Siberian Rubythroat, Osmington Mills, Dorset

I’d gone down to Portland on Sunday 19 October 1997 to look for a Pallas’s Warbler seen the day before, but no joy there. Still, I’d seen a Yellow-browed and just after 2pm I was looking for another in the grounds of Southwell School (now closed, but back in the day there was access to the grounds at weekends). Then came a Birdnet pager message which I had to read twice before even the first four words began to sink in – Dorset male Siberian Rubythroat…!! It’s still a very rare and desirable bird now, though most big listers have caught up with one on Shetland at some point in the intervening 25 years, but this was only the second-ever British record, and I was about 10 miles away from it! I left instantly in a screaming panic. The drive through Weymouth was painfully slow, and at one point I lost it and beat a line of traffic at a set of lights by going down the empty right filter lane, then nipping back in. The first car in that line contained old friends Dave Paull and the late Alan Bundy. Their conversation apparently went something like this: ‘Look at that crazy bastard!’ ‘It’s Julian, follow him!’

So it was that we were among the first on the scene at Osmington Mills. Most of the gathering crowd took up position in front of the clump of bushes across the field behind the pub, but I went round the side and found a spot where a skulking sibe might appear. Unknown to me, Paul Harris had already crept in under the bushes and come face to face with the bird feeding in a rivulet. It promptly flew up, breast feathers still wet, and came out in full view of the main crowd (now about 70 strong) to preen in the afternoon sun. Running down the slope to get round to join them, I planted my foot in a hole and went face first, cracking cartilage in my ankle and landing full on my tripod, smashing it to bits. Winded, I was up and running again in a few seconds, trying to get a view. The first birder I asked for a look through their scope was unhelpful, but the guy next to him just said ‘In here mate’. Still don’t know who he was, but I was very grateful, as I got my first view of that ruby-red throat and then gradually took in the rest of the bird.

It was now just before 4pm: the Rubythroat showed well for the next 45 minutes or so as a stream of panicking birders arrived, to be directed to one of several scopes set up on the bird. Then it went missing, and anxiety set in amongst those who’d just arrived and hadn’t seen it yet. I went back to the road briefly, in time to see an ambulance arrive. They were busy – one birder (Roger Broadbent’s wife, if I remember correctly) had tripped on the pavement and hurt her knee badly, another guy had slipped and broken his collarbone (the path round the side of the pub was muddy and slippy and claimed more than one victim in their haste), and there was my ankle, which was by now very sore. Then, with the light just starting to fade, the bird showed again, and most got reasonably good views as it moved through the bushes.

Reports from Scilly were of shell-shocked birders wandering around aimlessly that afternoon, unable to do anything about it on a Sunday (they would have struggled to make it anyway).  A Hampshire birder I knew who was on an early flight off next morning anyway was offered £200 cash for his ticket that evening. Sadly, the Rubythroat departed overnight, leaving a very large number of birders gathered from dawn on Monday morning empty-handed. Friend and near-neighbour Bill Urwin was among them (he’d been in Norfolk), though he found some amusement in finding a pager dropped by somebody the evening before, that had presumably been beeping away merrily with all the lift offered/wanted messages on the Sunday evening.

As darkness fell on the Sunday, a reporter from Radio Dorset appeared and interviewed me about the bird. Amazingly, I managed not to swear, but instead babbled, excitedly and probably incoherently, about this ‘mythical’ bird. It remains one of the most extraordinary rarity moments I have ever been involved in.