Then there is the water fowl.

Oh, I forgot about our seafaring friends. Yes, we have swans, ducks, black headed gulls (quite rare, I hear), puffins and the odd seal or dolphin at the coast. I'm not really a twitcher (it's just the way I'm standing) so don't I really know my warblers from my tits (pardon my indelicacy).

There was a secretary at a place I worked at in Sunderland one particularly snowy winter who came running into the office after a smoke break proclaiming that she had seen "strange footprints" in the snow going across the yard. "The strange thing is," she warned, "there's only one line of footprints so whatever made them must only have one leg". After I stopped laughing I went to examine the "footprints". It was obviously a bird, probably a robin that had been bobbing along through the snow. From then on, until the snow melted some months later I kept asking her if she'd seen "the Sunderland Beastie" on her smoke break.