13th November 1988

Yesterday's gloom disappeared overnight and we awake to blue skies and sun, though it becomes increasingly cloudy and is quite grey by mid-afternoon. The improvement in visibility makes for a better day's birding. We choose a 7.5 km waymarked path to the south of yester­day's ramble. The route starts near wet ground but is mainly over open sandy heath with birch, young pine and a few oak trees.

With the sun behind us, Jim peers through the telescope at a distant and partially obscured lake ‑ canada, greylag and barnacle geese are amongst the wildfowl present. Then something in the background ‑ it must have been half a kilo­metre away ‑ catches his eye and, with the tele­scope on full magnifica­tion, he manages to make out a great grey shrike. When I look through I just glimpsed a pale belly and black mask before it flies off. According to the field-guide, the great grey is the only shrike to winter in northern Europe, the Dutch name is klap­ekster ‑ Flemish was a dialect of Dutch so the bird name is probably similar.

We continue the walk and after a while met three native birders who tell us of a klapekster that they have seen a few hundred metres back. We find it too. It swoops through the dunes and disappears for a few minutes then flies past us and up into the top of a small birch tree ‑ only fifty metres away but against the sun.

We take a good look at it from where we are, then continue along the path hoping the bird will stay put, but, of course, it doesn't. It swoops out of the tree and up into a hover ‑ holding its body much more upright than a kestrel and fanning its tail to show the black and white pattern below the pale grey rump. It looks around, then flies off to a further birch tree and again perches near the top. Now the shrike is in full sunlight and showing how well it can be camouflaged. The blue‑grey back hardly shows against the pale blue sky, and the pale belly, in shadow, also looks sky coloured. This leaves the dark wing, tail and head markings looking like a continuation of the twig it is standing on. The bird makes a brief sortie from this tree and lands on the next, repeating the pattern until it is out of sight.

With the sunshine to create thermals over the open terrain, there must surely be raptors around. Eventually three birds do appear above the horizon; one soon disappears again, the second is a crow and the third, a goshawk, comes towards us.

Viewed through the telescope, the distant hawk looks pale and plain underneath with very white undertail coverts. As it comes closer, its dark crown and cheek patches with an obvious white supercilium in between become clear. When it is level with us the broad‑based wings with an S‑shaped trailing edge become apparent. Its flight pattern consists of half a dozen heavy flaps to a glide, unlike the sparrowhawk's easy two or three flaps to a glide. The bird goes on past and disappears into the distance, keeping quite high and in a more or less straight line. If only all birds would show their copybook characteristics like that!

In the afternoon we take a short route start­ing from a pub car park in Kalmthout itself, and discovered the continental habit of going for a Sunday afternoon constitutional. It seems as if the whole popula­tion is out and the part of the reserve nearest the town is overrun with humans and dogs; we see no birds other than pipits and tits.

The saga of klapekster is not yet over. A woman asks what we are looking at ‑ nothing in part­icular at this time ‑ so Jim tells her about some of the birds we had seen and shows her a picture of the shrike. She says she has them in her garden, but they are not quite the same ‑ more blue than grey. I wonder if she means magpie, which is super­ficially like a large shrike, and the field guide confirmed that the dutch for magpie is ekster. The word for shrike is klauvier and this is found in their names for all the other shrikes. Serious continental bird-watchers were usually quite fam­iliar with latin names, thus avoiding this sort of con­fusion.

Another pair of confusing birds are the marsh and willow tits. It seems strange here to find only willow tit and not marsh tit here when their habitats so often overlap in Britain, and also strange that the willow tits are in conifers with coal and crested tits. In fact, they are two of several species whose continen­tal habits are not quite the same as their British ones. The marsh tit here occurs in broad-leaf forest and more rarely in mixed forest, while the willow tit occurs main­ly in lowland and mountain conifer forest but sometimes in broadleaf forest and scrub in wet areas.