Weedon’s World
They say that if you spend enough time in the field, eventually you will find great birds. This month, Mike found this may well be the case...
Discover Mike’s joy at finding a rare bird at a secret location close to home
It was a perfectly still, warm, June evening, so naturally, rather than staying in to watch the gogglebox, I was out in search of Quail. With Quails, it is all about listening for the famous ‘wet-my-lips’ song of the male. Seeing them is not on the agenda. And such warm summer evenings, just after the sun sets, are the ideal time to encounter them. I checked out one ‘favourite’ Quail site, but the crops were not grown enough for their liking, so I drove off to check another site. On the way, as the sun set, I called at yet another place, and as the habitat looked good, I went on a bit of a listening walk around a promising field, which looked like it should be dripping with dry-lipped Quails. But all I could hear were buntings and larks and Sedge Warblers, plus a few Pheasants and Red-legged Partridges exclaiming their farewells to the day. But then, wallop! A song hit me hard. When you have been playing this listening game as long as I have, you get to know the songs and calls of most stuff out there, and when something completely different comes along, it is interesting. Very interesting. This song was pouring from a beautifully vegetated ditch, and consisted of leisurely, repeated pure notes, followed by fancy-dan flourishes of virtuoso intricacy. There were elements of mimicry thrown in, too: Swallow, Greenfinch, crickets and Green Sandpiper. And crescendos! This song was nothing like anything I had heard before in this country, and was in danger of being drowned out by the alarm bells in my head. This was the sound of rare. The song didn’t have the pace or excess mimicry of Marsh Warbler, and didn’t include well-known phrases of other birds which can throw curveballs, like mimic-heavy Whitethroats, for instance. If anything, the notes had a chat-like, or even Nightingale-like quality, a thought enhanced by those crescendos. Sharing a genus (Luscinia) with the Nightingale is the Bluethroat, which is rare enough as a passage bird in this country, but very rare indeed as a singer in the UK. Through the dusky light, I couldn’t see this hidden singer, but I started to think that perhaps I was dealing with a Bluethroat. This is where mobile phones come in handy; I made a whispered call to a friend who I knew could get on the internet. I told him what was going on, held up my phone for him to hear the incredible song and asked him to check Xeno-canto for the outlandish possibility of Bluethroat. He checked while I was on the phone and said it sounded close! I phoned another friend, and the result was the same. When I got home at about 11pm, I also checked Xeno-canto and now there was no doubt. I had stumbled upon a singing Bluethroat. I hardly slept with excitement. The next morning that first friend I called from the field came to pick me up, and we were walking to the ‘Bluethroat area’ at 5.15am. Even 150m away we could hear that the bird was in song. A few minutes later, a brilliant male white-spotted Bluethroat was in our scopes, belting out its beauteous melodies, in the wide open, beside its ‘favourite’ ditch. In the last few years, I have found one or two very decent scarce/rare birds (at least by my inland site standards). But this singing Bluethroat is probably the rarest and certainly the most beautiful. And it was found purely by being in the right place at the right time. The sad thing is that, as a singing male on territory, it is not the sort of bird news that should be released into the public domain. Understandably, the site manager wanted it not to be publicised, which is reasonable, as the area could not sustain a ‘public invasion’. Frankly, the bird would inevitably be excessively disturbed, and the habitat trashed, if many people came to see it. Bluethroats are not ‘rare’ birds as such, though they are very scarce inland, and in summer, and in song. Inevitably, birders missed out on seeing this wonderful bird. But I hope they can understand why. None of us are ‘entitled’ to see every bird, and the interests of the bird and habitat and the thoughts and ideas of the folk who run such sites rightly come first. I am not writing about this bird to cock a snook at those who missed out. Just to show how exciting serendipitous birding can be at times. Boy, was finding that Bluethroat exciting! I still didn’t hear a Quail, though...