Norfolk Nature: Spring 2026 Part 4

 Spring 2026: Comings and Goings

Some warm south-easterlies in late March/early April brought several scarcities from the continent. A great grey shrike largely kept company with the golfers on the Hunstanton course, occasionally deigning to flirt with the birding hoi polloi on the coastal path.

Birders were also out in force on the streets of Sedgeford a few weeks later as a hoopoe wafted from gardens to parks, occasionally stopping for food and photo opportunities. The sight of ageing men in camouflage running down alleyways in answer to the siren call of nature is not an edifying one but such indignity was forgiven by the exotic presence of the onomatopoeically named upupa epops.

The real rarity of this spring was the Ross's gull, a bird of the high Arctic and the first in Norfolk since the Cley adult of 1984. Found at Titchwell, it then circled around fields south of Thornham for a single day. It was a dainty 2CY bird which, after holding off for much of the time, did float down into the furrows close at hand. It found a very appreciative audience at what was a proper twitch, with cars slung imaginatively along the verges, as haphazard as the theories of the bird's location in its frequent absences.

Some of the winter visitors lingered into the first of the warm days. A party of twite were often found at the end of the Iron Road at Salthouse, but there were no shore lark and few snow buntings this year in North Norfolk.

The dartford warblers on the coastal heath just inland were soon busy in the flowering gorse, often accompanying the more prominent stonechats, and have become a wonderfully attractive resident.

While some species had battled the cold of our winter in order to secure breeding territory, others, which had braved the perils of migration, soon began to arrive to post their interest. The first turtle dove at Snettisham CP flitted through the bare trees, purring gently, becoming more of a genuine rarity with every year.

The little ringed plovers are similarly cautious in their approach, moving warily, almost apologetically, in the muddy margins of marshes, then scuttling away quickly like the second hand on the great seasonal clock before the big movements engage. 

In every ditch and dyke, it seemed that sedge warblers had hit the reed running; song-flighting and belting out their repertoire of chirps, hiccups and whinnies, their orange gapes imploring a likely mate to take an interest.

Cuckoos were up to much the same, their bubbling calls popping in the early morning warmth of Burnham Overy, with two embracing a mad dash out to Gun Hill and Scolt, while three ring ouzels stalked the short grass on a hair-trigger alert, dashing off in a squeaky fluster at the slightest provocation.

For me, working through Burnham Overy Dunes, the first wheatears are uplifting: a fence-post pose, a cocked head and a 'hwit-aersed' (the Old English origin of its name - 'white-arsed') flight all announcing that spring is here.