It’s official – I’m an idiot.

This week I have been left questioning my own commitment to getting out and getting the bird. Only a week or so ago, I was up a ladder working on house repairs, hoping to finish in time to do some good birdwatching. I stuck to the task of renovating the home and even managed a Mistle Thrush, a flyby of three Ring-necked Parakeets and a female sparrow hawk, all from the dizzy heights of my ladder. So I had collected enough Brownie Points to go somewhere exotic like Dungeness or Dunwich on the Sunday. Excellent prospect. However, when Sunday came, it was hammering with rain. There was a party of four Parrot Crossbills close to where I worked showing well but I ask you, in the rain??? No thanks. I did keep looking to the sky for improvement but when it came, it was too late to get there for daylight conditions.

Always tomorrow I thought.

So an early sortie to Gunners Park on Monday morning with clearing skies in the east making me think of biblical references and hoping for that beam of light to hit a small pine tree had me gripped. Everything would have been okay and this blog would have had some 'nice' pictures of these head-heavy beauties but I went looking in the wrong place. Doh! I stood with another birder looking at a few pine trees with nothing much in them. Certainly no Parrot Crossbills. There was a Ring Ouzel to make things sufferable and to be honest I wasn’t pissed off. I had made a decision yesterday and I had to accept it.

Back at work I quickly looked at the local website only to read the four Parrot Crossbills were still there. Well a lunchtime mercy dash back to the park was organised and I got there 30 minutes after the birds were last seen. I even realised I was yards from where the birds were seen in the morning and I couldn’t believe my ineptitude and laziness. I could have checked a bit harder in the morning but couldn’t be bothered. i’m bothered now I can tell you.

Yeah, you just missed 'em.
I have this vision of the four birds flying low over my car going in the opposite direction as I arrived at the car park. Oh well, maybe the Two-barred Crossbills in Norfolk in a week or so will be more sympathetic. Yeah right.

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