Lightning does occasionally strike in the same place twice. A second stone curlew turned up on the Crail patch this morning! There are only about 25 records of stone curlew in Scotland, and last year we had one on the 10th April at Anstruther for a few hours. At the time it felt like it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to add stone curlew to my patch list, yet here we are a year later with a second. The stone curlew last year was found early evening and there was a frantic dash by anyone close to see it before it got dark. It was gone by the next morning and many missed it. This one was more obliging for the local birders, being found early in the morning at Kilminning, and it stayed visible in the middle of Craig Peddie’s field, between Kilminning Reserve and the golf club, for most of the day. I got the news about it while I was setting up a student for some nest monitoring for corn buntings at Kilrenny. There was a bit of a tug between responsibility and abandoning everything for a dash to Kilminning, but calm prevailed and I finished what we were doing and headed down there 90 minutes later. It might have been less Zen if I hadn’t already done a dash for the bird last year. I grew up with stone curlews in East Anglia, where they are a rare but regular farmland bird. You soon learn that they are sluggish and fairly lazy birds in the daytime (to be fair, they are nocturnal), and once you have located them sitting in a field for the day, they will stay there (bar disturbances). The field the stone curlew ended up in is fenced to discourage the dog walkers and large, so when I heard where it was, I relaxed a bit. The only real danger of it moving on during the day would be if a birdwatcher was a bit too keen, or more likely a person walking up to it unknowingly. Stone curlews are well camouflaged and stay immobile. Part of their appeal to me as a new teenage birder was that they were hard to find, even though they were on my South Cambridgeshire doorstep. There was a real sense of satisfaction in scanning across a field and finding one. I relived this a bit yesterday. After arriving at lunchtime and seeing the bird immediately (just its head and more conspicuous yellow bill poking out of the grass) with the help of the other birders already there, I relocated to another edge of the field so I would have to find it myself. One of the great things about wildlife watching is that special animals, like stone curlews, punctuate your life. They provide landmarks that when you see them again, transport you back to the last time you were there. I sat on the edge of the field and refound and watched the stone curlew for half an hour, feeling much the same as I did 40 years ago. A different bike got me there, there was a different dog with me, and my current binoculars are only 20 years old. But it was the same me, feeling that same sense of excitement and connection to place – satisfaction – of sharing the world with something special. A short-eared owl hunting along the back of the field and the golf course – normally a Kilminning highlight – got a little bit relegated to second best, although I was able to enjoy that too. Stone curlews for all their local exoticness, as I said, don’t do a lot during the day.
Wild Crail 
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