Rare Bird Alert Triggers 200-Mile Car Chase That Ends at Wrong Reservoir

A rare bird alert issued at 6:14 AM on Saturday reporting a Siberian rubythroat at Grafham Water, Cambridgeshire, triggered a mass mobilization of twitchers that saw 47 vehicles converge at speed on Grafton Underwood, Northamptonshire, a small village located 38 miles from the correct location and possessing neither a reservoir nor a rubythroat. The confusion, attributed to an autocorrect error in the original alert text, was not discovered for approximately ninety minutes, during which time 47 birders set up telescopes, erected portable hides, and scanned the village's single ornamental pond for a bird that was never there. 'I knew something was wrong when I arrived and the habitat was a duck pond next to a pub,' said birder Derek Scope. 'Siberian rubythroats favor dense undergrowth near water. This was a pond with three mallards and a crisp packet. But I'd driven two hundred miles and I wasn't ready to accept that.' Several birders reported seeing what they believed might be the rubythroat in distant hedgerows, a phenomenon Wren Binocular of the Avian Research Institute describes as 'wish-fulfillment birding, in which the desire to see a rare bird overrides the evidence of the optics.' By 8 AM, the correct location had been identified and a secondary convoy departed for Grafham Water. The rubythroat had by then moved on. 'This is the cruelty of twitching,' said Scope, sitting in his car in a pub car park in the wrong village. 'You drive two hundred miles on faith, information, and adrenaline, and you end up looking at mallards. But you do it again the next time, because what if the next time it's real?' The pub in Grafton Underwood reported its best Saturday morning trade in years.