A whole heap of it!

Wagtails are difficult. Yellow wagtails are especially difficult. There are numerous races, sub-species, forms and colour variants which make a simple task much harder. For a start, our pied wagtail (Motacilla alba alba) is not actually the nominate species, which is the white wagtail (Motacilla alba) of mainland Europe.

This smart chap is a race even though we think of it as our species! The yellow wagtail complex is totally mind-blowing. As per pied wagtails, our yellow wagtail (Motacilla flava flavissima) is a race of the nominate European species (Motacilla flava). Then you add on numerous colour variations like blue-headed, grey-headed, Channel, black-headed and ashy-headed. All of these are just races though and not pure species.
You then add into the mix another entire species - the Eastern yellow wagtail (Motacilla tschutschensis). Thus was previously another sub-species of our yellow wagtail but is now upgraded to full species. It is basically Asian but also drifts across to Alaska. Then to complete the complexity, as for our Western yellow wagtail, it has numerous races including the Alaskan or blue-headed wagtail (Motacilla tschutschensis  tschutschensis).
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that one of them has taken up residence in Norfolk. They are very rare over here, although some of this may be that they are overlooked. I saw my first and only one of the presumed nominate species in Suffolk last year. This Alaskan bird would be new and could be a potential armchair tick in the future so was the ideal first stop on a swing through Norfolk with Judith.
The site was north of Sedgeford at an attractively described dung-heap! Yellow wagtails do like these as they attract lots if insects. We got there just after dawn though it could hardly be described as light, with heavy cloud cover. A quick coffee and I scanned the dung-heap but nothing was showing. Three more birders turned up and after 10 minutes a potential candidate was spotted but it was flushed and flew off!. A nervous 5 minute wait and finally it popped up on top of the pile of, well, you know what!

It was  very smart bird, more like a grey wagtail than a pure yellow one. Clearly different to the Suffolk bird and seemingly pretty happy with its breakfast. It only stayed a few minutes before flying off so we packed up and headed off elsewhere as half a dozen other cars turned up.
It was one of those days more about getting the year list up than stopping for photos, which wasn't helped by the dull-grey skies. One highlight was the ever-present flocks of ping-footed geese in the fields and the skies.

Titchwell delivered on most of the expected waders and ducks though we dipped on a sleeping woodcock by 20 minutes. By the time we got to where it was, it wasn't there anymore. This did become a theme of the day! Otherwise spotted redshanks were a good tick.
Next was Holkham and the marsh for the overwintering shore larks. Two blokes in the car park had seen them and said they were showing well. We got to the roped-off area and quickly found the flock of snow buntings, mobile over a wide area of the marsh and beach.

Try as we could though there was no sign of the shore larks. Two promises of easy-to-find birds and both gone AWOL. The sea was heaving with birds though, especially a large flock of scoters, numbering well over a thousand. Tricky but I did find a few of their rarer velvet cousins amongst them, identified most easily in flight by a white wing-bar, as per one in the photo below.

With a bit of imagination you can even see the tear-drop mark behind its eye!!

Final stop was at Wells for the long-staying rough-legged buzzard. This one was easy, sitting in a bush near the quay.

Would have been nice to see it fly but the afternoon was getting on and two guys at the buzzard said a black redstart was showing in Wells itself by the chandlery building. I think you can guess what happened. Three from three with people telling us a bird was there and in each case it had cleared off. Next time I'm not going to ask anyone if anything is around as it clearly puts a jinx on things. There were a few turnstones eating chips by the quayside as a compensation.

Not a bad day overall. 28 new birds for the year list including the two rarest targets for the day. I'll still be struggling to get to the 160 mark I had by the end of January last year but it's a good start.