Pied Wheatear at Meols on the Wirral

This Pied Wheatear was a recent celebrity bird at Meols on the northern end of the Wirral. A life tick for me and many others, the area was swamped by the birding paparazzi for several days but the bird was unperturbed and continued to perform regularly.

The age old issue of whether it's OK to feed mealworms to vagrant birds like this raised its ugly with so-called 'true birders' moaning on Facebook, blogs and other social media platforms, but only after they'd seen the bird up close and got their own photographs.

I personally don't lure birds with food or sounds of any kind, preferring to wait for them to come to me. But in a crowd of people like this you just have to accept it and I don't believe it does the bird any harm - it can always fly away and frequently does! The hard truth is that many of these vagrants will never make it back to where they should be, which in this case is Eastern Europe.

But if it were down to the moaning people like this there'd only be hand-drawings in bird ID books and David Attenborough programs would be full of animations.

These aren't my photos but they shows the sort of crowd scene that can be expected at every rare bird find nowadays - that's the power of the internet grapevine for you.