Welcome To The Kingfisher Wildlife Diaries – John Bailey
March 24th 2010
Boomers are Back!
Just five or ten minutes away from the Kingfisher complex, I was walking through thick reed swamp. Imagine my astonishment when I put up not just one but two adult bitterns. These fabulous birds simply rose, flew an ungainly forty or fifty yards and then disappeared again in alder scrub. I obviously left them strictly alone (hence no photographs) and got out of there, simply marvelling at what I'd just seen.
It was only a couple of days later, talking to a noted, local birder that I perhaps shouldn't be quite as amazed with my bittern sightings. There are, he told me, quite a lot more bittern around Norfolk than many of us suspect. And of course, a lot of the Wensum valley is almost completely untrodden wilderness. It's here in these very lovely acres of reed marsh that bitterns, he said, are quietly re-establishing themselves.
I know we don't have bitterns on the Kingfisher complex but who knows, if our work on the conservation area progresses as it should perhaps we'll attract them in one of these days. it's certainly good to know that there is at least one pair in the very close vicinity.