White-tailed Lapwing Vanellus leucurus at East Halton Pits December 31st 2021- January 2022
What a truly bizarre end to 2021; December 31st - in summary a set of house keys were lost this morning; we were going out for the day but had to wait in for the locks to be changed so the day out was curtailed to a wander along the Ancholme with 1200 Pink-feet and 26 Whoopers the best birds - back home at 14:15 and I got a message from Steve Routledge saying that a photographer had seen a wader with yellow legs in a field at East Halton but he was in Scarborough - at just 13 miles away it was worth a trip though it quickly dawned on me that I would have at lest an hour of light when I got there; the bird would presumably be a Lesser Yellowlegs that had been photographed two weeks previously but had then gone awol
I arrived to find no-one there apart from an old lady with two terriers but on the edge of the grass field beyond the Greylags and farmyard geese was a single wader; it did indeed have yellow legs but it was not the Yellowlegs but was the White-tailed Lapwing!!!!! after 3 months of hoping it would hop across the county boundary it had moved about 30 miles to be discovered in a bizarre location and a bizarre manner- thus ended 2021 with a first for Lincolnshire after a tick free year -
Still around in January even during a spell of really cold weather 6th - 7th with most of the pools frozen over it resorted to an ice free location where I obtained another set of images and some video see below.
