White’s Thrush, North Tolsta, Lewis

About 10 pm on Friday 24 October 1998 came a pager message which at the time beggared belief – White’s Thrush on Lewis, for its 10th day! This was before the really long-staying Scilly bird the next year, of course, and the showy ones in recent years elsewhere – this was a real mega, a birder’s bird, and it had been on someone’s lawn daily for over a week before they got someone to look at some photos of it! Caught on the hop, I couldn’t face the long drive, so didn’t go overnight, though others did and scored.

Lewis is Free Presbyterian territory, of course, and messages made it very clear that searches for the bird on the Sunday would not be welcomed by the locals. Transport options were pretty much non-existent for that day too, so James and I teamed up with Pete Hutchins and Trevor Ellery for the Monday. Pete was immense, driving from Hampshire to Ullapool virtually non-stop, but we arrived in Stornoway with no more recent gen than the Saturday afternoon. At least 30 other birders made the trip to North Tolsta that day too, but no sign in the original garden, and after a couple of hours we were failing badly. James and I were shown good photos of it from the previous week, which did not help - I thought I had blown it big time. Then, just to make things worse, we got pager messages about an American Robin on Scilly – we both needed it and could hardly have been further away if we’d tried.

But salvation was at hand – Pete and Trevor had wandered off and, with not much more than an hour left before we all had to head back for the ferry, they refound the White’s Thrush in a garden a few hundred yards back down the road. After an anxious vigil while Pete and Trevor went through the garden again (with the owner’s permission), finally the thrush shot out of the hedge nearest to the assembled birders and did straight and level past us before landing a hundred yards or so away at the next-door house and scuttling under a car. 

What an astonishing bird! I’d seen photos, of course, and even the stuffed one in the common room at Fair Isle Obs that had had me drooling only a few weeks before, but nothing quite prepared me for just how gorgeous and intricately marked a bird it really was! 

Other birders legged it down to the next-door house, and quickly (and inadvertently) flushed it from underneath the car. It flew back to us, giving us another thrill with the full Zoothera underwing experience before diving back into the hedge. By the skin of our teeth we had got it (and it was not seen on subsequent days): our time was up, so we left it and headed for the ferry, but we had some stunning mental images to take back with us.