This article first appeared in Birdwatching Magazine in February 2025
If you have stuck with me for the last two decades, you may recall a piece (2010) called ‘reasons to be cheerful…’ (To be fair the first 400 words were ‘reasons to be grumpy’…). In it I described a seawatch that “…suddenly went horribly right! It turned completely apple-shaped; a patch so purple it practically proclaimed itself the pontiff!”. A seawatch where I didn’t turn up on the wrong day, at the wrong time in the wrong season with the wrong weather. After swearing that my normal form was to do all of the above, I described how, just for once, I got it right. The tide was high and so were the winds, the birds were so close, they sometimes hovered over my head. Without a book or a better birder to hand, I was still able to ID the skuas and shearwaters perfectly, because I could almost reach out and touch them. At one point I not only abandoned the telescope, but the bins as well as I simply didn’t need them. It was a day to remember for the compliance of nature and the gods of good timing.
Since then, living by the coast I’ve become much more proficient at identifying birds far out to sea. I’ve always birded by eye (just as well as I am now too deaf to hear most) and by ‘jizz’ – general impression is what you use to pick out your beloved in a crowd, when all you see is the back of their head or a glimpse of elbow. You are so emotionally close to them, that you know their walk or the poses they strike. It’s been the same with birds, maybe before optics were so good. In my youth, struggling to keep aloft old Russian navy issue binoculars that were as stylish and sleek as a Lada, I mostly relied on general impression born of familiarity. That bouncing lump caught out of the corner of one eye is a Green Woodpecker, confirmed by the yellow rump as it disappears into the long grass. I’ve met African guides so brilliant with ID because they couldn’t afford any sort of optics growing up…
However, when I first sat on a headland watching black specks against a grey ocean I struggled, even when in possession of the optical equivalent of a Lamborghini! Now, Auks are like arrows, Great Skuas are aquatic Buzzards, Fulmars stiff-winged Common Gulls. The more you seawatch, the better you become and less likely to embarrass yourself by identifying a migrating hirundine as a petrel, or a young Gannet as a Great Shearwater.
If, that is, you get the opportunity.
When I moved to the coast a quarter of a century ago, missing out on passing seabirds in Autumn was mostly me getting it wrong. I often arrived to “…you should have been here an hour (or a day) ago.”
Things have changed, …a lot. A fellow birder asked me, a few weeks back, if I had been around here at the turn of the century, with the famed migrant falls and stunning seabird passages. For the last half a dozen years it’s been poor. Our changing climate means that westerlies blow at migration times more often than not. Birds drop in far less often and seabird passage is more likely along the French coast that here.
So, a run of easterlies this Autumn was very welcome and, once again I could count the feathers on an Arctic Skua’s crown and be stunned by hundreds of Gannets passing by each hour, right under my nose.
