Being optimistic has often paid off for me while out birding.
I learnt early on that there are rewards in making the effort despite atrocious weather conditions or being told an area is not worth visiting because ‘there’s never anything there.’
Nice surprises can happen at any time – like last November when I was habitually glancing out of the window and hit the bird alert button as an azure flash sandwiched by greenish blue whizzed by.
To make sure I had not imagined it, the Kingfisher – as far as I know the first to visit my pondless garden in 38 years – rested briefly on a branch for my granddaughter to enjoy too.
When you hit gold like that it helps make up for the many times, admittedly, when your efforts deliver scant rewards or you arrive at the site of a rare bird only to be told: ‘You should have been here five minutes ago – it’s just flown off.’
So I was not really expecting to be in on the action when early last autumn something happened across Britain that nobody had ever witnessed before. There was a huge arrival of scores of Glossy Ibis, a waterbird about the size of a Little Egret that you might expect to see in Spain or maybe a zoo.
Last century they were true rarities in Britain but have gradually been increasing. I saw one at Frensham a few years back. This time they were on the move following a population boom in south-east European countries. Perhaps dried up wetlands had also contributed to their journey north.
Glossy Ibis, which have a wingspan of a Curlew but their long legs stick out well beyond the tail, were making their way to various sites in England so I kept my eyes to the skies around Cranleigh.
One Saturday, walking back in Knowle Park from the afternoon Alice in Wonderland performance, I spotted a long line of likely looking birds in the distance and briefly felt I might be in Wonderland myself – but the specks disappeared behind trees.
Distant views of Glossy Ibis could easily make you dismiss them as drab. But as with many things in life generally, examination leads to a revelation.
Close up, and when the sunlight hits them at the right angle, the breeding adults reveal themselves to be mini rainbows of purple, green, chestnut, blue, pink, and brown. Long legs and a slim scimitar-shaped bill complete the picture.
I had more brief excitement a few weeks later when a distant line of birds early one morning in the Surrey Hills had my companion and I reach for our telescopes, hoping of course that they just might be Glossy Ibis. They turned out to be Herring Gulls.
A month on, we visited our vantage point again and Wes soon locked onto a group of fast flying large birds in a tight and long formation heading west. Cormorants? Large ducks? Waders, even? Another ‘scope’ job.
As they got nearer we could see their long necks, whirring wings broken by short glides, and slim heads.
They bunched up into a mass then back in a line again. There were eight of them and we were ecstatic. They were all Glossy Ibis – seemingly the largest flock recorded in Surrey. I did a little jig. The post dawn haze had granted us a colourful day after all.
The cliché (slightly rephrased) came to my mind : ‘You wait for ages for ‘i bis’ and then eight come along at once.’
