I'll keep this short. On the evening of Wednesday 19th June news came through that the very long staying Channel Islands American Royal Tern had finally crossed into England and was roosting on the tern island in Pagham Harbour, Sussex, and present until dusk.
A simple plan was hatched an so I drove overnight with Mark Sutton, Al Orton and Malc Curtin to be there before dawn. Everyone knows terns head out to feed early so a pre-dawn arrival was paramount.
Sadly we cocked it up, setting the satnav with the postcode, this took us to the wrong side of the harbour and necessitated a 15 mile / 20 minute retrace of our steps. In those valuable minutes it got light enough to see, the bird was showing initially but as predicted rapidly pissed-off out to sea minutes before our arrival. We hung around until lunchtime but predictably it didn't return, in fact that evening it was seen 75 miles further west in Dorset.
The Little Terns, Med gulls and so on did nothing to help lighten the mood. At least for me this was only an upgrade, having seen the Gwynedd Royal Tern in 2009. As such the twitch was a pre-empt of a potential future split where American and African Royal Terns will be classified as distinct. The 2009 bird was widely considered to be African, but in all likelihood will probably never be fully assigned.
As this year's bird has been around Guernsey since February 2017, so there's perhaps chance it will reappear yet.
Only ourselves to blame. Amateurs.
No comments:
Post a Comment