I have mentioned before in this forum the Isles of Scilly isle of Bryher, 30 miles off the southwest tip of England, as it is a favorite place of mine.
And I have certainly, unashamedly mentioned birding before in this column, as it is one of my passions.
In 2021 when I visited Bryher, the official population of the island was 85, but on my return less than two weeks ago I was told it is now 87, which bucks the trend of most remote islands.
Bryher has holiday-let accommodation for 36 people.
In addition, there is a campsite and the famed Hell Bay Hotel, also celebrated for its restaurants. It has 25 rooms, so perhaps room for 50 people, maybe a few more.
On Oct. 13 at shortly after 2:30 p.m. GMT, all 50 or so guests would have been very alarmed, perhaps terror-stricken, if they’d booked that date thinking it would be for a peaceful week with families unable to come due to it being the school term.
At approximately 1:30 p.m. a birder strolling around some thick hedges caught a glimpse of a Blackburnian warbler, a species of New World warbler that had been blown 3,500 miles off course from its usual migration from North to South America.
Word quickly spread.
It was the first time it had ever been seen in England and has long been regarded as the ultimate birding prize on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
I fortunately happened to be on the main Scilly island of St. Mary’s looking at a Melodious warbler, itself uncommon but not as startling a discovery as the Blackburnian, which has only been seen in the United Kingdom on three occasions, for less than four days and by, it is calculated, less people than one can count on two hands.
“Blackburnian warbler on Bryher. Repeat, Blackburnian warbler on Bryher!” crackled radio walkie-talkies and flashed up on pagers — yes, birders still use pagers — and on phones via WhatsApp groups.
People started running.
The tourism entities on St. Mary’s, usually quite happy renting rooms and making crab sandwiches, leapt into overdrive, with the St. Mary’s Boatmen’s Association and its 10 boats hastily organizing passage to Bryher from St. Mary’s and the other three of its five inhabited islands.
One problem, though. The tide was low at that hour, and on Oct. 13, especially low even for a low tide.
My two birding friends and I got to the quay, maybe 40th to 42nd in line, and we queued, believing we would set off at 3 p.m., but the boatmen — and there are woman staff, too — are made of sterner stuff, and a boat was made ready for 2 p.m.
As we chugged slowly over only a few feet of water, other boats motored toward us from other islands, although not from the nearest one to Bryher, Tresco, as the water usually in the channel there had almost completely disappeared.
The boat I was on, the first to reach the island, stopped 300 feet from the shore, and the captain and his mate then pulled around a motorized, rubber dinghy from behind the boat — I do not think any birder had foreseen this — and we were then transported 12 at a time to within 15 feet.
One birder in the first dinghy was a little too impatient and took a wet tumble.
I was in the second dinghy.
Then boots, socks, telescopes, binoculars and 150-to-600-millimeter SLR cameras around necks and cradled in arms, birders waded through the last bit of the Atlantic Ocean and ran up sandy lanes for 10 minutes to a small spot called Popplestone Fields.
The most-direct route passed right in front of the Hell Bay Hotel, which bills itself as “a place to escape. … It’s a haven of tranquility and seclusion.”
The BBC in its writeup made the comparison to the World War II D-Day landings, although it should be pointed out immediately birders were not strafed with bullets as they made footfall on the beach.
The article also had us all waist-deep, not knee-deep, in water, but it was pretty gripping stuff, and I cannot imagine what Hell Bay Hotel guests must have thought as they witnessed birder after birder after birder, hundreds after hundreds, up to 1,000 of us running around almost 300 degrees of the small pond that sits in front of it.
We saw the bird after waiting some 45 minutes, by which time our number had grown too, and it was magnificent, a bird already elevated to folklore in British birding circles.
As I have said many times before, if your hotel is close to a nature reserve or area of scientific interest of outstanding beauty, promote it, have an understanding of what is in it and perhaps even have people who can see if something rare turns up and know what it is.
Birders spend big, big money following their passion.
It would not have been the case with this particular bird, but quite often when a rare bird shows up on a property, car-parking charges can be applied and happily paid for by eager birders, who, once they've seen the bird — that is not always a given — often celebrate in a bar.
The Scilly tourism folk believe 1,000 birders saw the Blackburnian warbler over the initial three days it was there, and some would have started their long journeys from far away on the British mainland the moment news of the discovery was made.
In all likelihood, this might be the only chance these birders would ever have to see the species in the U.K. The last three sightings were on remote Skomer, Wales, very remote Fair Island, Shetland, and extremely, utterly remote St. Kilda, Outer Hebrides.
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