Icing on the cake

What a cake!

The best kind of cake.  Your favourite of course.  One that doesn't make you sick after you've eaten one slice too many.  A perfect cake.  Cooked by the best chef in the world of cakes.  Perhaps with a desired drink: filter coffee perhaps, black of course.  A nice comfortable chair, your feet up kind of cake. I think the conclusion here a good cake, with icing on top.  Proper stuff with fresh cream or whatever you fancy.

So that was the weekend then.  A big fat cake with a lot of icing and a strong black coffee, or perhaps a pot of tea. And the armchair stuff.

Friday through to Monday.  A lot of cake. Someone left the cake out in the rain on Saturday and the whole thing could of gone tits up, big time.  But luckily we could make that recipe again, and it was called Sunday.  Monday was just about licking the plate clean.

"Let them eat cake", Mary-Antoinette was supposed to have said, though she meant brioche, but we have been eating cake all week, different kinds of cake, and then it went way gastronomic.  Can you have too much cake. Normally no, this cake is none fattening, uplifting and just up the road.  What a cake!

Friday's cake, we thought could not be bettered, so Jono and I headed for a place where cakes are blown in when the weather conditions are right. But I digress.

Friday and Dan pulls out another Pied Flycatcher, with Jono a probable in the bandstand copse on the south side of the flats, this is getting ridiculous. These are the 4th and possibly 5th Pieds this year, more than in the preceding 3 years.  I went through the motions of trying to look for it, but really I couldn't have been too bothered after all I had seen 2 already.  4 Whinchats, OK not yet the high numbers of years gone by and big numbers of Spotties haven't occurred yet, but its still early.  5 Wheatears, Redstart and a couple of Linnet meant an OK day.  Could it get any better.  Maybe, but a day's sea watching with the perfect set of conditions roused Jono into rash thoughts.

So after driving 6-7 hours, we're sitting at Pendeen watching the sea.  Nothing is happening.  Jono gets a call I get a text.  "F*****g Wryneck on the flats".  I mean it was nearly the end of Cornwall.  It got worse: Pied Fly, Redstart etc.

We were pretty confident the Wryneck would stay, but would it relocate? hopefully it would relocate.  It didn't relocate. It had picked probably the least suitable place for us to find it and that's how it turned out, all bloody weekend.

Sunday and we are playing it cool, you know nonchalant. I potter around Jub and Cat & Dog and then through the birch woods, Jono takes a long route through the brooms, but end up we did at a hawthorn bush to await Mr B's great find (hats off to the cowboy). I got two short glimpses through someone's scope of the bird.  Jono will share his lucky snap of it with a Redstart for company. And that was it, didn't show again all day. It could have been anywhere in the mass of bramble, broom and hawthorn.  There are ant hills everywhere in here, you find them by tripping over them.  Enough cake for an army of Wryneck.

While I stood with Mr Bishop and (Wanstead virgin) Sean Harvey, Barry nonchalantly says: "Marsh Harrier over there".

I looked and there over Cat & Dog was a fecking Marsh Harrier.  Scramble for phone, camera.

"Don't you get many then?" he asks all innocent. Do you see any fucking marsh, I thought to myself. Unfortunately Sean, being new to the site was trying to help Jono - back with the main crowd - directions, but he was blind-sided by the lime trees. Oh cruel fate. Future gripping essential.

Monday and wearing a small hangover after the celebratory drinks of the night before.  I tip toe round the the same route as Sunday.  Yellow Wags over C&D, Redstart report from Stu in Long Wood, and a small gaggle of last night's dippers gathered in front of a hawthorn.  The bird a no show.  I had determined not to spend all day looking at this particular bush again. Bush is nice, but too much of one bush makes Jack a slightly jaundiced boy.  I went round the back of it and kicked some and did some booting. The bird flew up from where it had been feeding and sat in a tree, then out on a branch.  Would have been a good shot, bar the light being from behind, but Steve who  had just arrived with Stu scared it off.  Luckily it just went round the other side. We could hear the appreciative oohs and aahs from the assembled group.  Job done. It didn't show for another 7 hours. 

Bob Vaughan, who missed this showing, because he had made the schoolboy error of going home for breakfast, stayed the course and finally found the bird again to the joy of Mr Lee GR Evans who had already dipped 6 Wryneck this week.

Wryneck happiness.  Tomorrow we'll probably have to do it all over again.  I am beginning to hate that particular bush.

Cake! With large dollops of icing!