We’re at Oare Marshes, a Kent Wildlife Belief reserve some 30 miles west of Margate and on the southern facet of The Swale, which separates the Isle of Sheppey from the remainder of Kent.
And we’re searching for an uncommon customer that turns up each summer time when it actually needs to be someplace close to the US border with Mexico – the Bonaparte’s gull.
This medium-sized gull breeds within the northern US and winters on or simply past its southern border. The British Belief for Ornithology has 247 information of 1 being right here as much as 2019, with the primary in 1850. That’s not many.
The identify comes from Napoleon’s cousin (or nephew, relying on what you learn), Charles Lucien Bonaparte, who was a notable nineteenth century ornithologist.
It was named in his honour by its finder, George Ord in 1815. The Latin identify – Chroicocephalus philadelphia – tells us the place.
The chook appears to be like similar to our personal black-headed gull, of which there are additionally a number of on the market on this muddy Kentish foreshore, however its hood is black (not brown just like the black-headed). It’s additionally a tiny bit smaller and its legs are bubblegum pink.
However what's it doing right here?
One of many many mysteries of the pure world is migration – how birds can discover their means from one continent to a different, usually crossing the equator, and do it on the proper time of 12 months?
So far as the brightest brains can work out, the reply lies inside a mixture of the exterior – meteorological, geographic, seasonal – and inside – inside compasses and clocks.
However what about when it goes improper? How is that yearly, birds flip up in locations they shouldn’t?
It might be a Turkestan shrike in Yorkshire (breeds Kazakhstan, Iran, Pakistan, winters Arabia and Africa), a Pacific swift in Shetland (breeds central and east Asia, winters south-east Asia to Australia) or a Bonaparte’s gull in Kent?
How do they get so very, very misplaced?
Once more, theories mix a mixture of the interior and the exterior.
The chook’s inside navigational pc will not be wired correctly, driving its instincts north, say, as an alternative of west. Or climate – within the type of storms – can sweep them to unusual and international shores.
It’s additionally not unknown for drained birds to land on a ship that takes it someplace apart from the place it was heading as unwilling stowaways.
Nonetheless it's that our Bonaparte’s gull arrived right here, arrive right here it did, within the Could of 2013, staying put till the center of August then returning the next July and leaving in September.
And so it has been for ten years now – arriving in June or July, proper in it what could be its breeding season and leaving in August or September. All through, it's alone.
Which begs the query of the place on earth it goes for the remainder of the 12 months. It's inconceivable it flies all the best way again throughout the Atlantic after which again once more, so it should be elsewhere in Britain – or at a push throughout the North Sea into continental Europe.
It's, then, a thriller upon mysteries, this misplaced and lonesome wanderer. It was a first-year chook when it arrived and – gulls being long-lived – it might nicely dwell one other ten years. Blue tits, by comparability, dwell for a median of three years.
What we do know is that one 12 months, after we make the pilgrimage to Oare and look out throughout the mud for a gull with a blacker head and bubblegum pink legs, it gained’t be there.
The unusual and mysterious story of the misplaced American in north Kent may have come to an finish – the Bonaparte’s gull that by no means went house.
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