Fan-tailed Warbler

I had seen Blue Rock Thrush for my British list on Scilly in October 1999, but my old mate Alastair Stevenson hadn’t, so when another turned up in Cornwall on 14 May 2000, it was an unexpectedly early opportunity for him to claw that one back. I fancied seeing another one too, so I offered to drive him down the next day.

We met up and headed down on news, so it took most of the morning to get to the old Geevor tin mine near Pendeen. We didn’t know exactly where the bird was on the site, and struggled to find any other birders – it was a Monday after all, presumably all the early crews had been and gone, and of course many big listers had also connected on Scilly the previous autumn. Happily, however, it didn’t take that long to bump into the bird, not far from where we’d parked, and we got good views. Adrian Webb and his crew turned up shortly afterwards and we pointed it out to them.

The next birders who appeared were a bit of a surprise, to say the least – Grahame Walbridge and Keith Pritchard from Portland. The Blue Rock Thrush had temporarily disappeared at that point, but we told them where to look. Then Grahame dropped a bombshell – he told us a Fan-tailed Warbler had just been found, on Portland! An absolutely huge mega – potentially the first twitchable since the 1977 bird at Lodmoor. My reaction can be judged by his words to my retreating back – ‘Are you going to run all the way to Portland?’

The drive back up through Cornwall and Devon is a bit of a blur in the memory. I do remember muttering at some point something about having driven ‘to f*cking Cornwall for a f*cking year tick when there was a f*cking mega on f*cking Portland’. Not sure quite how well that went down with Al, for starters.

In the end I did it in under 3½ hours, which I thought was good going. We dumped the car and legged it past the Pulpit pub towards the Bill. Plenty of other birders on the scene by then, of course, and it was less time than it felt like before we heard the telltale ‘zit … zit … zit’. (Hence the international name Zitting Cisticola, which I happily use now I’ve seen a bunch of other cisticolas, but back then Fan-tailed Warbler was just fine.) But maddeningly the bird was just too high up to be seen, in what was still a bit of a foggy day at the Bill.

Happily, after a couple of episodes of this, the bird dropped into the low bramble scrub between the Pulpit and the Lower Ad compound and showed well on top of one of the bramble clumps. Tick! Relief all round, and we could all settle down to enjoy it. After a while I wandered back towards the Pulpit Bushes with Tom Raven (I’d lost Al somewhere for the moment), and a real bonus moment when the bird flew across and landed in the bushes right in front of us. Stonking views!
It only stayed briefly there, but spent most of the rest of the evening in the general area. Birders were arriving all the time – I was treated to the sight of Chris Batty executing a great fast turn into the Pulpit car park. The car screeched to a halt and his whole crew piled out in seconds and legged it towards the bird, following our hasty directions.

A little while later, Al and I headed home, both very happy indeed – he’d had a two mega-tick day! As a bizarre postscript, another, different Fan-tailed Warbler turned up at Hengistbury Head less than a week later. That time I was watching a Montagu’s Harrier on Dartmoor with another old friend and work colleague, Stuart Holdsworth, when the news broke, but as he needed Fan-tailed Warbler, we charged over and saw it. Two in a week for me, both in Dorset, but it’s been 10 years now since the last British record – the next twitchable one will be popular.