Rare Opportunity!..........White Billed Diver

I usually have a pretty good idea of what i'm likely to be shooting when I leave home, but last week, I was in for a real surprise!

I happened to be back in the UK for a few weeks and had been regularly visiting the local beaches of Minnis Bay and Reculver which are well known for wading birds. I had already got some good shots of the usual birds, when I received news that a White Billed Diver had been spotted a few miles away.

Now, to say that this bird is rare is an understatement. There have only been 7 sightings of it in the Kent area in the past 50 years!

Needless to say, I drove to the place where the sighting had taken place and spent a few hours in and around the area searching in vain for the elusive bird! It's frustrating, but very common to spend hours tracking or searching for a subject, only to fail and return home without a single shot.

Over the next few days, the search continued with no sign of the bird until one day when I was on my way shopping. There it was, just offshore and displaying beautifully.....and this was the one trip when my car was full and I had to leave the camera at home .    Grrrrr!!!!! 

It's the age old story, that if you don't have your camera......you can't get the shot!

In the end, it took me 5 days of searching to finally catch up with it, but it was well worth the wait.

The White Billed Diver is one of just five species in the order Gaviiformes worldwide. It is without doubt the most alluring and enigmatic, being the largest and the most remote breeder. Its global population has been put at somewhere in the region of 16,000-32,000 individual birds, so it is something of a scarcity worldwide. It nests on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, in a band from Russia through to Canada. While the respective beauty of each of the five diver species can be argued, the sight of an off-white coloured bill set against the spangled black and white plumage of a breeding adult makes it the most arresting on first sight.