This diminutive yellow bird had a whole country tweeting with interest, and craning their necks up to see it perched in the tree of a local’s front yard.
Around 300 bird watchers crowded a road in the northern city of Sheffield, where a scarlet tanager was first spotted perched on a clothesline.
It is thought the small yellow and black bird arrived in Britain after being blown off course by strong winds from a hurricane in North America. The last time this species was seen in Britain was back in 2014.
The migratory pattern of the scarlet tanager typically involves a straight north-south line from as far north as Maine to as far south as Ecuador. According to the Ohio Ornithological Society, by October the tanager is making its way back south from the mid-Atlantic—the same month when the southeastern United States was battered by successive hurricanes.
75-year-old Dave Stone said he had traveled 280 miles from his home in Exeter to the road in a community called Bridle Dene in the early hours of Tuesday with three of his pals all just to see it.
“We left Exeter in Devon at 2 am. We got up here at first light. It’s near enough the furthest I’ve traveled [to see a rare species],” he told British media outlet SWNS. “I’ll wait until the light goes to see it and then we’ll go back again.”
“I’ve been doing this since 1985. If I get this bird, it will be my 500th. There have been quite a few rare ones,” he added. “It’s been seen this morning, and it would be a new bird for me.”
Near the other side of the age spectrum, birdwatcher Joe Eckersley traveled around 40 minutes from his home in Leeds to see the rare bird on Monday morning.
“I never thought I’d see a scarlet tanager in the UK, let alone in Yorkshire,” he said. “It’s probably been here since October. I think the most likely thing that’s happened is it will have been blown off course by a hurricane.”
“When you’re flying and you only weigh a couple of grams, it is easy to be blown off course by hurricane-force winds.”
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Joe said the last sighting of a scarlet tanager was on the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides in 2014, but this is the first time the bird has been seen in mainland UK since a brief appearance in Cornwall in the 1980s.
He said scores of people had made their way to the quiet road in West Yorkshire to try and catch a glimpse of the rare visitor.
“When I was there, there were about 60 or 70 people waiting around,” Joe remembered.
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“We left because we weren’t going to get a better view of it, but a friend who is there has sent me a picture and it looks like the number of people has doubled. There’s at least 100 people there.”
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