UK Trip - part 3

The final leg of our UK trip was a long talked about weekend in Norfolk with Jack and Paula. Being the tourists, we arrived back from Dublin at 10 and took a leisurely drive up to the cottage at Burnham Overy.
Poor Jack and Paula had to work and so left Watford for the 3-4 hour drive around 5. By this time of course the weather had deteriorated to hard driving rain for their journey. Not only that but Jack then enthusiastically cooked a pasta Dinner....


Here's the mill just outside Burnham Overy on the coast road that most of the best birding sites are nearby and up and down we drove for much of the weekend.
Pre-Breakfast on Saturday Jack and I headed for Titchwell (in the rain...), but the weather cleared and after bacon and eggs we had rendezvous with some more old friends.


As the expressions here show, the wind whipping off the North Sea was cold but we spend the morning with Gary Elton (ex of South Oxhey, Jack's partner in Birding London, and the serious birder here actually LOOKING at the sea) and David Russell (Jack and my co-author on the Tring Book, and without gloves). Both Gary and David are resident in Norfolk so we had plenty of good local information about the whereabouts of local specialities (some of which cooperated and some of which didn't....)

One species that wasan't where it 'should' have been the first few times was the local Little Owl. Revisiting the tree on Sunday, Jack picked out a very obscured bird. We were looking at the top of the birds head (all that was visible initially) when a second bird perched in the tree giving wonderful views, Chrystal's first Little Owl.


Norfolk has a healthy Barn Owl population and we saw three of this increasingly rare species in the south of England.
We walked in Holkham Park, had a pleasant pub lunch (from a somewhat bizarre 'lunch menu') and visited Cley.
As often the case, we overspent our birding time budget and only just managed to find some meat for Sunday lunch in a rapidly 'closing for the evening' Holt. In the event Sunday lunch was a wonderful Pork roast. Before lunch Jack, Chrystal and I birded locally, finding the owls and some other species including a field of Pink-footed Geese.
Jack and Paula left in (again!) deteriorating weather for their journey south on Sunday.
On Monday Chrystal and I had another calm drive down to Heathrow ready for our flight home on Tuesday
It had been 'spring' in the UK. Birds were singing and displaying (including bizarrely Great-crested Grebe displaying on the sea).
The flight captain announced a temperature beneath freezing point back at Dulles. Overnight it snowed a couple of inches. During the following week the temperature here was 81 degrees and now its back down to 29 degrees (and ice/snow/freezing rain or something / everything in between...)


Still spring birds have arrived here too although goodness knows what the insect eaters will find to eat for a few weeks