6 reasons to watch rarer birds
Watching birds – all birds – is what this magazine is all about, of course. There can be just as much pleasure to be had from seeing a common bird on your garden feeders as a ‘mega’ on some windblown coast; the common bird might be new for your backyard patch, or you might get better views of it than you’ve ever seen before, or notice some unfamiliar behaviour. That said, there’s an undeniable appeal to seeing rare (or at least, rarer) birds, once in a while. James Lowen, who writes our Beyond Birdwatching page, says: “The allure of the rare – particularly my burning desire to FIND my own rare birds, rather than ‘twitch’ other people’s – so dominates my birding year that I try to minimise all work commitments during key rarityfinding periods, notably October.” So, you don’t have to become a full-blown twitcher, but here six of the best reasons to watch and enjoy rare birds…
1 Sharpening your skills
As Mark Golley has shown on the preceding pages, watching rarities, and particularly finding your own, requires you to develop all aspects of your ID skills – recognition of different plumages, listening to songs and calls, knowing what to expect in certain habitats, and even ‘reading’ the weather and calendar. That has a benefit for all your birdwatching – you’ll find that you’re seeing more species, rare and common, as you go on.
2 Learning family
Let’s say you find a Marsh Sandpiper – a rare vagrant in the UK – down at your local wetlands. It’s very much a bird to enjoy in itself, with its elegant looks, but you’ll also find that it subsequently makes you look harder at every Tringa sandpiper you see, partly in hope of finding another, and partly because you’ll want to appreciate exactly what makes this visitor different. So, even future encounters with the familiar Redshank take on new significance.
3 Inadvertent discoveries
If you get into the habit of looking for rare birds, along the lines Mark Golley suggests, you’ll also find less rare, but no less interesting species along the way. So, you might visit a south coast headland looking for Aquatic Warblers in late summer, but fail. Chances are, though that you’ll turn up other species you’ve not seen before – from Black Redstarts to flyby skuas.
4 Conservation
Some rarer birds, of course, are only hard to find in Britain – they might have large populations elsewhere. But others are struggling, full stop. Take those Aquatic Warblers. Their central and eastern European breeding habitat is coming under more and more pressure. Observations by British birders of how many pass through in autumn could be vital to working out how the population is doing.
5 Information
Similarly, watching rare birds can unearth new information on a species. Take the famous (or infamous) 1998 Druridge Bay Slender-billed Curlew – while debate about it still rages, it did spark all sorts of discussions about Id-ing Curlews, too. And the more recent search for the species across Europe and Asia turned up new data on the wider curlew family.
6 Enthusing birdwatchers
Rare and scarce birds do have a certain glamour to them, so looking for them once in a while, and finding them, can spark an interest in non-birders – you tell them that you’ve just found a tiny bird that should be in Siberia, and they’ll sit up, take notice, and who knows, look for a pair of binoculars. And of course, it will fire your own birding enthusiasm further, creating a virtuous circle of better birding.