With recent reports of a long-staying Great-tailed Grackle hanging around in Liverpool, I decided to head out to Speke today to get myself another lifer. After three hours of looking in all the reported spots, and in miserable damp, dark, drizzly weather, I still hadn't found it until I was joined by some other birders, one of whom eventually spotted it feeding in the distance though a fence bordering the nearby industrial estate.
There was no chance of even a record shot here, and there was no access to the industrial estate. After waiting for over four hours with only a couple of brief and distant glimpses of this bird, I eventually settled on just waiting for it to come back to one of its favoured roost sites.
By now it was 4:30pm and the light was fading fast with accompanying drizzle, so I had to ramp the ISO up high to be able to see anything among the branches. It eventually returned at 4:38pm with a couple of Magpies and settled here for about two minutes, calling a couple of times before flying away to its second roost site. Five minutes later and I would have set off back across the field for home and missed it.
I'd liked to have approached a bit closer, but there were other people present and so I didn't. We had a nice craic during the afternoon so all in all a good result, despite the miserable weather.
I was quite disappointed to find out later that although the BOU has classified this as a Category E bird, it does not form part of the British List. This is because it's not a natural vagrant, but most likely human-assisted, having probably come in on a boat via the Liverpool Docks.
