De-railed

Sitting in wet long grass by a river for a couple of hours may not be most people's idea of how to spend a Saturday morning, but once the fog had lifted, I was out trying to photograph Water Rails on the BTO's Nunnery lakes reserve, having failed last week.  Thankfully, persistence paid off, but typically, the bird I was after was shy and skulking but after a while it did show well feeding on a mat of vegetation.

The rest of the reserve was mostly quiet, but as I walked back alongside E Lake, I glanced up at a few circling gulls and was more than a bit surprised to see one had all white wings - an adult Mediterranean Gull!!  The next few seconds I was all a fluster as I frantically tried to get a record shot of this extremely rare visitor to the reserve but thankfully I managed to get something reasonable.  I contacted the local Lakes birders of my find but the bird drifted off and I lost track of it and despite a thorough search, couldn't relocate it.