Hermit Thrush v seasickness

YK rang me on Thursday and breathlessly told me that he'd just found a Hermit Thrush Catharus guttatus very close to where he'd found the Swainson's Thrush less than two weeks earlier. Last time I went mid-week to Heimaey I ended up stranded there and with another storm forecast and the weekend so close I decided to wait and arranged to travel on the ferry with SÁ and GÞ on the Friday night. Whilst flying to Heimaey is a painless experience (weather delays nothwithstanding), the three-hour ferry crossing is another matter entirely.

My fear of flying has vanished to be replaced by a growing susceptibility to seasickness, although I'd never really been ill on a boat. The strong south-easterlies were promising for vagrants but a recipe for disaster for seasickness sufferers. We'd just left harbour and the boat was already rocking alarmingly, prompting a passenger behind me in the TV lounge to wonder out loud whether the seat he was in was fitted with a seat belt. That was it for me, I had to go out on deck, and I spent three hours lying on a bench on deck. If lying on a bench alone in the dark, in the rain, in October, on rough Icelandic seas sounds thoroughly miserable, then you'd be dead right. It is. Bloody awful. My only thought was that I'd better find this Hermit Thrush.
Saturday dawned damp and foggy over Heimaey, the volcano which erupted from a flat field on the edge of the town to rise over 200 metres covering the island in pumice and lava in 1973 remained hidden from view all weekend. YK took us to the garden where he'd seen the thrush on Thursday but it wasn't be seen, although a Blackcap Sylvia atricapilla there was the first European vagrant passerine I'd seen all autumn! As YK had failed to cook us breakfast we decided to make a stop at the town bakery before continuing the search. On the way I looked over a wall into a garden and saw a leaf drop to the floor, which when I looked at it in my bins proved to be the Hermit Thrush Catharus guttatus! Superb, and only a few metres from where I'd seen the Swainson's Thrush 10 days earlier. It was a totally different bird, cocking its tail and half-flicking its wings like the Rufous Bush Chats I'd seen in Spain with SÁ and GÞ in May.



The rest of the day we spent in the fog-shrouded cocoon of Heimaey looking for vagrant passerines. It should be pointed out here that what passes for a rarity in Iceland very often differs from what European birders would call rare, and naturally vice versa. A Harlequin elsewhere in Europe is a major event locally, whilst if a Blue Tit showed up here it would set the pulses soaring. Rarity is always a relative term and I'm told that there are some birders in Europe who haven't seen an Iceland Gull. Just imagine! Basically all non-Icelandic passerines are of interest and whilst we don't do cartwheels if we see a Willow Warbler or a Blackcap, the fact that they are here means that vagrants are reaching these shores, and there could be something else out there, waiting to be discovered. So the rest of the day's haul of Garden Warbler Sylvia borin, Willow Warbler Phylloscopus trochilus, Song Thrush Turdus philomelos, Chiffchaff Phylloscopus collybita and Lapland Bunting Calcarius lapponicus was by no means spectacular but it left us hopeful that things remained to be discovered, especially as the wind kept blowing steadily from the south-east. Apart from the glorious Hermit Thrush, the highlight was seeing about 40 blue morph Fulmars Fulmarus glacialis near the harbour, as I'd only seen ones and twos before.