Grey-cheeked Thrush, Orkney

On 16 October 2001 I was (surprise, surprise!) at the Obs on Portland when news broke of a Grey-cheeked Thrush near Stromness on Orkney Mainland. For its third day! Most of the birders at the Obs that day had already seen at least one, if not several, Grey-cheekeds on Scilly in the 80s and early 90s, so thought I was utterly mad when I said I was going for it. But it had been nine years since the last twitchable one on Scilly and they had not been any more obliging elsewhere either. I had the scars of a couple of dips in the late 90s to show for it (I remember a particularly fruitless afternoon searching on my own for one on the coast path near Zennor, for instance). 

A few others of the keenest of the keen at the time were in the same boat, so that evening we gathered – Chris Batty, Rich Bonser, James McGill, and myself in the gold Audi that served me so well for several years (a brilliant car that ate up the motorway miles with ease). A mere 12 hours later we were at the ferry terminal at Scrabster, then on the ferry to Stromness. We were apprehensive, though, as we had had news while still in England on the way up that the bird had been trapped and ringed near dusk, going into the iris bed in which it had been roosting. Presumably with permission and to rule out it being a Bicknell’s Thrush, but it did not really help us – how would the bird react?

We had our answer fairly soon after arriving on site. No sign of a bird which had apparently been showing regularly feeding on the lawn of the house for the previous three days. And it stayed that way. We checked out the area as well as we could, but in reality we knew it had gone. A few hours later we headed back to the ferry, deflated, with the little matter of another 12-hour drive home in front of us.

Chris was an absolute star on that drive, keeping up our flagging spirits with stories and wicked impressions of birders on the scene. We had done all we could, but that was a small crumb of comfort. In the end, we only had to wait another year before a bird on Scilly heralded another run of twitchable Grey-cheekeds (including one in Hertfordshire!), but that was all in the future.