South Gare :: 12 September 2023

I was attending a meeting of the Banbury Ornithological Society and afterwards chatting with Sandra and Adrian Bletchly. They mentioned that they were travelling north the next day in their new van (unmistakeable apparently as it is orange) to eventually visit Shetland but stopping occasionally on the way; they would visit the brown booby at South Gare. As it happened, I was also heading to the northeast on Tuesday for an all-day meeting and hoped to be able to get away early enough to drop in there myself. We joked that we might see one another. Talking to Alan Peters (warden of the Bicester Wetlands reserve), he and a couple of others had been there early that day, seen the bird, and returned for this meeting - they were feeling a bit weary.

Tuesday arrived and with work over I set out on time and plugged in the brown booby's location into the satnav. No stops on the way and I was driving along the narrow road onto the point at South Gare when I saw an orange van pass me, going in the opposite direction. No sooner had I seen the van than a WhatsApp message pinged on the screen from Sandra to say they'd just passed me - the bird was showing well 😁.

It was less than a mile to the stop and I jumped out the car, grabbed my camera and scope, and made for the handful of birders scanning on the water. I looked on the buoys through my bins but couldn't see the bird so asked my fellow birders - apparently it had flown just a few minutes before and was likely on the water further back down the bay. We scanned for 10 minutes or so until one of the other chaps picked it out on the choppy water. While I'd seen it, it was a very small tick.

The bird was picked up again on the water, floating right but most of us didn't get onto it before it was lost again. Another 10 minutes passed and this time the booby was flying, and I picked it up just before it was level with a buoy. I snapped off a few photos as it flew across, back to what was supposed to be its favourite perch - it disappeared amongst some gulls and was again lost from view.

I waited for a few minutes and the birders started to disperse - it was time for me to make tracks to my hotel and to meet colleagues for dinner, so pulled stumps. What a lucky coincidence to have such a lovely bird so close to where I was staying.