After another frustrating afternoon in Wells Woods dipping on OBP and Pallas’s Warbler I responded, with little hesitation, to a pager message announcing the presence of an Isabelline Shrike, just up the road at Warham Greens. For once I was at the front of  ‘the pack’, parked up at Stiffkey and headed west along the track towards the ‘whirligig’. There were a couple of dozen birders looking randomly in the hedgerows where the bird was last reported but no one was on the bird. More birders were arriving by the minute but, with ‘no further sighting’, this was beginning to have a bad feeling to it. As the light was starting to fade I looked back to see a small crowd looking intently in our direction from across the marsh. As we started nonchalantly walking in their direction (there’d already been a few false ‘gallops’) the pager announced that the bird was showing. The pace quickened considerably until the growing crowd was lined up peering intently into a hawthorn bush, where it had just been seen. A brief view of the bird as it flew to a nearby bare Elder bush, followed by a couple of partially obscured views of it apparently eating a blackberry and that was it – show over! Still, another much needed Norfolk ‘tick’, third or fourth Shrike species (depending on whose list you use) in as many days and a satisfying end to an otherwise ‘damp squib’ of a day. Alas, no photo of the bird, but here is the obligatory crowd scene – spot the ‘celebrity’ birders!