Come on, you must have been absolutely buzzing when that news came on.

Yeah, I was absolutely, yeah.

I mean, I didn't jump immediately in the car.

I played it weirdly cool for something like this, waited about an hour, but...

Yeah, it was definitely a palpable, can't wait to go sort of thing.

I guess the fact it came out from the day before steadied a bit of that ship, but it was, you know, of course it was always going to be there.

It's, you know, still there today.

And I got a couple of poor shots of it as well, which I was delighted with.

I'd suggest actually in modern birding there's quite a lot of people who are just seeing birds through their camera screen and it doesn't seem to be a talking point or bother a lot of people but I see folks using new mirrorless cameras which are amazing but that's an LCD screen that you're looking at you're not actually looking at the real photons of the bird and to yeah i've often reflected on how different is that really actually from looking at a tv screen it's just a different it's just a distance between the lens and the and the screen there's not much else to it you're not seeing the real authentic image and that may not matter to a lot of people and that's fine but but to me um it removes some of the authenticity of the encounter

I mean, I'm consistently inconsistent, as you all know, but there's been some very good examples recently of birds in those circumstances.

One of the sightings, the Roof-Stalled Robin that was referenced earlier on its first afternoon, when it was essentially incredibly elusive and seen by 15 people, One of those sightings, the first one when it was relocated, was seen entirely through one of these new multi-spectrum binoculars, which is a combination of a thermal overlay of a essentially digital camera screen.

So it was relocated via a thermal signature that was then looked at.

through a camera, and that was it.

Personally, I wouldn't class that as not birding.

I'd say that's very much birding, using your senses to pick something up.

Should a bird count if it has been assisted by a ship, either deliberately or accidentally?

crazy record on its own.

Went from there, down the coast a bit further to the top of Cleveland, red car, had a nice pied wheat ear, sort of residing on the side of a cinema, sort of commuting between there and the beach.

And then another bird that neither of us had seen before was Eastern Black Red Star, which meant going a little bit further south to Skinning Grove.

And another bird that was really popular, lots of people saw that autumn.

And that was a lovely, what felt like a finish to the day.

And then the megrelow went off for one of many times that autumn with the news that Alan Tillmouth, one of our lovely colleagues on the SightX team, had found a sabacc of his own at Newbiggin.

in Northumberland, and me and my dad had both seen two by then, which feels mental to say, but it just felt like the perfect way to round off the day.

And of course, you, Ed, have written up a brilliant piece explaining the background of the rise of Isabella Inuita as a vagrant in the October issue of Birdwatch.

Sure

...

the biggest twitchers are, you know, can attract thousands of people.

There's been several thousand people this week in Gloucestershire for Britain's third long-tailed shrike, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit.

So yeah, it ...

I think it's that that kind of puts people off.

But pr- I think essentially pretty much every twitcher I know is a birder first and foremost.

Yeah.