Firstly I accept that I have made a rather large error on the ID of the Barton bird so this is not an excuse for what was a case of sloppy birding but a summary of the event and what I consider to have been the thought process which went wrong!
During the present spring I have been out virtually every day walking in excess of 250 miles on birding trips round the local patch and doing breeding bird surveys along the Humber and on inland heaths. The result of all this effort had been the discovery of a single Wood Warbler and three Ring Ouzels; hardly a good result and I had got into the mind set that I was unlikely to find anything this spring.
Monday 21st seemed little different with Far Ings producing the expected zilch and local waders only including a single Sanderling as a suggestion of some movement. When I glanced up to the quarry above Far Ings and saw three large raptors drifting over the ridge I assumed they would be buzzards or maybe the local Marsh Harrier and some buzzards. The birds were against a bright white sky but as they banked it was clear that one was a kite, long looking wings and a longish tail with a shallow fork; as it banked around it showed a really striking pale covert bar on the upperwing and this immediately said Red Kite to me thinking that Black Kite has only a poorly developed pale covert bar. Although I have seen 1000’s of Black Kites the last trip when I saw about 80 was in Spain in May 2003 since when I have seen only one in winter in the Camargue apart from the Black-eared Kite of course, so my memory of the species was somewhat distant. I had not really looked at the photos of the Norfolk bird on the net and had overlooked Stuart Piners composite shot on Rare Bird Alert gallery which shows how striking the upperwing covert area was on this individual.
http://www.rarebirdalert.co.uk/RealData ... =4&pos=45&The bird I was watching was drifting north-east against the light but I decided to get some record shots and set up the camera with 2x converter as the birds were so far away; having shot off a few very small images a Landrover approached and I had to move all my gear off the track wasting vital seconds in the limited amount of observation time available. The bird drifted closer but as they did so were directly in line with the sun so I couldn’t even look at them at this point but when they emerged from the sun I took a few more pictures before they started to move directly away from me when I at last looked at them with my bins; the scope was in the car! As the kite flew away towards the Humber I could still not get any colour on it but it still never occurred to me that this was because there was no red to see! Looking at the photos I realised that even though they were terribly under-exposed and against the light the bird did look rather like a Black Kite in profile but in life it struck me as being very long winged and long-tailed which convinced me I had got it right and it was a Red Kite after all. I think the apparent wing length was due to the fact that it spent much of its time gliding with the wings bowed right down from the arm to the tip; the tail seemed narrow at the base and one outer feather seemed a little longer than the other side suggesting wear.
So why then did I not think of Black Kite in the first place having seen 1000’s and several 100 Red Kites as well? All I can suggest is that several factors may have affected my line of thought; I was not expecting to find a rare bird and especially a rare raptor on my local patch; there had been several recent reports of Red Kites this spring and I had even missed one which flew past behind me while I was in the hide at Far Ings so I was almost expecting a Red Kite to appear; my lack of recent experience of the species failed to alert me to the key ID features even though I saw them!; and finally the frequent forum statements on the abundance of Black Kites in the UK probably had an opposing effect convincing me that they were not common and this bird proved it! [In actual fact the tracking of this individual around several sites in Norfolk and then through North Lincs, possibly to North Yorkshire and back down the Lincs coast proves the point that the species is not as common as statistics may suggest but that one individual can account for a multitude of records which in the past would possibly have been recorded as 5 or more individuals in BBRC statistics].
So no excuses and I guess the moral of the story is don’t be complacent; look harder at all birds but the question of whether to look or photograph is still a vexing one. Had I not reached for the camera I may well have got better views of the bird and identified it correctly in the first place but if I had continued to think it was a Red Kite and did not have the photos then a good record would have been lost; the images appear to confirm that it was the same bird as the Norfolk sightings and that in itself is useful in a British context so sacrificing views for evidence may have had a productive outcome but I would certainly admit that I wish I had looked at it longer in hindsight!
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