When people tell you about an unusual bird that they have seen near where they live, what do you do? Get a description from them and then show them some pictures or better still go and have a look at it. It usually ends up as being a fairly common bird but, on this occasion, the bird turned out to be a Blue Rock Thrush! It took around two weeks for the news of the birds presence to leak out Now, I will not get into the why`s and wherefores about where the bird came from but certainly it is worth going to see.
With most people having gone back to work it was left to Bob K, Steve K and myself to try for this normally southern European cracker. We left Newhey at 5-45am in Steve K`s Vauxhall Insignia (recently acquired) and all sat very comfortably. The weather men had promised us freezing fog etc for the journey down, but we only saw fog for around the last 15 miles. We reached the beautiful town of Stow in the Wold around 9am and parked up to the news from our grapevine friends that the bird was still present.
The morning frost made walking a little precarious and when you are in a rush things can go wrong. A small group told us the bird was sat on top of a roof around the corner, off we went again and found a large group of birders admiring the thrush. We managed to join the crush and had good views of the bird. We stayed in the area for around two hours and had some good and some distant sightings of the Blue Rock Thrush. I even managed to fall to the ground whilst trying to negotiating a fence, now I know how racehorses feel. I even managed to take a few pictures of the bird but it was mainly backlit as it sat on roofs, chimney pots, aerials etc. We met lots of birders as we joined different little groups watching the bird and had a good chat with them, especially Kevin Hughes and little Marie from Macclesfield. We returned to the car, had some food and decided to head for home having achieved our target. The notorious M6 did not let us down as we crawled for quite a few miles in the roadworks. We reached home by 3-45pm after a good days twitching.
