Welcome To The Kingfisher Wildlife Diaries – John Bailey
October 19th 2009
Beautiful Buntings
Friday, 16th October, I went for my normal run on Salthouse beach about twenty-five minutes north from the Kingfisher Apartments. Sadly, I didn't have a camera!
The wind was howling from the north creating monstrous seas. In fact, just running along the shingle crest of the beach was a painful experience, making the eyes water. In the end, I gave up, dropped down from the seaward side of the beach and decided to run back in the comparative shelter of the marsh. Good job I did. There I bumped into a flock of perhaps twenty snow buntings, for me at least, our most beautiful winter migrants. October isn't necessarily that early for buntings to appear. They have, in the past, been recorded as early as late September and very possibly these birds were blown in by the enormous winds.
Nor is a flock of twenty birds anything extraordinary. In the past, they've been recorded at many hundreds strong.
The majority of birds spend the winter close to the sea and the extensive ringing programmes carried out since the early 1990s have revealed that our buntings come either from Iceland or from Scandinavia. The Icelandic birds are darker than the paler Scandinavian ones. And, interestingly, Icelandic visitors now seem to be the more common.
If you're staying at Kingfisher, a drive to the North Norfolk coast is an easy one. You can stop for lunch or shopping in Holt on the way, of course. Take your binoculars and it's very probable that you will be rewarded with a sighting of these gorgeous, flitting, small birds. Just look for that shimmer of black and white and you'll know exactly why so many people just love their arrival.