Belted Kingfisher

It seems apt to start with perhaps the most famous April Fool’s Day bird of them all (with the possible exception of the 1986 Berry Head Gyr, but that was before my twitching time). Early afternoon on Friday 1 April 2005, news broke of a Belted Kingfisher in Staffordshire – excruciatingly rare bird, well inland, on April Fool’s Day, at a place called Tixall. Yeah, right! But Paul Chapman had spoken to Chris Batty at RBA, who assured him that the news was genuine, so I arranged for the afternoon off and picked up Howard Taffs from Clevedon – Paul had already headed up, taking Richard Hunt with him, but Howard could not leave when they did, so needed a lift.

Trying to suspend disbelief while heading up the M5 became harder with each ‘no further sign’ message, but we kept going anyway, arriving around 5 pm. Barely had we got of the car when we got news that the bird had been relocated inside the grounds of nearby Shugborough Hall. Paul was down along the canal somewhere near where the bird had first been seen, but Richard was waiting for us by the road as we headed back the mile or so to the entrance gates at the southern end. Where to park? There were cars parked out on the green back the way we’d come, but nowhere close, and, quite apart from me being a lazy git, I had Richard and his limited mobility to think of too. So I dumped it by the gates themselves, starting a trend which saw a whole line of cars there when we returned later.

The bird was in a dead tree by a small pond not far inside the gates, so we could quickly settle down to enjoy good views, to be joined by a rather sweaty Paul soon after. It had been 20 years since the last twitchable ‘Belted K’ in Ireland, and 25 since the last British one, so it was a huge unblocker (the first of several in what I came to call ‘The Year of the Gripback’), and the small but growing crowd was full of very happy birders indeed.

It was only after we left that found out the sad news – John Gulley, a long-standing and well-liked Midlands birder, known to his friends as ‘Gupta’, had collapsed while running for the bird and died shortly afterwards from a heart attack. I didn’t know him well, but had met him a few years before when Higgo and his crew let a few of us crash on their floor on Scilly after dipping a Baltimore Oriole on Bryher. Hearing about Gupta added a sombre note to a day otherwise famous for a fantastic-looking and very rare bird.

The next day, being a Saturday, saw a much larger crowd gathered in hope of seeing the kingfisher, made up not just of those who could not get the time off the day before, but also more than a few who had decided that it was a wind-up, and found out too late that it wasn’t. Sadly for them, the bird did a bunk, then caused more frustration by being seen in Yorkshire that afternoon, but only briefly. A week later it popped up at Peterculter near Aberdeen, only to once again elude the Saturday crowd. Fifteen years later, and with only a very mobile and elusive bird in Ireland and a brief one on Scilly to show for it, Belted Kingfisher is once again a much-needed bird – next mainland one will be popular!