Quivering cobalt in the autumn leaves - Red-flanked Bluetail, South Landing, Flamborough Head
I WOKE UP AT 4AM TODAY, to some WhatsApp messages asking about Omani Owl. I had decided not to bother going to Flamborough Head for dawn and was intending to do some birding around Ribchester instead. Well now I was wide awake and a couple of hours away was yet another new UK bird for me, Taiga Flycatcher. It was another chance to see one, having not bothered with a bird I have seen lots of in Southeast Asia. If I am going to get to 500 at last I might as well go, right? After all, it was going to be a fine sunny autumn day in East Yorkshire and there was also a bluetail right next to the flycatcher, a bird I had not seen in the UK (or anywhere else now it’s split from its Himalayan relative), since the mould-breaking Winspit bird in October 1993. Bluetail was another one I was ‘saving until later’. Actually the last one I tried to see was in the South Landing ravine as well.
The Taiga Flycatcher was on view on and off early morning in the tall trees of the ravine and even came quite close a couple of times. Top marks to Jack Morris for spotting it on its way towards us! A very grey-and-white bird lacking any peachy tones to the breast and with an almost all dark bill, whitish eye-ring and most striking of all the coal-black uppertail coverts. It called a couple of times too, a short wren-like rattle ‘trrrt’.
Taiga Flycatcher, South Landing Flamborough - look at those black uppertail coverts!
That’s six new for me in the UK since July and all within 3 hours drive! I left the flycatcher after some very nice views, Jack thinking most folks would stick with it and we should try the bluetail while there was hardly anyone else looking. It seems that the newly-non-rarity bluetail (I can still hardly believe I’m writing this) was way more popular than the flycatcher and almost everyone clogged up the path to the whale bridge searching for it, or rather mostly chatting to their pals. It was well worth the wait and I watched it on and off for the next five hours or so. It was hyperactive most of the time, except when perching in the tall trees of the ravine, where it seemed to rest between feeding sessions. It hardly spent any time on the ground, just diving down into multi-coloured leaf litter where it blended in extremely well, almost disappearing at times. It was very difficult to photograph well with hardly any light under the still quite dense sycamore canopy and owing to the fact it did not stay still for more than a few seconds. Bizarrely the best place to watch it from was a picnic table just inside a sycamore clump, where the bluetail would regularly come within a few metres of folks sat around it!
The bluetail spent a lot of time feeding under the small sycamores by the path to the whale bridge at South Landing.
Taiga Flycatcher watchers, South Landing
Bluetail watchers to the right, Taiga Flycatcher watchers to the left, a unique east coast double!
It transpired that there was no more fitting way to spend today, watching Siberian vagrants at Flamborough, when Tony Stones told me about the passing of DIM Wallace last week. I am sure he would have loved this combination. The flycatcher and bluetail even came into contact occasionally in the ravine. DIM Wallace’s ‘Discover Birds’ book was a big influence on me when I was a child. It opened my eyes to the realistic possibility of seeing rare vagrant birds and the plates showing a selection of typical birds at places like Cley, Walberswick and of course, his beloved Flamborough, were inspirational to me.
The first time I heard of such a bird as Red-flanked Bluetail was on a trip to Norway with my scout group in 1980 when I was 14. Eddie Chapman, an ex-pat birder living in Voss showed me a photo of one caught somewhere on the coast there in the 1970s. Soon afterwards I bought Lars Jonsson’s ‘Birds of Mountain Regions’, which has a first winter bluetail on the front cover. I am glad that the alternative name ‘Orange-flanked Bush-Robin’ did not catch on! Mind you I would prefer ‘Bluestart’, like in Sweden where it is called Blåstjärt. I plan to make more effort to photograph bluetails on the east coast in autumn in future.
I guess DIM would include a bluetail on the Flamborough birds plate if Discover Birds was written now.
This lovely book is still widely available secondhand for under a fiver!