Eurasian hoopoe – photo by Nrik kiran on Wikipedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
It’s Hallowe’en morning. I spent yesterday afternoon on a three-hour Zoom course, interested, participating, but with one eye on Twitter, monitoring the news about the hoopoe that had been discovered at the microlight airfield in Ince Blundell late that morning. On my only previous attempt at ‘ticking’ one, on the Wirral in 2021, I missed the bird by about five minutes. Will today be different?
This time, as Monday morning dawns, I decide to wait until the school and rush-hour traffic has subsided before setting off through the city centre, Waterloo, Crosby and Thornton to a tiny track off the bustling A565. That wait *almost* costs me dear. As I park up and look expectantly at a bloke standing near the closed gate to the airfield, I learn that the bird was here “a few minutes ago”. Oh no! However, he goes on to say that it has disappeared three or four times in the hour he has been stood here, and each time it has re-appeared. Almost on cue, from around the bend in the track on the other side of the gate, a small pinky-beige bird strolls into sight. It is meandering along the edge of the grass lining the track, foraging. I punch the air (metaphorically but, thinking about it, probably literally as well). My first hoopoe!
Another kind gent asks if I would like to see it through his scope. Unfortunately, the bird moves as we are swopping places, and so I never have a close-up glimpse of it. After these brief minutes, before I have really had the chance to soak in this marvellous experience, the hoopoe takes to the air, its striking black-and-white barred wings unfurled for all to see. It flies across the field in front of us, then heads away from us, then left, then back right, then… I lose it, but someone else is still tracking it. When I pick it up again, it is flying at height now, above the trees, and crossing the A565, where it lands in another field.
I decide that I am not going to go after it in case I can’t pick it up again. These few minutes have been brief but brilliant and I don’t want to spoil them. So, after exchanging a few pleasantries with other birders, I get back in the car and head towards Marshside, an RSPB reserve, and another lifer, the lesser yellowlegs that has been there for a week or more.
Hoopoe site – microlight airfield Ince Blundell