look, during my time birding in Norfolk I never claimed to be an amazing birder, I was generally hopeless at bird calls and always felt that I should have found a bit more than I actually did (although I guess a first for Norfolk isn't too bad ;-). However every birder has their strengths and weaknesses and i generally felt that i was an above average seawatcher with a sharp eye and especially on my first year on the coast spent a lot of time seawatching (i'm not claiming that makes a good seawatcher).
How many times are you seawatching and one person picks up a decent bird that is already going away and ID is clinched just before it disappears from view - you wouldn't have seen it if it hadn't been for that one person. In rough weather with a LTS sea-hugging you are likely to get three or four views the whole time it is passing - pretty easy to miss entirely then.
By the sound of things keeping your concentration up for a whole day when the passage was not what was expected would have been hard and people would not have been as focused at 11 and 4.30 than they would have been at 8am. I'm the first to say that on an all day seawatch i would definitely relax and the craic was always brilliant at Sheringham - it would be amazing how much a fresh birder who arrived in late afternoon would start picking up in comparison.
There wasn't too much opportunity for seawatching last year but there was one morning - late October - squally showers ripping in from the North sea - morning light in our eyes, I had a Skua fly past and called it as a LTS in about 1 second, probably shocked i'd called it so quickly I then changed my mind to Arctic. I'm not prone to name dropping MAG picked it up and confirmed the ID - description has been submitted, (i'm confident it will get through - unless the equaliser has been marking my homework ;-) it was missed by every other birder along the Cley stretch and then at Sheringham (in hindsight i'm pretty sure there was another LTS just in front of it that I saw for about a nano-second) - sounds like a fairly typical example right.
I just figure get over it - you missed some Long-tailed Skuas, better luck next time.
Appreciate you have some experience of sea-watching in Norfolk, and you certainly sound 'above average'. That aside, considering you presumably weren't there and don't know who/what you are defending, this seems a slightly strange post?
I'm (at best) a sub-average sea-watcher (lack of time / living 50 miles from the coast doesn't help). I have an accepted Norfolk Storm Petrel (which was missed by several observers at Sheringham that day). In other words, I'm not very good, I've been lucky on a Sheringham sea-watch, and I know the drill.
The point I was making is that the 2 experienced and 3 less-experienced sea-watchers in 'my' shelter (counting myself firmly in the latter camp) - and as far as I can tell, everyone in the 'main' shelter - missed these birds, two of which were reportedly adults, and all of which had gone through by 11:20am (when most of the Arctics were passing, and our concentration was right on the money). More importantly, I was stressing that Long-tailed Skua is a local rarity (which some people don't realise). Perhaps therefore it's a species where nano-second (or even <5-10 second) views, by just one or a few observers amongst c40, should be consigned to the possible/probable category in most cases, rather than being 'newsed' as definite (almost as if using this as a way of 'confirming' the sighting)?
The flip side to the main thrust of your argument could be summed up by the following equation:
very promising weather forecast + inexperienced sea-watchers flock to the coast + high expectations =
n(Long-tailed Skua + Pomarine Skua + Sabine's Gull)
where
n = numerous and/or nailed-on
If I missed Long-tailed Skuas on Tuesday, there's nothing to get over - I do half-dozen or so autumn sea-watches in N Norfolk, which certainly isn't enough to warrant feeling hardly done by. It's the 'if' I'm interested in though, from a bird recording / reporting point of view.
If they're documented properly and get accepted, great! If they were just bunged on a news service and that's the last of the 'record', not so great...
