I have just returned from my annual week on the Isles of Scilly off Cornwall, England.
As always, the week is all about birds, with hundreds of birders present hoping for autumn winds to blow in rarities from North America and Siberia, individual birds caught out by storms developing around their normal migration routes.
The highlight was the reappearance of a Red-footed booby, a species that should be frequenting an oceanic swath south of the equator.
The one I saw on Bishop Rock Lighthouse, the farthest speck of United Kingdom land in the southwest, has been blown all the way up there from somewhere in the Caribbean, remarkable for a species that does not migrate far.
My other highlight was an Arctic warbler, right next to a hotel on the isle of St. Martin’s.
On the boat out there from the Isles of Scilly’s main island, St. Mary’s, I got chatting to a South African woman who was working the season at the Karma St. Martin’s Hotel.
The day in question, Oct. 13, was a blustery, wet one, the only such day of the week, and the only birders I saw were ones waiting to return on the boat I was on.
Two days before, someone I know found the Arctic warbler I was attempting now to see, but that was at the other end of the island, in Higher Town, not Lower Town. The isle has three tiny settlements, with the third being Middle Town.
As I left the minuscule quay, the 10 or so people getting off the boat all went into the hotel, and I was the only one left.
Immediately I saw a small bird flit onto a conifer-tree branch, and it turned out it was the warbler, which very much surprised me, as Arctic warblers by nature rarely wander far once they have located a food source.
When the sun came out for a few minutes, I again saw the bird, which allowed me to confirm the identification.
I sat in the 30-room hotel’s sandy garden overlooking some of the Isles of Scilly’s other islands, one of which, Bryher, was the 2022 scene of perhaps the greatest birding triumph for me and the isles and which featured the Hell Bay Hotel.
Picking up a hotel brochure from an outdoor table, I was startled to see the hotel is part of the 40-hotel Karma Group, and then I realized I did know the Karma Sanctum Hotel in London, although that is the only one in the group that is a partner hotel, not an owned one.
The group has presence in 11 countries on three continents and includes nine hotels in Indonesia and 14 in India.
I rather think the St. Martin’s property is the farthest flung, for to get there requires a prop plane, helicopter or three-hour ferry ride from Cornwall and then a 20-minute boat trip from St. Mary’s.
The extreme western point of Cornwall is not easy to get to either, as anyone sat in A30 highway traffic in the summer will attest.
I sent my discovery via WhatsApp to approximately 600 birders and am now awaiting to see if the British Ornithologists’ Union’s rarities’ committee accepts my bird as a new bird or the same one as was seen two days before.
I also sent the record to subscription service BirdGuides, which allows birders across the country instant access and directions to every rarity found.
My bird was seen twice on the day afterwards and one final time on the day after that.
I noted the hotel has a restaurant called the Cloudesley Shovell.
In the early 18th Century, knighted Shovell was the most senior naval office in the U.K., admiral of the fleet and a former Member of Parliament.
He was hugely famous, and it was a shock to the country when on Nov. 2, 1707, as he captained the HMS Association, he and hundreds of other men lost their lives when the ship hit a rock, an incident that led to Parliament increasing the reward for the successful invention of a navigational apparatus that could measure longitude.
The ship was pummeled by the same type of wind that birders hope will blow in birds.
Shovell and others washed up on the St. Mary’s beach of Porthellick Cove, where a small plaque marks the spot.
He was buried with full honors in London’s Westminster Abbey.
St. Martin’s also puts on a Dark Skies Week at the end of September, and there is so little light pollution here, the Milky Way can be seen in all of its huge glory.
The seasonal pub there, The Seven Stones, also is a joy.
I had a drink to celebrate my find.
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