Sunday 12 May 2019

12th May

I took a foray out of the parish today to go and look for a couple of Yorkshire rarities. I very rarely go twitching these days but I do keep my Yorkshire bird list active so the chance of adding species number 359 and 360 to my county list was too tempting. These should have been a Brown Shrike and a Collared Flycatcher which were both seen on the Holderness coast yesterday. So an early start with Frank and we were over on Cowden Ranges by 7am but to cut a long story short the birds had flown. In fact every rare/scarce bird on the east coast seemed to have cleared out overnight!
A fruitless search did at least turn up a Barn Owl which flew right over our heads, a Cuckoo and an astonishing density of singing warblers including half a dozen Cetti’s and huge numbers of Whitethroats…


Later, back home I went with my botanist friend Helen to look for Green-winged Orchids at a lovely site near Leyburn….


Beautiful plants…



Particularly this single white-variant we found…


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