I had a great trip to England last week, on my last day of the trip I went to Newhaven Harbour with Gideon. We were up at 5.40 and on site just after sunrise, so we headed to the Pier to look for Turnstones and Purple Sandpipers as they are almost guaranteed there in winter and finding them isn't usually that hard. It only took a few minutes to find them but they were in the shade below the pier so getting photos was not easy, still they are always lovely to watch, As they were not showing very well I thought I would get the scope out and see if I could find anything out at sea, but other than 2 Cormorants some Great crested grebes and a Shag there was nothing other than gulls, so we walked down next to the beach to see if we could find anything nice. We saw a few Stonechat, Reedbunting, and some Skylarks as well as lot's of finch flocks.
Then while watching one of the Finch flocks i saw a larger bird with big wing-bars fly over us, My first thought was Snow bunting but I thought it looked a bit too big, Then Gideon called Snow bunting, and after very excitedly approaching where it had landed I saw it, A lovely winter male Snow bunting just sitting there in the shade, So we moved around and waited, hoping for it to come closer, and thankfully it did, The next four hours were spent watching and photographing it. After crawling on wet shingles and some very sharp rocks, we at times managed to get within 10 foot of him. He seemed to like sitting behind things making it hard to get a good photo, but even with it sometimes hiding it was an amazing bird to see
