It's about time!

At the moment I'm suffering from yet another revolting cold, so having spent the afternoon lying on the sofa watching Lewis Hamilton achieving his 61st pole, I began idly to flick through my old bird logs. For many years - before I discovered the joys (!) of bird photography -  I kept a virtually daily written and illustrated record of the birding trips that Linda, I and our friends made around the country. Now I don't have a very large self-found list, but I paused in my nostalgic musings to reflect on what was probably the best bird I've discovered so far....

Shortly after the first Ring-billed Gull for Norfolk was identified on the ice at the University Broad and a second (or the same again!) turned up in Bure Park, Gt. Yarmouth, I found a third on the shingle at Cley. I struggled to persuade my companions that we really were looking at a scarce American gull, so I scuttled off to the Coastguards and alerted Mark Golley who was, I think, virtually resident there at the time. Within a couple of minutes he'd confirmed my identification.

The bird was submitted to the County Recorder and - as often seemed to happen in those days - it duly appeared in the NB&M Report as 'Ring-billed Gull : M. Golley et al.'   Hmmmmm!

The point of this posting is to reflect on the fact that, since 'my bird' in November, 1992, there hasn't been another in Norfolk, as far as I'm aware: it's about time, isn't it? With all these westerly gales, you'd think a few more would've graced the East Anglian beaches!