I don't know how many hours I have spent staring into trees, looking for that elusive bird, which doesn't show itself for hours at a time. All the excitement of a twitch can die off and you boredly gaze up at some branches and leaves in the hope of finally seeing that bird. As it was today, with a twitch for a TWO BARRED GREENISH WARBLER, I looked up into a sycamore tree for at least two hours with a hundred other people.
With all the excitement of the last couple of days, things quietened down on the islands. No new rarities had been called in, and it seemed to be the sort of day where you just wander around in the hope of finding something of your own. The decision was to spend the day on St Mary's, the main island, and to have a look for any birds that might have flown in.
Maybe a mile or two down the road from where we were staying in Hugh Town was Carreg Dhu gardens a community area planted with exotic plants. After a good search we located a FIRECREST, in one of the conifers. And then news got out that a TWO BARRED GREENISH WARBLER had been discovered on Tresco, an island we had previously visited. Being an extremely rare bird it was decided to go for it, and head off to the other island.
Cue a mad dash from Carreg Dhu to the docks of Hugh Town, with shouts of 'ten minutes to departure!' as we desperately rushed to catch the ferry boat. We bought tickets on the docks, and managed to get to the boat in plenty of time, a boat jam packed with other twitchers, heading for the rare bird. The boat took little time to get to Tresco, and once there it was a case of blindly following other birders to the location of the bird as I had no idea where it was.
I arrived at the twitch and things didn't look too good. Groups of people were stretched out along the road, which meant that the bird hadn't been located for a while. However I decided to stay with the largest group who were looking up into a sycamore tree. It was a busy road for Tresco, and the throng of people constantly had to move to the side of the road as they got out of the way of the golf buggy buses. This warbler we were all hoping to see is an extremely rare bird in the UK, with less than twenty records, so there was a sizable group of people present. Only in a hobby like bird watching could a large group of people spend hours looking up into a sycamore tree, for brief glimpses of a little brown bird.
In the two hours twitching I saw the bird for maybe twenty seconds, enough time to see the distinguishing features of two bars on its wing, and yellow supercilium. It was about the size of a chiffchaff, a couple of which were also in the tree to cause confusion, and stayed in the very tops of the tree which is standard for this species, different types of warblers choose different parts of trees. Its amazing how even the smallest of places could hold birds for a long time without the bird showing itself, as did this bloody sycamore tree.
With the lack of activity, I got bored and moved off to have another look round the island of Tresco. I stopped off at the Great Pool, where a CATTLE EGRET was present on the mud at the back of the lake, but there was nothing different to the last visit, a couple of days ago. In a further wandering round the island I saw little, but did manage to get extremely wet in a brief but very heavy rain storm. That was it with Tresco, and headed back to the guesthouse wondering whether we had really seen a TWO BARRED GREENISH WARBLER, or some kind of imposter species.
The TWO BARRED GREENISH WARBLER was in the end never accepted, it was deemed to be a YELLOW BROWED WARBLER instead. It was decided that the primaries, the end of the wings, were the wrong colour. A shame in many respects, as it would have been a lifer, but I don't particularly care too much, it was a bird I saw briefly, one I saw for seconds and couldn't properly identify it. Its one of those birds that you have to be anal about to tell it apart from other similar birds, one that wasn't very exciting. But then that's bird watching, and I wouldn't do any other hobby.
No comments:
Post a Comment