In autumn, few people listen more intently to the weather forecast than birders. Especially that hardcore subset of the tribe known as twitchers, who chase down rare birds that wander to our shores from every point of the compass.
Twitchers are praying for westerly gales during autumn – often the fading end of tropical storms and hurricanes from the Americas – which bring vagrant North American songbirds across the Atlantic, to make landfall on islands and headlands on this side of the ocean.
The Isles of Scilly used to be the best place to search for these lost waifs. But now the jetstream has shifted further north, birdwatchers have too; heading instead to Shetland and the Western Isles, where increased coverage by birders has discovered a wealth of sought-after rarities.
During lockdown, one birder based on the Hebridean island of Barra came across the smallest of all these birds: a ruby-crowned kinglet. This tiny relative of our own goldcrest, weighing just 7g, had been swept across the Atlantic by a fast-moving weather system, and took shelter in a wooded garden on the island, where it fed eagerly on insects.
Frustratingly for Britain’s twitching community, however, lockdown rules meant that the news of its presence could not be made public, and it was seen by only a handful of lucky islanders.
