Rare great knot in England

This is a great knot video.

From Wildlife Extra:

Extremely rare bird draws a huge crowd in Norfolk

A great knot, a small wader you might normally expect to see in Australia, drew around 400 ardent birdwatchers to the Breydon Water estuary near Great Yarmouth in Norfolk this week.

The species has only been seen three times before in the UK – first in Shetland in 1989, then on Teeside in 1996 and, most recently, at Skippool in Lancashire in 2004.

Most of the latter sightings were so distant, however, that that bird was nicknamed the ‘great dot’.

Great knots breed in the tundra of Siberia and winter on the coasts of southern Asia and Australia, travelling between the two in large flocks. Somewhere on its migration, this bird strayed off course, lost its companions and ended up in East Anglia.

Like other calidrids, such as sandpipers, stints and dunlin, the great knot probes mudflats and beaches with its sensitive bill searching for mollusc prey. This specialised bill contains numerous nerve-endings known as Herbst corpuscles to enable the bird to sense the tiny movements of prey buried in the wet mud.

This particular great knot, oblivious to its legions of admirers behind rows of telescopes, enjoyed the delicacies of Norfolk coastal mud for a few days before moving on.

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