Yellow-browed Bunting, Scilly

On 19 October 1994, a Yellow-browed Bunting was found on St Agnes. Another absolute mega (the first for Scilly, and only the fourth British record), it was also a personal landmark, as it was my first twitch to Scilly, rather than being on the islands when ticks were found. Indeed my first island twitch, bar the Isle of Sheppey, which doesn’t really count.

It was found late on the Wednesday, and even most birders on Scilly at the time didn’t connect until the Thursday, while I was still umming and aahing about going for it (including an ill-timed phone call to Rob Wilson, who I knew was on Scilly, just as he was trying to photograph the bird. Doh!) Alastair Stevenson was up for it too and managed to book a flight for the Friday, but by the time I could try to book to join him, all flights had gone. Aargh! Luckily for me, Paul C had booked on spec some time before and gave me his outward flight, passing up the chance to travel to year tick it in his big year (very magnanimously, considering we didn’t know each other that well at that point). (This was of course pre-9/11, and not only were provisional bookings possible, but you didn’t have to show ID to travel, so all I had to do was pretend to be Paul for a short while.)  

Travel went without a hitch and by late morning we were down by the old Obs on Aggie. It was a queue-and-view system, in groups of 10, but you had 10 minutes in there and then out, win or lose. We lost first time – no sign of the bird, which promptly showed only a couple of minutes after the next group went in. Rats! Having rejoined the back of the queue, gradually our turn came round again, and this time the bird showed very well in one of the small weedy fields opposite the Fruitcage. I don’t think either of us realised properly at the time just how rare a bird this was, as it was only two years after the North Ron bird that Paul ticked, but it remains a blocker to this day (you had to move very quickly to get the spring bird on Hoy, Orkney in 1998 and the only other record since then, in Kent in 2022, was not twitchable). The next gettable one will be very popular indeed.

Alastair and I had decided to make it a two-day trip, and later that afternoon we trotted down to Troytown to tick Dusky Warbler. Next day we ticked Pallas’s Warbler on Tresco, it flicking around in an apple tree by the Abbey Gardens. Later I found (or co-found, I forget which) another Pallas’s by the Great Pool, so maybe I wasn’t a complete tart. Maybe.