Black-faced Bunting: A quick trip to Spurn where I embarked upon the hard slog across the energy sapping sands of the breach to get to Middle Camp. Here I waited with large group of twitchers and had a long wait before the bird slowly emerged out of the buckthron.
There has been about three records this Autumn so far of black-faced bunting in the UK and several records across Europe, so this Autumn is fast becoming the the black-faced bunting Autumn.
They breed in southern Siberia across to northern China. It is migratory, wintering in north-east India, southern China and northern South-East Asia. It is a very rare vagrant to Western Europe.
The black-faced bunting is a difficult bird to connect with in the UK, there have only been nine accepted records in the UK with the first in 1994. I guess many get overlooked as they are difficult birds to pin down.
These small birds are known for often being very skulky often in deep in shrubbery but emerges to forage in the open more than some buntings. And this is precisely what this bird was doing.
