This article first appeared on page 19 of the May 2026 edition of Birdwatching magazine
I’ve written before of the most wanted lifer, which I encountered on a huge boulder as we forded a stream in India. A ‘jungle’ Wallcreeper was as unexpected as it was welcome. Anything new turning up anywhere is, of course, always welcomed. Years ago, I’d just returned from a trip that included a visit to Singapore; there I saw waders I’d never seen before and got quite used to their diagnostic features.
It was only a week or so later, when I was visiting a local reserve, by myself in the early morning and I set up my scope. I peered through the viewer and immediately saw a Terrick Sandpiper. I think I probably did a cartoon-like double-take. I Shook my head and looked again. But I was right, it was definitely a Terek Sandpiper. What’s more, I had finally found something I could actually report on a bird line.
I was in the act of checking pockets for my clunky mobile phone, when a fellow birder turned up and stood next to me.
“Have you seen it?” He said.
Seen what?” I asked.
“The Terek’s”, he said.
“Oh. Yeah. It’s just over there”, I said rather sheepishly. Another minute and I would have made a fool of myself, not having realised that this rarity had been reported the day before. Of course, seeing something where it shouldn’t be is just a normal ambition, for the average Twitcher.
Some are just unexpected in the sense of being encountered when I was not out looking. For example, walking to the ‘ablutions’ at a caravan park in France a bird called from the leylandii that screened the site. Never going anywhere without the bins, I nipped back to the mobile home, grabbed my ‘nocs and located the song’s source. A Cirl Bunting! Still a bird I’ve never seen in the UK. My only other encounters were of one in a hedge, spotted as we waited at a junction on our ways to buy gyro’s in a Turkish village, and another when visiting my dad in New Zealand!
Most of my close encounters have been of a second kind; more about not recognising a bird when it, or I, have been out of place or the wrong time. Just like the summer plumage Brambling I saw from a restaurant window in Poland.
Years ago, we took my parents-in-law for a holiday staying in a cottage in Limousin. Every morning, we were serenaded by a Black Redstart which nested in the dry-stone garden wall. Scanning the fields and hedges from the comfort of a patio chair, glass of local wine in one hand, was my early evening entertainment. The commonest birds were Yellowhammers and Serins. It’s great to be able to spend time observing locally common birds, that are rarities at home. That weeks’ every day birds made it easy to ID the Serin that turned up on my patch a few years later. But, when I wandered into the surrounding oak woods I ran into a small flock that completely confused me. Half a dozen birds with speckled breasts, yellow heads and giant beaks? In the end, it was the beaks that made the truth dawn. I had just never seen a juvenile Hawfinch before, and precious few adults come to that.
Seeing full breeding plumage Rosy Starlings in India was not unexpected, but when I spotted one go to roost with hundreds of Common Starlings in a palm tree outside my hotel in Benidorm you really could have knocked me down with one of its feathers!
