Car trouble

An inevitable result of driving a ridiculous number of miles to chase after birds all over the country is that at some point your car is going to let you down. The annals of twitching are littered with tales of breakdowns and how they were dealt with – at least one tells of a very high-ranking twitcher thumbing a lift off fellow birders from the hard shoulder, abandoning his stricken car where it stood, to be sorted out as and when later.

I’ve had my share – probably more than my share, now I think about it. A wheel bearing going, a busted alternator, the exhaust falling in half a couple of times, a blowout, and a disturbing number of engine problems, all on twitches. The perils of doing a lot of miles in a succession of mostly quite old cars, I suppose, or maybe I need to do something about my driving style. But any long-distance twitcher will have at least some similar tales to tell, I am sure. Thankfully most of mine have been on the way back from birds, rather than on the way there.

Then there was that other time…

On the morning of 23 March 1997 I got a terse call from Paul C, just as he was about to jump in his car: ‘Little Crake, Bough Beech Reservoir’. Little Crake was a big need, 10 years since the last twitchable one, so as soon as James got to mine we were off in the old Escort I had at the time. Big trouble within a few miles though – oil light on, some odd noises from the engine, and the car clearly was not going to make it to Kent. Our only possible lifts had been waved off by phone with good luck messages some time before, so it was back to Ilminster and some desperate thinking as to how to get hold of another vehicle on a Sunday morning. Couldn’t borrow my Dad’s, he needed it that day. James was under strict instructions not to use his Mum’s car on a twitch, so that was out too. What to do? Where to go? I know, the pub!

The regulars at my old local, the sadly now long-defunct White Horse, used to play the landlord up something chronic (one of the milder pranks was the time he came back from a safari holiday in Kenya to find we’d turned the white horse on the sign into a zebra…), but he was always up for helping out a friend in need. And I knew he also had an old Escort, which he wasn’t using, tucked away in the car park. It turned out that the Escort wasn’t taxed or insured, so it wasn’t an option, but he offered to lend me the pub minibus instead! It was almost worth borrowing just to see the look on James’s face when I turned up back home in it. But once he’d stopped laughing the twitch was back on, and we were off to Kent.

It was a bit underpowered and slower than we would have liked, and a disturbing amount of white smoke blew out behind us for the first few miles on the A303 as the engine decoked itself, but it was at least a working vehicle. And fair play, it got us there. After a stressful wait, knowing our time on site was limited, we got decent views of the bird, and we made it back in time (just) for the landlord to use it to ferry the pub pool teams to their Sunday night league matches.

So if you were on that twitch and ever wondered why, in amongst all the cars parked along the reservoir causeway, there was a shrieking red Sherpa minibus emblazoned in big white letters with the name of a pub in Somerset, now you know.