Which way to go?

As is so often the case, in normal years, I spent a lot of time in spring 2000 on Portland, and so it was again on the morning of Saturday 6 May. There hadn’t been a fall, but there were a few migrants around to make an enjoyable morning’s birding – Pied Fly, Cuckoo, Whinchat, and best of all a Wryneck. Then, late morning, two rare birds broke within a few minutes of each other – an Alpine Accentor at St Margaret’s in Kent, and a Hudsonian Whimbrel at Goldcliff in Gwent.

A classic twitcher’s dilemma. I needed Alpine Acc; on the other hand, Hudsonian Whimbrel, though only a subspecies at the time, was already mooted as a potential split, and was much the rarer bird of the two. There was no way of getting to both that day, and no way of guessing which, if either, would stick to the following day. So, which one do I go for?

The Alpine Acc won, at least to begin with – if I saw it, I could tick it straight away, and as I hadn’t been able to get to the Rimac bird in 1994 it was an itch that needed to be scratched. So I headed off up to Dorchester, then east. I hedged my bets, though, as there were no updates forthcoming, and went up the A354 via Blandford Forum to Salisbury, rather than heading for the faster A31/M3 route.

By Salisbury there was a ‘no further sign’ message on the accentor, but the whimbrel was still present. So I changed tack and headed northwest towards Warminster, in the general direction of Gwent. Then, just north of the A303, there was another message saying the accentor had been seen again briefly. Meanwhile the whimbrel had been lost for the time being, so I changed tack again, did a very quick U-ey back to the A303, and started off east again. Pretty soon after that there was another update on the accentor saying ‘no further sign’ – there was even some doubt whether the most recent report was gen. Plus the whimbrel was now back again.

This was getting silly now. With only the pager messages to go on, if I kept reacting and changing plans I could spend the rest of the afternoon zig-zagging across southern England and getting nowhere in the end. So I formulated a new plan: if I kept heading east A303/M3 I reckoned I could reach the M25 by 4 pm, and at that point I would be about equidistant (at least in terms of driving time, if not actually in miles) between St Margaret’s and Goldcliff, with time still to get to either. Whichever bird was showing at that point, I would commit to going for, hard.

And so it was. At 4 pm, as the M25 junction hove into view, there had been no further sign of the accentor for a couple of hours, but the Hudsonian Whimbrel was showing well. Decision made – M4 here I come!

It was well into the evening before I made it to Goldcliff, and a bit of a walk to get round to by the seawall and join the small crowd, but I was quickly directed on to the whimbrel once there. We didn’t seem generally to know much about them back then, apart from the dark rump and tail, duly seen as it flew a short distance to a new feeding area. But the slight differences in coloration and the stronger, brighter head pattern, that we now know are features, were fairly obvious that evening. The head pattern in particular made it easy to pick out from the flock of 60+ Eurasian Whimbrel it was with.
 
As dusk approached, I left to head home, with the pager telling me that the accentor had still not been seen again. So the insurance had been well and truly bought, compared to a dispiriting dip – it had taken me a while, but I had made the right decision in the end.

(I was even happier when the same or another Alpine Accentor was found at Corton in Suffolk the following Saturday – it was only a one-day bird, but news broke early enough for lots of birders to get there and get good views, this time including me.)