Wednesday 4th September

I don’t twitch often but I have been tempted by a Brown Booby in Cornwall. The bird has never been reliable and I had correctly decided not to travel twice as the bird had been rather elusive.

However, an apparent 2nd bird was located on The Lizard and had been playing ball for a couple of days, I couldn’t make Tuesday but with the bird going to roost on Tuesday evening, Joy and I decided to travel early Wednesday in an attempt to get my first UK tick of the year. We were due to take a passenger but he failed to find my house and ended up somewhere near Shropshire!

The journey down was uneventful although it was a little nervous as there was no news until 9.00am by which time we were only 30 minutes away. We parked on the National Trust car park to find the bird had landed out of sight on an offshore island. We walked down to find a spot to view from when a sudden squall hit. An hour later and there was still no sign, a few birders had walked a mile or so along the coast to view the far side of the island. It became apparent that they were watching the bird, so Joy and I decided to walk that way, there was a surprising amount of climbing involved plus we had to negotiate a couple of Devil Dogs at the rear of the cafe! We had just got to the top of the climb to be met by birders coming back telling us the bird had flown – Joy shot me a look and we made our way back.

The light looking south into the bay was challenging, with lots of glare and reflection, after a while someone picked the bird up and we continued to watch it in poor light for a while before the bird flew past the headland where we were and gave great views as it flew past before it disappeared back to its perch out of sight.

We hung around hoping it would come back, whilst doing a little Seawatching, where several Manx Shearwater and a single Balearic flew past. It was rather windy and the light was poor so at 1.00pm we decided that we had better start making our way home.

Near Exeter we decided to visit Alyesbeare Common where we eventually connected with a single Dartford Warbler but little else. We eventually arrived home at 7pm and slept really well.