RARITY CHALLENGE
Some birds just seem to elude you, no matter how hard you try. But don’t give up – Paul Brook took eight years to bag his bogeys!
In 2015, I took on an ambitious birding challenge. I would try to see 12 ‘bogey birds’ that had frequently or frustratingly evaded me, or which I’d gazed at longingly in my first bird book many years ago, but still never seen with my own eyes.
The challenge to find these tricksy species would long outlive that first year. There would be glorious successes and dismal failures, until finally, in May 2023, I saw the final two within a week of each other. This is the story of my Bogey Bird Challenge.
2015: Three down...
In the (theoretical) year of my challenge, I managed just three birds on my list.
After regularly taunting me on autumn trips to the east coast, the Great Grey Shrike was high on my wish list. When one turned up closer to home, at Heslington Tilmire, I couldn’t resist trying my luck. Perhaps it was a bad omen when I bumped into a fellow birder I’d met when we’d both failed to see Hawfinches in Sherwood Forest earlier that year. We failed to see the shrike, too, and, annoyingly, it was reported again the next day.
I tried again at the next opportunity, this time taking my son, Daniel. A man ahead of us started waving and pointing – when we caught up he said the shrike had just flown across the field. We’d missed a close-up view, but he spotted where it had landed and bingo, there it was, distant but unmistakably our bird! Since then, I’ve seen two Great Grey Shrikes, both near York – at Acaster Airfield in 2017 at the seventh attempt, and at Wistow in 2022 at the second attempt. This bird will, it seems, always make itself hard to find.
As lifers and rarities go, I’ve been spoiled by Black-necked Grebes. After seeing several reports and photos of them at St Aidan’s RSPB, I made my first trip there in May. After walking round a good portion of the site, I asked a fellow birder if he knew where to find them. He pointed to a pool just behind him. “They're literally just there,” he said. And so they were, almost within touching distance – a pair with stripy little chicks, some of them hitching a ride on a parent’s back. They became an instant favourite. I now go back every spring on a Black-necked Grebe pilgrimage.
May 2015 turned out to be a very productive month. A gold-standard lifer – a beautiful Montagu’s Harrier at Blacktoft Sands – was swiftly followed by one of the most surprising and exciting moments of my birding life.
I was at Strensall Common, near York, doing a reccie for a Go Birding walk. Just after a Great Spotted Woodpecker had flown past, a smaller bird caught my eye on a half-dead Silver B
