Cream-coloured Courser – Golf Course, St. Marys 24^th October 2004

After an absence in the British Isles of almost exactly 20 years, on Tuesday the 28th September 2004, a Cream-coloured Courser was reported in the Scillies, first on St. Agnes and then on St. Martins, and then finally on St. Marys. This followed one that was in France a few months earlier.

Four weeks later it was taken into care on Tuesday the 26th October. Thankfully, by then I had successfully twitched it from Edinburgh via Coventry with Elizabeth, and as a result seen it on both the preceding two days...... .

As such, this surely comprised one of my more unlikely twitches; almost a month after the bird was first seen, a desert bird in a very stormy Scillies in October, and with that ardent twitcher, the errant Elizabeth!

This scheme of things had emerged when Elizabeth and I agreed to go away for part of the October half-term, and I had indicated that it being October, my preference was not to be too committal regarding a destination, and further, that if there was anything to be seen I would want to go to see it. As such, we tentatively resolved to visit Dorset for old time’s sake, and as this was theoretically well-placed on the south coast. However, the greater the staying power the ‘CCC’ demonstrated, the more I wanted to go to the Scillies instead. During the preceding week therefore, I made tentative plans for a twitch there, including getting all the appropriate ‘phone numbers sorted and so on.

So it was that early on Friday the 22nd October I left home and then flew from Edinburgh to Birmingham. After a day rattling around Coventry with and without Elizabeth and a brief visit to her sister’s that evening, we finally set off for the south-west of England after 19:00.

The drive went well, so well in fact, that, with some debate, we just kept going. There was an argument for finding somewhere sooner rather than later and then set off from there at some stage the following morning. Conversely, there was a preference on my part to get as far as possible, so that we could get onto St. Marys sooner rather than later, so that Saturday would be taken up with the twitch of the CCC, and we then had at least two full days to explore the Scillies.

We also debated our accommodation options, and against our better instincts considered stopping in Travel Inns, indeed stopping at the one east of Okehampton on the A30(T). However, we then continued all the way to Hayle where we failed to get a room at a similar large travel inn. This meant we were arriving in Penzance after midnight with no accommodation. Anyway, without any real problem we managed to get a room at a ‘hotel’ on the seafront in Penzance. This wasn’t the most salubrious of places, but it did the job.

Saturday emerged, or we emerged on Saturday, to find a stormy, squally, windy day, and huge Isle of Scilly travel problems as a result. I ‘phoned all the travel numbers I had, to find out what I sort of expected and feared. The Scillonian was cancelled for the second day running, the Skybus was also cancelled, and the helicopters were struggling with the weather and the resultant backlogs too (and also with the lack of a second helicopter for the Tresco flights). However, we were encouraged by the staff at the heliport to ‘phone or call in at various times, just in case there were no shows and so empty seats, or spare seats on flights that had to be put on later. This we did, whilst still enjoying an interesting and exhilarating day in cataclysmic weather.

We visited St. Just, Marazion and Praa Sands and basically chilled. Most memorably we sat in a gallery windowed café-bar looking out over Praa Sands watching the incoming waves (this was Elizabeth’s old stomping ground from her childhood years, so she was very happy, and I was happy to be with her there). I was phlegmatic about the unexpected extra days delay before my intended audience with the CCC. The storm thrilled and excited me; what would it bring with it, if anything?

That night we managed to find far more salubrious accommodation in Marazion, so that the following morning we were refreshed, and ready to continue our thwarted attempt on St. Marys. Again though, we were frustrated by the disappearing prospect of places on additional helicopter flights that morning (we also bumped into Pete and Angela Ewer at the heliport, which was, er, interesting, given I was with Elizabeth and not Gillian....).

Instead, we faced the prospect of a rough crossing on the Scillonian which we were told was to sail at 12:30, and even this seemed unlikely when we turned up at the booking office to find it shut. Anyway, we managed to sort out this minor difficulty, and arranged places on the ferry, park the car (‘illegally’ as it turned out) and, critically, get me some sea-sickness pills.... !

So it was that just before 13:00 we sailed for St. Marys. I stayed on the deck for the entire crossing, getting wet and cold, and trying to maintain a trance-like ‘I’m not going to be ill’ state throughout. Whether it was this, or my taking two (rather than the recommended one) pills, I was, much to my surprise, totally unaffected by the rough seas!!!!

Once on St. Marys, we quickly gathered our belongings and walked into Hugh Town. We still needed accommodation, and after a couple of failed attempts to find bed and breakfast, we got a room at Lyonesse.

Although the sailing was some one hour longer that the usual 2.5 hours, there was still plenty of time to walk up to the golf-course. Or so I thought. For Elizabeth this wasn’t such an appealing prospect, but out of devotion she followed me, on what to her seemed like an enforced route march! Anyway, we got up there in reasonable time, and I was quickly able to find the small group of birders watching the CCC, and therefore, it itself!

It was actively feeding on the fairways around the small group of birders, at times at ridiculously close ranges.

Somehow, and possibly more to do with the past few hours, the bird looked ‘damp’. It also appeared to be duller / darker pale brown that I assumed it would be, although perhaps if it had been in brilliant desert sunshine..... ! Alternatively, the shade of the bird’s plumage was perhaps due to it being a first year bird.

Anyway, it was a quirky looking bird, similar, if anything, to a plover in terms of size, shape, stance and moves. It also had a down-curved bill that was pratincole-like and long legs that were curlew-like. It had an upright and pot-bellied appearance, and fed by running a few metres and then probing at the ground. The birds plumage was overall subtle shades of off-white / light brown, with darker remiges visible. It had a distinctive head pattern involving a ‘smudged’ dark brown patch around the ear coverts, bordered by off-white supercilia, which met at the rear of the nape. The crown was a slightly richer light brown compared with the rest of the plumage. There were some indistinct darker flecks on the coverts, indicative of the bird’s first-winter age. The eye was largish and black, the bill was mainly black with a blue-grey base, and the legs were greyish blue white.

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? As I wrote at the time, “A brilliant twitch, with the woman I love, who loves me and what makes me ‘tick’, despite the wet and cold, and lack of comforts to which she has become too accustomed. Some 18 years and 220 ticks on from the Subalpine Warbler and Red-breasted Flycatcher I saw with Elizabeth at Spurn in May 1986 we twitch Cream-coloured (or Vauxhall?) Courser together! Brilliant. And a celebratory evening necessarily followed...... “.

Little did I know what was to follow the next day, when I was to see Ovenbird and the Cream-coloured Courser again within an hour of each other...... .

Cream-coloured Courser Golf Course, St Marys, Isles of Scilly, October 2004, taken the day before I first saw it (photograph credited to Steve Valentine).