If there’s any such thing as an enjoyable dip…

On 14 May 1997 I got an early morning call from Paul C – ‘Veery on Lundy’! This was disastrous news for me – I had enough time to make that morning’s sailing on the Oldenburg, but I knew I’d already pushed my luck a little too far over recent months in terms of taking time off work at short notice. I could have taken a sickie, but that wasn’t my style. Besides, my boss of the time (who, fair play, had been more than reasonable, most of the time) had once said that if she ever caught me taking a sickie for a bird all privileges would cease immediately and all requests for leave would have to be 24 hours in advance, in writing. So I would have to eat it this time and hope the bird stuck. That Paul and a few others managed to get on and see the bird (and his story of that day is an entertaining tale in itself) didn’t help. Nor did the prospect of the first clear night in a couple of weeks.

The birders assembling at Ilfracombe the next morning did so with a sense of foreboding, and we had our answer early, before we boarded the boat – no sign, despite searching. Still, we’d bought the tickets and there was always a chance that it was there but hiding – it had been elusive the previous day, after all. So we got on the Oldenburg (once dubbed, unforgettably, by a Devon birder I know, the ‘Old and buggered’) and off we went.

But the news continued to be negative, so we were pretty sure by the time we arrived at Lundy that it had gone. That was back in the days when the quay was not big enough for the Oldenburg to dock, so you had to climb off it into a tender to get on the island, and then there was the killer walk up the hill (that, of course, hasn’t changed). After mooching around the Millcombe Valley for a while, just to formalise the dip, we decided to go for a walk around the island. And that’s when the day and the mood made a change for the better.

With both the day twitchers and the few birders staying on the island spreading out, news came in of various finds, and I had a high old time that afternoon, twitching from bird to bird, in glorious sunshine. A very smart Woodchat Shrike up near Pondsbury was followed by a possibly even smarter male Red-backed Shrike near the western end of Quarter Wall, both giving great views. Then it was a short hike down into St John’s Valley where a Golden Oriole gave itself up after a little bit of a wait (a Devon tick, and still the only one I’ve ever seen in the county), and a Turtle Dove showed well there too. Add in a bunch of commoner migrants, and a couple of Puffins among the seabirds off the return crossing, and we almost managed to forget we were dipping an American mega-vagrant.

It took me another five years to see a Veery in Britain (a saga that involves a couple of stories worth recounting on another day), and I had no way of knowing on that day whether those opportunities would ever arise. But, while missing it inevitably cast a long shadow, the quality of the birds we did see made for a great day out otherwise. If there’s any such thing as an enjoyable dip, this one has to be right up there.