Must have been a decade ago, no date, don`t have my notebooks at hand here. First ever twitch of a Lesser Spotted Eagle in Holland, still badly wanted by many birders. News came in late that day of a weakly flying LSE in a dune area near Katwijk. Being roughly 200km away, my friend and I decided it was too late to give it a try, especially as this was an eagle. Next day. Arrived really early; we must have gotten up at 3:00 or thereabouts. To make an otherwise boring story short: we searched all day in vain, criss-crossing the entire area time and again. And we weren`t alone. Having no luck we decided to call it a day at around 17:15, when we walked back to the car. Getting there, we bumped into a local walking his dog. The man was wondering what was going on all day: he`d seen us arrive very early that morning. We told him the story; he asked how big the thing was; we exaggerated but luckily not too much. He pointed us to a small bush only 150m away, under which a (the) bird had been sitting all day long. We Couldn’t believe it really, but the story was so strange that we rushed there anyway. Sure enough, there it was: a shivering squatter, eyes closed, underneath a big bramble bush. We weren`t even sure it was still alive. Wondered whether we had to call in some people first, but most had left, and the area wasn`t small. We orchestrated a communal applause, and, just for a split second, the bird opened its eyes (well, the one eye we could see). Then, we decided to pick it up, which I did, and with which it fully cooperated. We took it to a vet some 25km away, where it died of lead poisoning the following day: I think, 12+ pellets counted in an x-ray. The bird was full of lice, which bugged me for another few days.
