Aurora borealis

Of Slender-billed Curlews...

Got up at first light on Saturday absolutely brimming with optimism, given what was elsewhere on Shetland. First few birds seemed reasonably promising - some calling Goldcrests and a couple of Chiffchaffs, and plenty of Redwings calling as they flew overhead. Only a Song Thrush in the trap, the first of a dozen or so during the day. A Fieldfare in an enclosed yard. A few more Goldcrests in the plantation. Five Barnacle Geese flying south-west offshore. And a peach of a steady south-easterly blowing all the meantime. By now if truth be known I was feeling slightly pissed off that there had been nothing better, so headed onto the runway thinking Short-toed Lark/Shorelark/Sibe Stonechat, but could only manage 40 Golden Plovers (and nothing remotely American!). Things finally improved by my tattie patch with a Bluethroat, and shortly afterwards a beautiful Red-breasted Flycatcher in the bushes of the croft below us. A really smart bird with a rich apricot-washed breast.

Bumped into B by the trap, and went back to look for the Bluethroat, seeing the flycatcher buggering off over the fields towards my croft. No sign of the Bluethroat, just a Wren masquerading as a Lancie in the tatties.

JL was back, and had found another shrike, Great Grey this time. He needs to up his game to Long-tailed... B had a vocal Yellow-browed Wblr in his garden (why still none in the plantation? Am convinced it's the lack of sycamores!), and elsewhere on the island another Bluethroat and a Bastard Grotfinch.

B set up a net in the plantation in the evening, and repeated drives yielded a handful of Goldcrests, Garden Warblers and a pair of male Blackcaps. The flycatcher had turned up in my thistle patch at lunchtime, but had moved on before JL turned up to see it.

All very well, but no bird to really set the blood racing. And then the bad news that there had been a White's Thrush on the mainland at Voe, presumably the Skerries bird. Why couldn't the big fat thrush have stopped off in the plantation? Oh well, another time.

Met a couple of visiting birders yesterday, with an interesting tale about the curlew in Suffolk - rumour has it that a Belgian curlew-expert has been to see it twice, and is convinced it's a Slender-billed. So much so that on the strength of that prognosis Dutch listers have been over to twitch it. Which reminds me...

I normally consider myself a fairly lucky birder, and have certainly had more than my fair share of being in the right place at the right time experiences (ie twitching the Oriental Pratincole in Norfolk on the day the Pacific Swift turned up at Cley), but there are a couple of occasions when I've shown monumental poor judgement and consciously made a decision that proves to be utterly, spectacularly the wrong one. The least painful of the two whoppers is the Scillonian Fea's Petrel Experience (see an earlier blog entry) - after all, there's still a fair chance I might evenually bump into one of these enigmatic birds.

The one which really hurts however is the Northumbria Slender-billed Curlew. I had a car-full of birders with me, down in the south-east for our annual assault on the Kent Bird Race (racing as The Total Kents, our team name after the organisers delicately asked us to change from the sponsor-unfriendly Amazing 24 Hour Shags...) We had a choice - do the bird race the following day, or drive overnight for a funny Curlew that might or might not be Slender-billed. As the driver, I got the casting vote, and on the basis that a) Slender-billed Curlew was almost certainly globally extinct, and b) the last remaining individual of the species had no business being on the north-east coast of England, I decided we'd stick with the birdrace.

The following day, with a total of 148 species behind us, it seemed like the right decision. The next month, seeing for the first time the photos of the Northumbria curlew, I started to feel a bit uneasy. A few months later, when the BBRC confirmed Britain's first (and surely last) Slender-billed Curlew, it seemed like the dumbest idea of my birding career to date. Okay, so granted they're a birder's bird - brown, and pretty similar to their common cousins, but all the same... what a bird to see.

Let's just say that were I still living in the south, I'd have been to see this bird before any Cream-coloured nonsense on Scilly!

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Posted by Stercorarius at October 4, 2004 10:28 AM