Having a dip at Gullane

Twitching does not really do it for me. Don't get me wrong, I like seeing rare birds and I love seeing stuff that I have never seen before. But for some illogical reason, I get more of a kick out of looking at pretty much nothing in the hope that something unexpected appears, compared to seeing something pretty rare but known to be there already. Of course, this illogical thinking meant that I drove straight past the Green-winged Teal at Aberlady Bay today. Twice.

Ironically, I was twitching at the time, although in a pretty low-key way. Darren Woodhead had reported a trumpeting Northern Bullfinch at Gullane yesterday. I have been looking for this subspecies in among the Bullfinches at the Hermitage area in Edinburgh ever since Northern Bullfinches were reported on the Northern Isles and down the East coast earlier this autumn. Having failed to find any locally, I thought I would pop along to Gullane this morning to try to see, and hear, this trumpeter. More of an aural than visual twitch really.

No luck, as it turned out, but there were plenty of birds in among the sea buckthorn, which was festooned with its outrageous berries. Fieldfares were very obvious, though shy, and three or four Woodcock added to the event, though they seemed to melt away once the first of a stream of dogs appeared.