More Eastern Delights and a cold dish of revenge.

What a cracking weekend:

Benitez's brinkmanship strikes again.

And the belief that Torres has messed with the head of the formidable Vidic since taking him to the cleaners in Liverpool's 4-1 win at Old Trafford last season was only underscored by the Serb's ham-fisted attempts to mete out his own form of physical intimidation.

Three times in three games he has failed to survive the 90 minutes against Liverpool and the cruel jibe is already doing the rounds that "trick or treat" children will turn up at Vidic's house on Halloween wearing Torres masks.

Oh yes and the score was 2 - 0 to Liverpool. After all the jibes from my Utd supporting mates about red balloon's they've suddenly gone very coy about responding to texts!!!

Back to the birds - a late decision Saturday night to get up Sunday and travel to the east coast where Red-flanked Bluetail & Dusky Warbler were still present at Bempton / Flamborough resulted in a flurry of phone calls with Pod & Mark accepting lifts.

We arrived at Bempton to find the Bluetail hadn't been seen since early morning. Many people were standing (and a few talking at the top of their voices) around the small feeding station waiting for it to reappear. With limited cover it became obvious within 20 minutes that a) the bird wasn't there & b) it was unlikely to show with all the noise so we split up and searched different areas. A couple of hours later Mark came back to say he'd met someone who'd seen it on the approach lane about 400 m from where it was last seen so we headed that way. Finally catching up with the bird we were soon joined by a massed throng and decided to leave for nearby North Landing.

Unfortunately the Dusky Warbler wasn't playing ball and despite both Pod & I hearing it call and having brief views it didn't show for Mark and we reluctantly left it and went for a pint nearby before driving home!

As an aside, Pod, being a mischevious kind of person, sat in a ditch along the approach lane to the car park at Bempton playing Red-flanked Bluetail call at full volume on his mobile. Mark & I could clearly hear it from 20 m away. Not one person stopped..................Even if they didn't recognise the call you'd have thought someone would have checked it out.
A great weekends birding - Eastern-crowned Warbler, Red-flanked Bluetail, Dusky Warbler and Red-backed Shrike. Amazingly I've now seen Red-flanked Bluetail three times in four years. Not bad for a species that not so long ago was the stuff of dreams and a major rarity.