Graham Workman: Dad and lad's adventure in the East

04.00 up and ready, collect Marcus and off we go. Destination East coast of Yorkshire hoping to catch up with a fabulously good looking lark. We watched the sunrise through the clouds on the low horizon as we headed east on the M62.

The bird we were looking for was a pair of Shore Larks (in the USA they are called Horned Larks). They are a scarce winter visitor to the UK, occurring mainly on the eastern coasts of England and Scotland. They must feel at home on cold, windswept days in habitats not be so different from this species' high-Arctic breeding grounds. Shore Larks are a good looking bird with their distinctive yellow and black facial markings. It’s the faces and heads that are so colourful, the rest of their plumage is a mottled brown with a paler underside. They are not an easy bird to pick out of their usual haunts of rocky, sandy areas close to the shore. Finding these two was not going to be an easy task. Small flocks can be hard to pick out in coastal habitats.

The European breeding population is estimated to be around 7 million pairs. This gives you some idea of their scarcity in the UK, where around 100 birds can arrive in a winter. Like most birds escaping the freezing conditions further north, Shore Lark numbers fluctuate wildly between years, depending on the severity of the weather the birds are escaping. We parked up at the famous Spurn Bird Observatory wating for Mathew one of the wardens who we’d booked for a 3 hour stint to get an idea of where we should be looking and what the area had to offer. The Shore Larks had been frequenting a series of brackish lagoons close to the shoreline which provided exactly the habitat where you’d expect to see them, So we headed across the salt marsh for around 3 miles to the lagoons.

Searching the shores of the large lagoons we weren’t having any luck - needle and haystack was a phrase that sprang to mind. Any way to cut a long story short Matthew caught a glimpse of a couple of birds as they flew in and flittered about feeding on the banks – 30 seconds later and they were off again and Marcus and I were both gutted as we didn’t get really good views of them. But Marcus said he had a good idea where they had landed and so off we trudged again. We were all scanning the far shore when Marcus casually said – found them Dad and he had.

This time we spent a good 45 mins watching them. They are smallish birds when they are 200m away and even with my 800mm prime lens getting a decent photo wasn’t going to happen. Luckily Marcus had brought my scope and using his iPhone camera through the scope hot some really good video of them feeding.