Rose-breasted Grosbeak –Tresco, Scillies, Cornwall, 12^th October 1993

Monster!

In the way of things on Scilly, a Hermit Thrush had been seen on Tresco on Monday the 11th October 1993, and so the next day that was where I was. Except it wasn’t, or apparently not; more of which later..... .

Anyway, whilst forlornly looking for it news broke of a Rose-breasted Grosbeak on the gorse, bracken and bramble covered slopes above the western end of the Great Pool.

As I made my way along the upper track I was daunted by the size and presence of the gallery on the lower track, so I decided to be different and clambered up through the wood to the tor and out onto the hilltop. I made my way to the already present birders photographers, much to the misplaced wrath of the assembled gallery below.

All the same, this did prove to be a misguided idea as, just as the hill-slope frustrated views from the track lower down, it also thwarted ones from higher up. So eventually I made my way to the much dispersed gallery. This afforded better and better views as the bird gradually moved across and then down the slope.

So, in the end this was a very good, and predicted, tick. Best (simplest) description – a like a large male Whinchat – due to the combination of eye-stripe, supercilium, cap and wing-bars, plus the orange wash of the breast.

Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Tresco, Scillies, October 1993 (photograph credited to unknown).

 Blue-cheeked Bee-eater – Asta House, near Scalloway, Shetland, 24^th June 1997

The news of this broke (me) on the afternoon of Sunday the 22nd June 1997, at about 16:00, as Gilly and I browsed our way around the Dougal Evans Walled Garden Centre, at Hopetoun House, just outside South Queensferry, as you do.

I ‘broke’ as it was eight years since the last one, which had been at the somewhat more accessible Cowden in North Humberside. Well remembered because (like the Mowbray Park, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear Baillon’s Crake) I dipped it, as I was moving into 8 Chatsworth Court in St. Albans, whilst Paul Pugh, my birding best mate and arch-twitching rival, scored. The pressure was on!

Much of the rest of Sunday afternoon was spent ‘phoning airports and British Airways or (offshoots of) with little or no tangible success. I was no nearer knowing what I was doing come Monday. In between attempts to work, I continued to make calls to BA and P. and O. Ferries, slowly formulating my strategy. This was not swayed even when offers of lifts on the pager began, although I did ‘phone Dick Filby, seeking his input on twitching it, including advice on any other birders who might be doing so.

So it was that at about 14:50 I left South Queensferry prepared, or at least prepared as I could ever be, for a long twitch. I was still running the car in after its engine refit, but the journey was well timed, or would have been if it wasn’t for rush hour traffic chaos in Aberdeen.

Anyway, I made it, and not knowing anymore than it was showing in the late afternoon, I was off to twitch a mega in Shetland, complete with all its’ memories of successful and unsuccessful previous twitches. It was a bouncy, chilly trip, the wind coming straight from the Arctic, and causing quite a swell. Despite, or perhaps because of, several seasickness pills past their use by date, I was reasonably comfortable throughout the trip, and managed to sleep even though the reclining chairs were less than ideal for sleeping in. However, I coped better than most, and breakfasted well, before attempting a sea watch, which was abandoned quickly as it was just too cold.

Finally, we arrived in Lerwick, on time. I disembowelled (!), (tripods are so dangerous!), and marched to the nearest taxi, and asked for Asta House. After some debating and prompting a fare of £6.50 was agreed, and so we were off. At just about 08:10 we arrived at what was thought by me and the decent old taxi-driver to be the said Asta House, but by way of confirmation I asked a local woman, who in turn asked me if I was looking for ‘the bird’. She told me it was still there and I paid the taxi driver. At first I could only hear it, which was very frustrating, as it was obviously very close in the crown of a stunted sycamore in the well vegetated (for Shetland) garden. It was only after the local woman had departed and a local man had arrived that I finally located it by moving along the top of the roadside bank against the garden fence. It was sat on the top of the sycamore on wind stunted dead branches just above the canopy, and so slightly obscured from some angles. However, it obliged us with crippling, although back on and slightly obscured, views. He too had to go so I was left on my own with an eighth for the British Isles.

There was the occasional further passing local, including Pete Ellis. After some while it moved from its favourite perch, possibly due to my noises in an attempt to get it to face me. Anyway, it then proceeded to move from perch to perch within the same wooded (?) gardens and was obliging enough to let me fire off many shots - some quite close and with flash – Reg Mellish (er, let’s say, a very early incarnation of a modern-day togger) eat your heart out! After it had had enough it made its way back from perch to perch to its favourite perch in the sycamore.

Here it showed better than ever whilst I showed it to a mini-bus full of students from de Montford University, on a seabird ringing expedition to Yell.

Whilst they were watching it suddenly left its favourite perch and flew to the nearby golf course and began hawking for more insects and then perching on the adjacent barbed wire fences alongside the golf-course and road. However, when the mini-bus and another vehicle went past, it was flushed and flew alongside the mini-bus over the golf course, and away.

I followed it on foot when it didn’t return but failed to locate it, so I returned, if only to grip-off the late-comers, including the birders on the charter from Inverness I had considered trying to get on.

It was a stunning bird. Overall it was bright green with some browner and bluer areas. It had a long tail with long pointed central tail feathers and also long wings. It had a long black eye-stripe terminating with an upward sweep behind the eye, and separating two powder blue patches on the upper and lower face. It also had a white forehead, yellow chin, and orange-red upper breast. In comparison with European Bee-eater it was more slightly more attenuated, in particular because of the longer tail, with a longer decurved bill that was all dark, as were what was seen of the feet. Otherwise, was very similar in size, shape and overall appearance, both in flight and at rest. The call was similar as well.

After some general socialising (gloating?) with the assembled birders I walked into Scalloway and to the recommended North Atlantic Fisheries College, which proved to be a fitting place for a meal that was excellent. I had seen a stunning bird when no other twitchers had seen it that day, at least until it was re-discovered late in the evening. I returned on the ferry that night feeling very comfortable with life, and was, in effect, back at work by 10:30 on the Wednesday, having taken just one whole day off. A supremely successful grip back! That said, I was equally a tad uncomfortable, as the same crew who had twitched in by charter plane from Inverness were returning on the St. Clair ‘with’ me, having dipped….. .

Many years later, when Chris Pendlebury and I stayed in Scalloway in September 2020, we birded Asta House every morning, and I was invited to bird the excellent gardens from the inside, rather than from the roadside, by Janet Caterall, the co-owner of Asta House. When we discussed the Blue-cheeked Bee-eater I had twitched, she showed me her signed photograph of it which she had been presented by Bill Oddie, and I was photographed holding it in front of the sycamore the bird had most often frequented.

Blue-cheeked Bee-eater, near Scalloway, Mainland Shetland, Shetland, June 1997, so close even I could get record shots.

Your truly with said signed photograph many years later at the scene of my successful twitch.

Blue-cheeked Bee-eater, near Scalloway, Mainland Shetland, Shetland, June 1997 (photograph credited to Rob Wilson).

 Naumann’s Thrush – Woodford Green, Essex, 6^th February 1990

A less than successful attempt to capture how the bird looked in the very early morning light as it fed on the cricket pitches.

Finally the thrush succumbs!!!

Pete Ewer, Mike Thompson and I had had an unfeasibly bad start to 1990. On Saturday the 13th January, we’d dipped Wallcreeper having gone to Amsterdam for the day on the ferry from Harwich to Hook of Holland and the boat train from Hook of Holland to Amsterdam.... .

And then we went to Starcross / Dawlish in Devon on Sunday the 4th February on what turned out to be a complete fool’s errand. We had chased a rumour of a Green Heron which came to nothing, and only later on had we realised that there had been two Serins nearby...... .

This was incidental though. All the time we were standing around waiting for the Green Heron rumour to become something somewhat more tangible another rumour was slowly escalating... .

It went something like this...:

- ‘news of something big is going to break later today’;

- ‘news of something big in South-east England is going to break later today’;

- ‘news of something big in Greater London is going to break later today’;

- ‘news of a rare thrush in Greater London is going to break later today’;

- etc..

By the time we had travelled back to St. Albans later that evening I think we knew something like the full story.

Unbelievably, there was a Naumann’s Thrush in Woodford Green, on the edge of Epping Forest in north-east London!!!!! A what now??????

Necessarily, Pete and I were there early the following morning. But not early enough, as it turned out, as we just missed its pre-dawn appearance on the artificial wicket of the cricket pitch.

Hundreds of birders were arrayed all the way around the boundary of cricket field, standing close to the edge of the woodland that surrounded it. Sometime soon after dawn, there was a sudden ‘dread’ as seemingly birders in the far corner of the cricket field got news that the bird had been seen nearby. Seeing these birders running all of a sudden, everyone else set off running towards this point from all sides of the cricket pitch. Hundreds of birders, all clad virtually the same (at the time, in regulation issue Barbour jackets) and carrying tripods, etc., all charged across the cricket field as fast as they could.

This scenario always amused me greatly, as I imagined some bloke in one of the council houses which bounded on side of the cricket field lazily getting out of bed, stretching and then pulling back the curtains to see this apparent invading army storming towards the council estate, and shouting, “FUCK!!!!!! Hilda!!!!! Get in the wardrobe. The bloody Russians are here...!!!!!”

Anyway, later, whilst we were still moping about, David Cotteridge, who was there with a friend who was a press photographer, asked whether any of us would participate in a staged photograph. Given that most people there should have been at work, most birders quickly disappeared as they didn’t want their photograph taking, but Pete and I stepped forward, and volunteered to do so.

That was as good as it got..... . I later commuted into Central London from whichever was the nearest or most convenient nearby railway station. I was at work at ERL by about 09:15. (ERL, now ERM, was the environmental consultancy I was working for in London at this time).

OBVIOUSLY, Pete and I repeated the process the following morning, Tuesday the 6th February, with the very important exception that we made sure we got there earlier, given we had arrived just too late the previous day.

As a result we were able to witness its appearance out of the dark; in the (very dark) semi-light, I was able to eliminate the other thrushes due to a combination of its upright Wheatear-like stance and initially the pale wing-panels reminiscent of a female Ring Ouzel. As the light improved, so did the views, revealing plumage with a colouration recalling somewhat lighter female Blackbirds or (apparently) American Robin having been bleached out. Later in better light the upper-parts were a warmish grey-brown, and the under-parts were white and closely mottled with diamond shaped orange-rufous spots. The rump and the tail were more rufous, and it had a distinctive facial pattern, combining supercilium and sub-malar stripe like a female Bluethroat.

Having seen it, we departed. Pete again dropped me at whichever railway station it was, and I again commuted in to Baker Street Underground Station to arrive at work at ERL at around 09:25.

On my desk someone had placed a photocopy of the back page of that days Daily Telegraph on which there was a large black and white photograph depicting a group of birders walking through a wooded area. I was right in the middle of the group looking towards the camera. Pete was obscured by the other birders. Someone had ringed my face. Fair cop. Was I bothered? No, I had seen Naumann’s Thrush!!!

An old newspaper cutting, featuring the photograph of the staged twitch, taken by Dave Cotteridge's press photographer friend, which appeared in the Daily Telegraph, and which was placed on my desk at work, with me circled, the morning that I arrived late at work for the second day running, but crucially, this time, with Naumann's Thrush on my list.  Obviously, I'm completely inconspicuous in the photograph, dominating the scene, dead centre, and looking directly at camera.....

Paul Pugh, my long-time best birding mate and twitching arch-rival hadn’t – so I prepared a spoof flyer to celebrate my success and antagonise him further.

My spoof film review flyer, prepared solely to grip Paul Pugh off.

I saw it again when we went back on Saturday the 24th February. I also saw Lesser Spotted Woodpecker in the woodlands.

So in the end, I had storming views of a stonking bird after a stinking early 1990.

Naumann's Thrush, Woodford Green, Essex, February 1990 (photographs credited to Peter Ewer).

Gyr Falcon – Loch na Reivil, Hougharry, North Uist, Outer Hebrides, 2^nd April 2016

Gyr Falcon sketches based on those in my 2016 notebook (and as such, based on those made at the time).

Historical dips, or at least failures to twitch, but most notably the failed twitch to North Uist with the pregnant Gillian in April 1998, and the failed twitch to North Cornwall with (the not pregnant) Elizabeth in December 2007, were one of the back-stories to this twitch. Oh, as was the notorious occasion when, as part of our ‘Let’s Do Scotland’ trip, Dave McAleavy and I travelled by ferry from Aberdeen to Lerwick in May 1990. We hadn’t really planned to get to Shetland via Orkney and as such we hadn’t planned for an overnight stop-off in Stromness en-route, and so sneaked back onto the ferry to sleep that night, and then twiddled our thumbs in Stromness before we sailed the following morning. Once we finally departed for Lerwick, we were up on deck. We were admiring the mightily impressive Old Man of Hoy as we sailed past when someone casually remarked, “There’s been a Gyr Falcon up there...”. D’oh! Frantic scanning ensued, to no avail. Worse, debatably, we would have had time to get there earlier that morning, if only we had known about it!

However, as an alternative to such bad luck stories, another argument could be that I merely bided my time before finally catching up with a prime occurrence of this must-have species. I certainly bided my time with this individual, which despite it (or at what was most likely to have been it) having been on North Uist, or the Uists, since at least the 6th December 2015, I finally caught up with it on Saturday the 2nd April 2016.

Circumstances prevailed against me going before early April even though it had eventually become a bit more reliable, being associated with the general area around Benbecula in general (rather than North Uist, or indeed the Uists!) for at least a couple of weeks.

This meant setting off to hopefully catch up with it on April Fool’s Day, an irony not lost on me given my track record. Neither was the dubious delight of driving past numerous signs warning of ‘Hidden Dips’ and even ‘Blind Summits’ on the A roads through the Highlands and beyond to the Islands, or at least Skye.

The crossing from Uig to Lochmaddy was surprisingly calm, at least in terms of sea state, given a storm earlier had possibly caused the previous sailing to be cancelled.

I perhaps wasn’t quite as calm, especially as dusk tantalised to the extent that I might have made it to the scene (had the ferry sailing not been delayed by some 30 minutes) in half decent light. That and the fact that the directions on RBA being entirely misleading, certainly in relation to my ‘intelligence’ from Ken Shaw, et al., and, sign of the times, Facebook. The directions on RBA stated, “W. Isles. GYR juv. Female white morph still North Uist at Balranald RSPB by road near visitor centre and showing well. View from a sensible distance and stay away from swan carcass”.

Now, call me stupid, but this, to me, implied that the target of my quest, or at least its most recent food source, was somewhere (very) near the Balranald RSPB visitor centre. It was for this reason that I parked up there, and settled down for a surprisingly ‘good’ night’s sleep in the car. And it was for this reason that, from dawn onwards, I travelled and walked the local road network for at least two hours forlornly looking for a swan carcass which was within 30 or 40 m of the said roads.

Finally, I decided that it had to be elsewhere, and to my failing logic, the next most likely place was Loch na Reivil, just north of Hougharry, a place I remembered from two years before when Gary and I ‘Did the Hebrides’ and stayed in the nearby Sgeir Ruadh bed and breakfast with Mrs K. Simpson.

Once there I chatted to a bizarre elderly couple who were looking for the Gyr Falcon too, and indeed they showed me the much vaunted Mute Swan corpse. I gently, and then increasingly less so, suggested that they should move away from the corpse and watch from their car. This failed to register, so I tried to set a good example by retreating myself and parking up some way off.

Having set myself up in the car, I almost immediately became aware of alarming Common Gulls, and as I traced them I realised, in a complete heart attack moment, that they were mobbing a fucking great big white thing perched on a fence-post on the peninsula in the lochan.

I frantically waved and gesticulated at the couple, who were still wandering around aimlessly near their car, and therefore near the swan carcass. They remained defiantly oblivious..... . In complete frustration at their general ignorance (both in terms of still wandering around near the corpse and totally ignoring me – and so potentially not seeing the bird they were ‘looking’ for) I resorted to driving at them at speed in the wrong gear to ‘put them right’.

Anyway, perhaps I needn’t have panicked, as effectively the bird remained on the same fence-post until much later in the day, long after I had watched it for a good while, helped the couple get on it, allowed them to use my ‘scope (as I was feeling guilty!!!), walked closer and watched and sketched it for a good while more, departed to Lochmaddy, checked into the Lochmaddy Hotel, watched Brighton and Hove Albion versus Burnley and lunched in the solitude of the public bar, and eventually returned.

Once back, I watched it on the same fence-post for a good while more. Initially I had it to myself (and even resorted to waving down passing Dutch tourists in camper vans to share the experience with them), but eventually (partly due to the arrival of the afternoon ferry) other car loads of birders appeared. I also visited the RSPB visitor centre for a ‘comfort break’ and collected another car with another couple of birders who were evidently following the same directions as me..... .

I returned with them, and thankfully from their perspective, it was still on the same fence-post.... .

By this time, I hadn’t exactly lost interest, but the combination of its inactivity, and the previous night’s ‘sleep’ in the car and the lunchtime beer meant that I nodded off. ...... just a few minutes wouldn’t matter, it was only ever going to be on the fence-post...... .

After my (brief?) doze I focussed on the fence-post, and it wasn’t there!!! “WTF?” I scanned the general area and became aware of an off-white shape in the long grass near where I had walked earlier.

I binned it to confirm my suspicions. Obviously I wanted views, but it wasn’t really necessary to confirm the Gyr Falcon was indeed part hidden in the long grass near the edge of the loch.

The assembled cars were (gently) jostling for a better position just a little way further along the road. I did the same, and then, like others were also doing, I edged open my car-door and erected my tripod.

Binocular views of ‘it’ at an estimated range of 40 m were amazing enough, but through the ‘scope zoomed up to 60 x they were incredible! At this magnification the bird almost filled the ‘scope!!!

The bird was tearing chunks of raw (and fresh!) meat off the carcass of what I suspected was a Greylag Goose. Its’ new food source was largely hidden in the long grass, but at times as the Gyr Falcon ripped chunks out of it more of it was briefly visible.

This was massively dramatic action, was enjoyed (and photographed and videoed) by all with almost safari-like voyeurism analogous with that of the occupants of several Land-Rovers around say, a Leopard with a recent kill.

Although intent on eating as much as possible as quickly as possible, the bird was just slightly uneasy about the proximity of the cars and birders. Fantastically, it responded to this potential threat by taking the goose carcass in the talons of one leg, and then attempting to drag it off by walking away on the other, accompanied with some wing flapping. Enormously powerful!! An absolute BEAST of a bird!!!!

Eventually, having consumed its fill, and having failed to drag the carcass very far, it lazily flew back across the lochan to (a different!) fence-post.

No words can do justice to this bird; beyond stating it was awesome, large, white, and evidently immature and female it was just massively impressive. (Okay then, a very large falcon, with largely white plumage with intricate and subtle dark markings, mainly on the wings and back and black wing tips. It had pale blue-grey legs and feet and bill. Will that do?).

Gyr Falcon, Loch na Reivil, Hougharry, North Uist, Outer Hebrides, April 2016 (photograph credited to Graham Jepson, and taken at the time I was there).