Two Musings for the price of one

I am currently on Shetland, and as I feel I'm entitled at my age to stay indoors when it's wet and windy, I'm working on my website at times. My latest "project" is to show a photo of every Category A species on the British List. Of course, many of these will have been taken abroad, some will have eluded me thus far so it gives me an incentive to continue birding (I will even twitch  something if it's a world tick!)                              One of the species I have a love-hate relationship with is Siberian Thrush. When I started birding the old Shell guide was "the" field guide;  it had a separate section at the back for rarities, and therein was a bird I was immediately attracted to, with three records at the time of publication. One of these has subsequently become "not proven", but of the other two, one was on the Isle of May in 1954, and the other, in Great Yarmouth, was someone's best ever present in 1977. That would really have put the cat among the pigeons nowadays, how many hardcore twitchers would have disrupted Christmas Day, with subsequent divorce proceedings, to go and see it? In 1977 no-one got the news before it disappeared, perhaps thankfully. I had to see one, but chances in the eighties were slim. 
The next two records were on South Ronaldsay (1984) and Cape Clear (1985), both one-day birds, which is not unusual for eastern thrushes. In 1992 a female flew into a shed on North Ronaldsay and was trapped. Whatever the reasons, it stayed for a week. But I wanted to see a male, quite apart from having to travel to North Ron. The following year I went on a trip to see seabirds in the Russian far east which was partly exploratory, in that there was no great history of birding that region. I went for a walk through a wooded area just outside our pre-depature hotel in Khabarovsk, and saw a male Siberian Thrush carrying nesting material. I was just able to get a couple of shots on slide film. This chance encounter also saw me watching a Rufous-tailed Robin singing at dusk, out in the open.
Back to normality and the British twitching scene. In 1994 a young male was found at Burnham Overy, near the coast of Norfolk. News went out in the late afternoon, but I lived close enough to get there, Britain's first twitchable mainland Siberian Thrush!
Organised flushes were the order of the day (different times) but these were restricted with a generous break in between. Everybody saw the bird when it flew from one end of the crowd to the other, showing its distinctly patterned underwing. Needless to say, no photo, but I wasn't too bothered. Another 1st winter male turned up as part of the "best-ever" autumn of 1999. In those days we stayed in our campervan in Cot Valley, but as we had dashed down for the Veery at St.Levan we continued on to St. Agnes the next day, as Ann needed it and we both needed White's Thrush, amazingly both there at the same time. This time the Siberian showed well, if briefly, in a dead tree every so often, and I thought "This time I'll get a photo". But that doesn't trump Short-toed Eagle, as someone came running up shouting "There's an Eagle flying this way!" After dealing with that our next priority was the White's Thrush, and good views of that were cut short when a Blue Rock-thrush turned up on St. Marys! 
So yesterday I saw my third Siberian Thrush in Britain, I saw it hop out onto a lawn during its foray across the road, but by the time I alerted others it flew again back to 
its favoured, largely hidden area. Although the bird is still there I am on Yell and don't want to go back to Mainland just yet, so I'll paint it, unless......
My second musing (where I have got photos with me) concerns Snipe. I got to Snipe on my Britain's Birds page and during research noticed that Wilson's Snipe, apart from one Irish record, has only ever been accepted on Scilly. This to me suggests that some are obviously returning birds, but also that birds are probably being overlooked on the mainland. Snipe are notoriously difficult to identify since in many cases the only certain diagnostic features involve tail feathers which are rarely seen on vagrants. It's not just Wilson's, the same applies to Pintail and (less likely) Swinhoe's. Great Snipe is a bit easier, and there are numerous records. Also the fact that they often remain hidden doesn't help, but how often does anyone really look at them once they're on the year list?
 







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