Double dip day

October 1995 was the nearest I have ever come to ‘phasing’. It started off well enough, very well indeed in fact with Britain’s third-ever White-crowned Sparrow and a long weekend with James on Scilly that included ticking Red-eyed Vireo and jamming in on my first Alpine Swift. But it unravelled pretty quickly. A one-day Parula came and went while we were briefly off Scilly, then in our planned a week on there my only tick was Red-throated Pipit, while two Yellow Warblers appeared in Ireland and a Sociable Plover was twitchable (just) in Dorset.

On our final day on Scilly I suggested to James that we move our flights earlier and just get off and go home, but I’d been such a pain to be around that week that he wasn’t in the mood to listen, I think. We were on Bryher that afternoon watching a Bonelli’s Warbler sp. when a message came on Birdnet saying that a birder had found what he thought was a Chestnut-sided Warbler at Prawle Point in south Devon, and asking for help to confirm. On RBA this apparently translated into the distinctly lukewarm ‘unconfirmed report of a possible’. Shame we had dodgy mobile signal on Scilly, so couldn’t pass on the Birdnet message: I know Paul C wonders to this day whether he could have made it if he had left Bristol immediately – touch and go, I think, but with more positive gen he would have tried. He did, however, phone Alastair Stevenson about it: Al left the office I normally shared with him in Taunton at 4 pm and pegged it down to Prawle in time to see the bird, which was indeed Britain’s second Chestnut-sided. Meanwhile, James and I left Scilly on our planned 5 pm flight with no chance of making it there that day.

Having dropped James off in Taunton I headed down to Prawle anyway. In the Pig’s Nose pub that night I found three young Scottish birders drowning their sorrows – they had done Prawle that morning on the way down to Scilly, found nothing, and heard about the bird too late to make it back from Penzance in daylight. As we left the pub at about 11.30 pm the cloud was clearing away, leaving an ominously clear sky. Plenty of American birds had been found in the previous week or so, but all had made first landfall further north and nothing was sticking – even an Upland Sandpiper on Scilly (normally good for a few days’ stay) upped and left after only a couple of hours. So the chances of a warbler staying through a clear night were slim to none.

The next day dawned and the collected crowd marched down to the car park to begin the inevitable dip. A few Cirl Buntings were pretty much all anyone had to show for it. By lunchtime I had given up and headed up the A38, stopping briefly at the services on Haldon Hill. There were a few other birders there, including Adrian Wander, who told me that an American cuckoo had been seen on St Mary’s on Scilly. Why couldn’t that have been there yesterday?

During the charge back down to Penzance it was confirmed as a Yellow-billed, and it was showing well in the trees along the edge of the campsite at Rocky Hills. There’s footage of people watching it (and the infamous car-runs-over-birder’s-foot incident) in the strange twitching documentary that also had the late Keith ‘Dipper’ Lyon rowing across Blakeney Harbour. It was still showing as I jumped on the chopper with Sean Browne, a printer from Nottingham who I knew from yearlisting the year before. But when we arrived on site, it wasn’t. About 20 minutes earlier it had dropped out of the tree where it had been sat for several hours, never to be seen again. As dusk fell, and my spirits along with it, I tried for one last crumb of consolation and said to Sean, ‘It could have been worse, it could have been Black-billed.’ Sean, bless him, came up with an innocently devastating reply: ‘I don’t need Black-billed.’

Worse, however, was yet to come. Stuck on Scilly overnight, I found a B&B then headed out for an utterly joyless meal and beer in the Bishop and Wolf. There were plenty of birders there who had seen me on Scilly for the previous week and didn’t know that I had left, so assumed that I had seen the cuckoo and, again entirely innocently, came up to me with beaming smiles. If the ground could have swallowed me up, I would have welcomed it. Then I met Mark Bailey, friend and big Devon lister, himself shell-shocked at missing the Chestnut-sided in his home county. He took one look at my face and said, ‘You don’t want to be here, mate, do you?’ No I didn’t.