Diary of a part-time twitcher: Pallid into insignificance

After such a good time with the Pallid harrier at Welney this week, I was tempting fate to try and repeat it with a local bird. Another juvenile Pallid has been quartering the fields at Therfield in the north of Hertfordshire for 4 days. It seemed like a tricky bird to get close to but yesterday people were saying it was putting on a good show so I thought "why not". I got to the village about 8 and parked up by the church. It took about 10 minutes to walk to the top of the fields where you have a view over the valley and the stubble. The farmer has been releasing grey partridge and with the accompanying food crops for them has brought in a lot of smaller birds. This is probably why the harrier was hanging around.
There was a crown already gathered on a VERY windy hillside. The harrier has just dropped out of sight. When I worked out where they were looking though it was miles away. When it did fly you could see a harrier and probably a bit of golden colour but the rest was too distant to make out. In the high winds it didn't want to fly far and came to rest in a ditch from where it did not want to move. I could see some other birders lower in the valley in front of us. One of them walked along a small track across the fields towards the bird, spooking it into flying but not far. They seemed to be closer anyway so I relocated down to there. Lee Evans was already there but of the bird no sign. We waited and waited till eventually it flopped out of the ditch and flew a few yards before disappearing again. This was repeated again about 30 minutes later. Lee was in phone contact with birders up where I came from who could see the bird sitting in the ditch, but it was out of sight to us. The landowner apparently didn't like you going down the track towards the ditch and even Lee didn't want to risk the wrath of him of other birders up on the hill. We sat it out for over an hour hoping it might fly! Finally we got a lucky a breaks it flew up out of the ditch.

It was still way further off than the Welney bird but you could at least make out a few of the salient features. Not sure I could call it a Pallid rather than a hen harrier on these views but I'll bow to others on that. It flew up the hill opposite us and sat down briefly on a grassy bank before flopping down out of sight into some stubble.

We decided that we'd had enough so most of us left though the second shift were starting to arrive as we walked back to the cars. Hopefully they got better views than us.

I did stop off at Maple Lodge on the way back which had the usual suspects in attendance, mainly from Long Hedge hide. The little egret put on a good dance for me.