Two-barred Greenish Warbler, Filey, N.Yorks 18th Oct 2006

It took a couple of days to id this bird but news came through on tuesday 17th of a Two-barred Greenish Warbler at Filey North Cliff Country Park in Arndale Ravine. I wanted to spend some time trying to get photographs of the bird so decided to wait until 18th which would give me the whole afternoon there. The winds had swung to a southerly on 17th meaning that this would favour a migration down the east coast but fortunately for me there was 100% cloud cover all night. At 07:55hrs the bird was reported so I made my way up.

About 12:30hrs I arrived on site to find birders stood adjacent to the car park looking into a long line of trees. It wasn't long before I saw the bird feeding in the tree canopy from inside the Arndale Ravine working its way along with some goldcrests. I quickly learned that the bird was doing a circuit with the crests and made steps to anticipate the birds movements in order to maximise my photo opportunities. The bird did not call but the crests did so this helped locate its movements. I managed to get some photos from inside the ravine but the quality was poor as I was using a small 70-200 lens with a 2x converter on manual focus.

Towards the end of the day the bird seemed to reduce the size of its circuit and was regularly occuring in one area viewable from outside the ravine. My thoughts were that this bird was showing better because there were less birders around but more so because the side we were standing on was facing the sun and the bird was still able to feed. This time I was using my big lens and it proved a real challenge to get this fast moving bird in the view finder. I managed this by lining up the camera with the movement in the trees and then hope that the bird was going to come into view. I used just the 600mm without any converter as the light was fading and I had a wider field of view to help locate it.