Our great friend Iain Campbell has been over this week staying with us in Llandudno. You may remember from last year that Iain is co-owner of Tropical Birding (www.tropicalbirding.com) and helped us enormously with The Biggest Twitch. It was great to see Iain and catch up with the latest news, he is now working for Leica Optics and was in the UK for a meeting. We had time for some very casual birding and surprisingly for a man with a life list of well over 5,000 species we even found him a new bird for his life list. Iain visits Britain regularly, usually to attend the Birdfair each August at Rutland Water and has seen nearly all the species in the UK but one has always eluded him despite not being at all rare. So we took the short walk down to Llandudno West Shore to see if we could find one. A few days ago we had been watching several along the shore and we were very confident of securing Iain a new bird. Arriving at the beach the conditions were good, calm, dry and mild. Fulmars were sweeping in and out of the cliffs above, nice but not what we sought. We looked and looked, but no sign of the target bird. Iain was very relaxed as he had been here before, several times we had promised him this species and it hadn’t materialised.  With the clock ticking and Iain glancing at his watch, and beginning to worry about catching his flight home, it looked like another dip.  We turned and began to trudge back.  Just then a small bird flew overhead and landed behind the sea wall, some hundred metres ahead of us.  That’s it!  A Rock Pipit at last.  The view was brief and in flight only, so no way was Iain going to count this on his life list.  We set off in pursuit, just as a dog walker appeared a few yards from where the bird landed.  Surely this couldn’t be.  Would the dog flush the bird before we got close enough for a view?  The dog walked to the exact spot where we’d last seen the bird, but where was the bird?  Had it flown off without us seeing it?   Luckily, no!  The bird was standing within a few feet of the large dog, totally unconcerned by its close presence.  The local Rock Pipits are very used to seeing walkers on two legs and four on this particular beach.  Iain was able to enjoy great views of this subtly marked pipit, and was actually quite impressed despite himself, being rather more used to the exotic birdlife in tropical Ecuador.  Bird under the belt, it was time to head for Manchester airport.As we neared the airport, a phone call from our friends Rose and Roy told of an unidentified bird near Foryd Bay, Caernarfon.  Just our luck to have driven over 60 miles in the wrong direction!  The bird sounded intriguing being white and buff in colour and feeding on the open rocky beach.  Given the description over the phone, we racked our brains for possible identification.  A male Snow Bunting was the only theory we could come up with.  We rang back and asked had they considered this.  Yes they had, but had dismissed this as the bird had a fine insect-eating type bill.  It was then that we remembered seeing a strange bird in the same area over two years ago.  This bird turned out to be a near-albino Rock Pipit, a very strange-looking creature indeed!  When we mentioned this to Rose and Roy, they thought that could well be the mystery bird.  Amazing to think that such a strange and conspicuous bird could survive for so long without being picked off by the local Sparrowhawks, Merlins or Peregrines.  Luckily, they had met some other birders, one of whom was able to take some photographs of the mystery bird and when they were emailed to us this morning, we were able to confirm the identification as the strangely plumaged Rock Pipit.  Always nice to solve a mystery like this!