The Pensarn Hoopoe : 22nd December 2013
Hoopoe Pensarn December 2013
I had been looking at the presence of this bird at Pensarn for quite some time on the bird alert services, Rare Bird Alert and Rare Bird Network, the latter of which I now access via Twitter. Both had been showing the bird for weeks after it had presumably been blown off its migratory journey to Africa due to very bad weather – it had landed at Castle Cove Caravan Park in Pensarn near Abergele where it seems to have been roosting under a caravan. The caravan is almost entirely unoccupied in winter so there isn’t much disturbance and the bird has been feeding quite well during its unscheduled stay.The worry is, of course, that it will not be able to get back on course and when the winter sets in and the ground freezes it is going to find it hard to feed. It may need to be rescued before it dies. With very high winds the day we went, and more to come, it is remotely possible that it could get back on track – but hard to imagine. In any case, for the moment it is doing well.
Finding the bird was not at all easy for us though some days it happily shows well for all and sundry. We went on a Sunday so we were expecting a lot of birders but this close to Christmas and with a lot of birders having already seen it perhaps it was to be expected that it would be a little quiet. Be that as it may we ran into several other birders all with the same idea as us; to see this rarity – especially rare this far north and certainly this late in the year.
We came off the North Wales Expressway at the A547 to Abergele. At Abergele we turned right onto the A547 (Dundonald Avenue). There is a roundabout at the bottom and you take the second exit which is a road that rises uphill and over the railway line. If you turn left at the bottom you come to a big car park and the amazingly welcome “Pantri Bach Shop and Cafe” which had good food at low prices – and toilets ! We parked up and availed ourselves of a mug of tea and some hot food before starting our search.
We started walking down the road from the cafe towards the caravan park but we returned to the car because there is plenty of parking on the verges opposite the caravan park. We drove down the promenade road and bore right (make sure you do not go up Sea Road – this takes you back into town) down the track to the caravan park. This is a public road that eventually turns into a foot and cycle path that you can walk down at least as far as Llanddulas. Along the sea wall there are various ramps leading up to viewing platforms and from here we could both sea watch and scan the caravan park for any appearance of our target bird. There were a few birders here but none had seen the bird yet.
By this time it was around 11.30am. Infuriatingly I saw a posting later in the day saying that the bird had been seen at 11.15am. As the morning wore on we all formed a zombie horde of birders slowly walking up and down the verge by the caravan park scrutinizing every caravan for traces of our bird. We did spend a little time sea watching but the winds were so strong (and arctic) that my scope was always threatening to blown over even though it was weighted down. We did have good views of a couple of pairs of Scaup relatiively close to the land and in the distance there were hundreds (if not thousands) of Common Scoter. They were to far away to see if any of them were Surf Scoters as some had reported. As we got to nearly high tide and with no sign of our Hoopoe, we took a quick drive to Llandulas , which is only a couple of miles away, to see what was on the water there. Unfortunately it was similar to Pensarn with a mass of Common Scoters a long way out. One ray of hope emerged when I saw a group of four birds flying fast and close together out towards sea. They looked a bit like Cormorants but were white under their necks and right down to their bellies. My thought at the time was that they were Red-throated Divers but because they were so far away I couldn’t be 100% certain. I wish there had been an experienced sea watcher around to check with. When I got back home I looked up some videos of Red-throated Divers flying and I convinced myself even more. Unfortunately I had already mentally excluded them as not certain enough.
Anyway, we decided to return to Pensarn. We had another look for the Hoopoe but to no avail. Nobody had seen it. While we were standing around a guy came up to us and introduced himself as the person who had first seen the bird weeks before. He worked for the council and travelled down this road every day so he had seen it many times already. He advised us that we were a little out of position and that we should really be looking in the area of the eleventh static caravan past the caravan parks own cafe (which is closed for winter of course) so we counted out caravans until we were standing looking at caravan N27. As it happened, we did not have much luck here either and so we decided to go for a cup of tea before returning for one last look.
This we did but on our return to the location there was still no sight of the bird. We decided that it was time to call it a day and we were slowly driving back down the road between the caravan park and the sea wall when we saw one of the chaps we had been speaking to earlier gesticulating wildly with his arms. We could not figure out what he was trying to convey to us so we pulled up next to him and he rather breathlessly informed us that the Hoopoe was on the other side of the sea wall. It was too high at that point for me to climb up it so I ran to the nearest ramp and as I started walking along the wall it flew up and over the wall and crossed over to the caravan park. It then flew down the road a bit so we turned around and drove down to the next ramp. When we got up the ramp there were a few birders watching the Hoopoe as it fed again on the sea side of the sea wall. After a short while it flew back over the wall and started feeding on the grass verge in front of us but at a little distance. I tried to get a half-decent photo of the bird but as can be seen above I didn’t manage. It was getting dark and light levels were too low; I had to ramp up the ISO and even then the shutter speed remained too slow.
Anyway, we watched the bird for about twenty minutes as other birders came and went. Suddenly it was done and nobody knew quite where. We were happy enough to have at least seen the bird at last. It was a typical case of just having one last look. I figured that if had had eaten at 11am it would have to eat again before dark and so it did, managing to extract a good number of worms as we watched, apparently unconcerned at the attention.
How we got there