The topic of twitching crops up here more frequently than I feel comfortable admitting given my statements in an earlier post that I’m not the biggest twitcher. On a Thursday evening after work, I received the message from a friend that a Northern Mockingbird turned up near Bonn. This is an absolute mega rarity, being the first record for Germany and only the fifth for the West Palearctic. So obviously, it would be important to get there as soon as possible for the best chance of seeing this beast!
A short heads-up here though, this isn’t one of those dramatic twitching stories we all love to hear from seasoned birders. The following day, I left for a week-long vacation directly after work, and I had several meetings during the day that I could not miss. I realised that you can only identify your personal twitching boundaries when you’re forced to choose…
Returning from my vacation, the bird was fortunately still there and this time I went out to the spot right after work. When I got there, it was odd to think that this place was teeming with twitchers throughout the last week, while superficially appearing not out of the ordinary at all: the bird frequents a row of apple trees in an area of farmland. Several people were walking their dogs or cycling past the place, asking us whether this thrush-like bird was still there (owing to the German name for Mockingbird being “Spottdrossel”, which translates to “mocking thrush”). This event was picked up various local papers and there was probably (and somewhat understandably) a lot of head-shaking amongst non-birders.
Because it was late September, it was already quite dark and a cold wind was making the wait even less bearable. It was also the first time I went birding in my office clothes – although this did contribute to a more ‘twitchy’ vibe. After a wait of around half an hour, a bird somewhere between a flycatcher and a thrush popped out on a very distant but exposed branch – it was immediately obvious that this was the silhouette of the Northern Mockingbird. I got scope views for a few seconds before a large flock of starlings made it scramble back down into the dense tangles, never to be seen again by me (at least for the evening, it was still there at the time of writing, a week later).
Fortunately, the bird stayed put, which allowed me to pay another visit on a sunny day. I ended up with extensive close-up views and even hearing short phrases of its song. The tameness of the mockingbird was – apart from the obvious appeal – also quite surprising, and raises the suspicion whether this is a genuine vagrant or an escapee. The distance from the West European coast, where this bird would’ve arrived, is also odd – why would it fly so far from where it reached land, just to end up for weeks in a boring row of apple trees? True, vagrants do weird things, but this seems to be weird indeed.
This was unquestionably the rarest vagrant I’ve ever twitched – it it’s a vagrant, that is. Regardless, I simply enjoyed the unusual sighting of a bird completely different than what I’ve seen before.
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