Nutcracker sweet

Sunday 6 September 1998 looked good for seawatching, so Stuart Holdsworth, Alastair Stevenson, and I headed down early to Hope’s Nose at the top end of Torbay. The morning wasn't high on variety, but numbers of skuas were excellent, with Arctics topping 100, and a single juvenile Long-tailed picked out amongst them. By about 11 am things were tailing off a little, though, and I had already thought about how much longer to give it. Then I got a pager message which decided the issue – ‘Nutcracker, St Margaret’s, Kent’. We left, rapidly. Stuart didn’t need it, having seen the famous bird at Westleton, Suffolk in 1985. James McGill, on the other hand, very much did, as of course did Alastair and I – the equally famously showy and confiding Cocknage Wood, Staffs bird in 1991 was just before my twitching time. So after a rapid exchange of calls we headed back to Taunton to drop off Stu and pick up Jimbo, then off to Kent.

The journey, while inevitably stressful, was largely uneventful, but it was gone 4 pm when we arrived at St Margaret’s. We jumped out of the car just in time to be directed straight on to the bird, at that point circling well above treetop height and showing every sign of trying to leave. Phew! Not the best of views, but certainly identifiable.

After a few minutes the bird evidently decided it didn’t like the look of conditions out to sea and dropped down again and out of view. At that point I went in search of a loo – I had been driving for five hours, after all. While I was away the small crowd had moved off and I’d lost them, including Jimbo and Al, so I wandered through some side roads trying to relocate either bird or birders. Happily for me, it was ‘bird’. Suddenly the Nutcracker appeared low over the nearby houses, heading for the top of a pine tree right next to me. Fantastic close views! I dropped to the ground quickly, just as the crowd came bursting round the corner further down the road. But the bird spotted me, lifted up again and kept going over the next row of houses.

And that, I think, was it for that day (I certainly didn’t see it again). It was seen briefly next day down near the Bockhill monument, but most of the big crowd next day went home empty-handed. More than twenty years on, unaccountably, there has still not been another even vaguely twitchable Nutcracker. The next will be extremely popular.