Weedoms World
THERE WAS A REAL CHANCE OF A LONGRANGE TWITCH... I WAS THERE AT 6AM
Mike Weedon is a lover of all wildlife, a local bird ‘year lister’, and a keen photographer, around his home city of Peterborough, where he lives with his wife, Jo, and children, Jasmine and Eddie. You can see his photos at weedworld. blogspot.com
Like with last year’s Lammergeier, Mike is prepared to travel from home to see really big, rare birds... like an albatross!
Ihave seen albatrosses before. But not in the UK, nor even the Northern Hemisphere. In my previous life, before Bird Watching, I delivered a talk on the skeletal ultrastructure of cyclostome bryozoans (yes, really) at the 10th International Bryzoology Association conference in Wellington, New Zealand (January 1995). My lasting memory of the conference is fielding questions at the end of my talk and, after I gave one answer, hearing a loud “Bullsh*t!” from one of the senior Kiwi conference hosts. After the meeting, I headed off with three colleagues for a few weeks’ field work (collecting fossil and living bryozoans [look them up!]), mainly in the South Island.
I found New Zealand’s land birds underwhelming (too many introduced European species). But the seabirds were something else! My first taste came on the ferry across the Cook Strait. There were giant petrels, shearwaters, petrels, prions and even skuas. My second was on a boat trip off the Otago peninsula, with the aim of trawling up some invertebrates (particularly bryozoans) from the sea bed using a simple, effective device called an Agassiz trawl (a sort of evil dredge with a net which crudely ploughs along the sea floor!).
Naturally, a small trawling ship not too far offshore attracted hungry seabirds. Hundreds of them, most of which I hadn’t a clue as to their ID (I was poorly armed with respect to field guides). There were Cape Petrels and White-chinned Petrels (I believe) and all sorts of other tubenoses, including Black-browed Albatrosses and one or two other albatrosses, including a few spectacularly huge Royal Albatrosses, presumably straight out of the Otago colony.
New Zealanders have an odd way of talking about albatrosses. They only seem to go in for using the A word for the really enormous ones: Royal and Wandering. Everything else is almost disparagingly dismissed as a ‘mollymawk’.
We are not so fussy up here in the mid latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, where albatrosses of any type are extremely rare. They are so rare and so conveniently big that individuals can often be tracked, sometimes for years. Most famous of all was Albert Ross, a Black-browed Albatross (the most ‘frequent’ species seen this far north) which returned to the same cliff at Hermaness, Shetland, to sit on its nest (yes, it made a nest), nearly every year between 1972 and 1995 (the year I visited New Zealand). And Albert was likely to be the same bird which had previously made the gannetry at Bass Rock (in the Firth of Forth) its home, in the late 1960s.
A good proportion of more mature British listers paid a visit to the northern Unst seabird city in the far north of the UK to see Albert sitting there among the Gannets, not doing much. And since those days, rare albatross sightings have been for the lucky few, usually seen ‘by accident’ on seawatches and very rare and extremely gripping for the rest of us. One did turn up on the cliffs of the remote Scottish island of Sula Sgeir for a couple of years in the mid noughties (perhaps even being Albert).
In October 2016, an immature Black-browed Albatross was reported flying past East Yorkshire coastal sites, such as Flamborough Head and Bempton Cliffs RSPB. In May and September 2017, an adult BbA was back off Bempton for brief visits (presumably the same bird also seen in northern Germany, near the Danish border, off and on for a few years).
Early last July, that Black-browed Albatross was seen sitting on the Bempton cliffs from the New Roll-up viewpoint. Brilliant photos were taken by birders in the area at the time, but it was tough/impossible to ‘twitch’ for those from further afield. But this year, things have been different! The latter-day ‘Albert’ was seen off Bempton Cliffs on 28 June; and landed on those same cliffs as in 2020, on 29 June, seemingly going to roost there. There was a real chance of a long-range twitch!
I was there at the top of those cliffs in the chilling northern mizzle of 6am on 30 June, with not a sniff of an albatross penetrating the glorious seabird city stench. But at 7.20am, everything changed.
Albert was still there. He flew around, He perched on the cliff among the Gannets. He sheared the waves; and preened on the sea. He shrugged off ‘tiny’ Herring Gulls. He performed. He was majestic. I would never be as disrespectful as to call it a mere ‘mollymawk’. I’ve seen an albatross. The albatross. Superb. No bullsh*t!