other, and the atmospheric, distinctive bubbling of the males drifted up over the moors to our ears. Curlews sang and made display flights almost continuously, Lapwings defended their territories (and small chicks), and some Meadow Pipits posed rather nicely in the lovely morning light. At one point a small grey raptor cruised through the scene and we were able to add a fabulous (and increasingly rare) Merlin to the trip list. What a great way to finish off our trip.
We still had another fry-up waiting for us back at the Golden Lion before we began making our way slowly south and west through the Pennines, exploring the local area a bit further. In doing so we managed to pick up a parking ticket from the money-grabbing bastards at High Force, grabbed sandwiches at Middleton then cruised up onto the moors between Middleton and Brough (where the satellite picture showed good heather coverage) to have our picnic and scan for further heather-dwelling species; we saw another Red Grouse but not much else of note. Arriving late to Oxford, we sidled down to the Bear and ragged Staff for a great meal to cap off a cracking few days that had delivered some quintessential British birding, arguably the best of the North East.
