Finding “Missing” Rare Birds
Some thoughts on why so few rarities actually get found
I’m not super-well qualified to write this blog. As I have discussed before, I’m not especially keen on UK birding’s disproportionate focus on rarities and twitching. I’m also in no position to hold forth with advice on finding rare birds. In my 30+ year birding career, I have indeed found a smattering of rarities and scarcities, but not enough to claim any special rarity-finding insight or prowess. However, this engaging recent blogpost from Owen Foley got me thinking about the art of rarity finding (if you haven’t already read Owen’s blog, you should read it before reading the rest of mine). Implied — but not explicitly stated — in Owen’s blog is the simple fact that the percentage of rare birds we actually discover must be infinitesimally small. This is something I think about a lot. I don’t know if my musings on this topic are helpful but I’m going to run with it…
Let’s start with an obvious fact: for a rarity to be both found and identified, a series of unlikely circumstances need to align. For a not entirely random example, let’s consider Blyth’s Reed Warbler. Formerly a big rarity, a combination of better ID knowledge and genuine range expansion mean it’s now a bird on most keen bird-finders’ radars. But it remains a tricky ID proposition, and is often elusive. So for any given Blyth’s Reed Warbler in the UK to be “nailed” it needs to be a) seen or heard, b) by someone who knows how to ID them, who c) has the confidence to “call” it. You might assume b and c amount to the same thing. But I’m not sure they do. For instance, I know the key ID features of Blyth’s versus Marsh and Reed Warbler, and I’ve seen about half a dozen of them before (one autumn juvenile, the rest singing birds in spring/summer). But if I were to see a non-singing bird on my West Midlands local patch, would I have the self-assurance to say “yes, fire up the quattro lads, I’ve got a Blyth’s”? I would *hope* so, but I can’t, hand on heart, say that I definitely would.
This is partly because birding is not only, or even primarily, about the mechanical application of pre-existing knowledge to our concrete experiences. If you will indulge me a cod-philosophical digression: our birding is mediated by our assumptions and expectations. This in turn means that if one sees a bird you are not anticipating — even if it’s easy to ID — you often have a “WTF! Does not compute” moment before the penny drops. Our brains don’t see things in an unmediated way: we tend to try to fit things into pre-existing categories that we carry around in our heads. Thus, I fear I would likely default to the assumption that any unstreaked acro on my patch is a Reed Warbler, even if it were to show features indicative of Blyth’s. The wider point, again, is that the chances of any given individual Blyth’s in the UK being seen, identified and recorded are absolutely tiny.
As Owen’s blog outlines, this problem is compounded by the fact that even pretty good birders don’t always “bird” in ways conducive to rarity finding. Looking up and/or scanning the sky for flyovers, for instance, always feels very physically unnatural to me, and I shudder at the number of interesting overflying birds that I must have missed as a result of not looking skyward with sufficient diligence.
But more than that: it is no exaggeration to say that the whole infrastructure of British birding disincentivises rarity finding, despite the centrality of rarities to British birding discourse. Most birders want to see a range of good birds, and do not have unlimited birding time. This leads to one of two things: birders twitch rare birds already found by others, and/or it results in the “honeypot” effect, whereby birders converge disproportionately on well known sites, given that a visit to a less well-known location constitutes more of a gamble. In my part of the world — the West Midlands region — this is a particularly stark problem. A small handful of sites — Belvide, Middleton, Upton Warren etc. — attract the lions’ share of birders’ in-field hours, and a relatively small group of people (perhaps most famously Belvide Reservoir stalwart Steve Nuttall) end up finding a massive percentage of the regions’ rarities. As such, there must, surely, be lots of undiscovered rarities in the wider region which go unnoticed because everyone is — understandably — opting for a productive few hours at Middleton rather than a speculative trudge around an unassuming patch of marsh in Wolverhampton.
So there’s basically something of a collective action problem in UK birding, whereby a relatively small gaggle of committed rarity-finders do the heavy lifting of finding rare birds which are then enjoyed by others. Obviously if no-one did the hard work of rarity-hunting, then we’d have no rarities to twitch. But from the perspective of any individual birder, it is not rational to pursue dedicated rare-hunting: why bother trying to find rarities when there’s a whole bunch of ready-made rarities found by others you can twitch, photograph, and post on social media to accumulate likes, views, clicks and kudos? I realise that posing the problem in this way makes me vulnerable to the familiar charge of “twitcher bashing”, and I’m sure some readers (Hi Geoff!) will harrumph and mutter under their breath that many people twitch and find rarities. This is of course true. But the irony is that the obsessive focus on rarities and twitching results in fewer rarities being found in the first place, because the percentage of birders doing the hard work of rarity-finding is small by comparison to the togging and twitching masses.
Dedicated rarity-finding requires a specific set of skills and a certain temperament which is related to — but not exactly the same as — raw birding knowledge. The undiscovered rarities are out there: let’s do our best to find them, rather than assuming that labour should fall to someone else.
