A Field Notebook: The hunt for the Elegant tern - Part 1, Chasing the tide on Formby beach

Probably the most predictable 1st for Lancashire ever was found on Formby beach on Sunday evening, an elegant tern with thousands of Sandwich terns. Predictable because it is undoubtedly the same bird as that which spent July in the tern colony at Cemlyn Bay, Anglesey where it was paired with a Sandwich tern. Every year in late summer when the young fledge and the colony disperses, these birds arrive on the Sefton coast, and amazingly just two days after the elegant tern was last seen at Cemlyn it was found at Formby.

News broke on Sunday at about 7pm and I was tempted to go there and then. I got all of my gear ready and even had my shoes on, car keys in hand, but at the last minute abandoned the idea. It would take me 50 minutes to get to the car park and then there was at least a 30 minute walk with no clear idea of exactly where I was walking to. With less than three hours daylight left that didn't seem particularly appealing. I decided to wait until the following day.

I arrived at Formby beach car park (Lifeboat Road) at 6:30am on Monday morning and began the long slog, at first over the dunes and then along the beach. I was expecting a fair few of Lancashire's finest to be there looking for a bird which is not only a county first but also only the 5th for the UK, but no, I saw just four other birders all morning and one of those was Tim, the original finder from the day before. The first birder I met informed me that he had seen the tern at 5:30am but it had flown out to sea, hopefully to fish and not leave for good. I started off down the beach.

From the end of Lifeboat road to the Sandwich tern roost on the beach is at least a mile and a quarter (2km). All the way there the air was full of the cries of Sandwich terns and when I finally got to the roost it contained about 1000 birds, mainly Sandwich but also a lot of common and Arctic terns. There was no sign of the elegant tern and I was told by another birder that tern numbers were well down on the day before. Not what I wanted to hear. I gave it until 11am and then decided to call it a day. It was approaching low tide and the beach was now huge and the heat haze made viewing very difficult. I'd been well entertained by the commoner terns as well as at least 7 little gulls, 3 Mediterranean gulls and a few hundred waders, mainly sanderling, bar-tailed godwit and dunlin, but there was no sign of the star of the show and I was now searching on my own which was just impossible. I trudged back to the car.

At 4pm I was at home when "ping!", my phone caught my attention. Fortunately this wasn't the NHS app telling me to self isolate for 10 days, it was an alert from Birdguides informing me that the tern was back. Tim had found it again in exactly the same spot, in the Sandwich tern roost and apparently it was showing well. I immediately jumped in my car and headed back to Formby.

Another slog ensued over the dunes and down to the roost, and this time there were about 15 other birders present as high tide approached, but again no sign of the elegant tern. Apparently a few minutes after Tim had relocated it, it had flown off out to sea and when I arrived it had not been seen again. I waited and waited until it got to about 8pm at which point for the second time on Monday I decided to call it a day. The bird had shown for about 20 minutes all day. I'd spent 9 hours on site but not seen it.

The evening visit had been worthwhile though, because there was a cracking roseate tern in the roost. It's the bird lurking behind the gull in the photo.

Due to other commitments I couldn't get there for high tide early on Tuesday but in any case it was not reported from Formby early morning. I had decided the night before to get there for around 10am and spend as long as it took. Brave words. I arrived at Formby to be informed by Birdguides that the bird had been seen at nearby Hightown at 9:30am, but was then seen flying towards Formby. I decided to stay at Formby and chance my luck.

Formby beach on Tuesday was a bit depressing for myself and the one other birder who was there. It was a really tough day, walking up and down the ever expanding shoreline, in the end covering over 6 miles. Of course it's a beautiful location with lots of great birds and it was a tremendous experience, but they were all the same as the day before, nothing really new to report and our hopes receded gradually with the tide. By 2pm the beach looked like a desert with vast open spaces, mirages and a shimmering heat haze with no hope of finding a lone elegant tern. Eventually I gave up and headed home, slightly depressed and resolving to not go again until Thursday. However later in the evening my enthusiasm was renewed and I contacted Pete who had seen the bird at Hightown and got directions from him for where best to view from and decided to get there for 7am on Wednesday. I'll cover that in the next post, but read on for more about Formby beach.

These little gulls are fabulous, really smart looking birds.

Part of the problem with finding the elegant tern is that the beach is just vast, especially at low tide, and though the Sandwich terns tend to congregate in large groups, there are several such groups all over the beach, plus smaller groups scattered all along the tide line. On sunny days the heat haze almost renders the scope useless and the beach is not flat, there are islands of sand which hundreds of birds can disappear behind. It's a real struggle to find a single bird.

Even so, it was an incredible experience to be so far out on Formby beach on Tuesday. I was at least a mile offshore and I couldn't see a single other person anywhere, not even through my binoculars. Finally I saw a tiny figure moving towards me through the heat haze, which shimmered all around it in a magical and surreal sort of way. As the figure got closer I could see that it was a young woman jogger, with flowing long blonde hair. I was worried that she might run through the tern roost but she kept coming straight towards me. Finally she got to me, said a cheery hello and asked if I would take her photograph and I duly obliged. Then after a brief conversation about how wonderful it was out here, she continued on her way and just a few minutes later she was gone, once again a magical shimmering figure, disappearing into the distance and I was completely alone! Did that really happen? It was like something out of a Christmas ghost story. Was she real or just a figment of my dehydrated mind? Her footprints in the sand proved that I was not going insane. Oh well, back to the hunt for the elegant tern.