Chapter Fourteen

No one ever knew for certain who started the rumour of the blue-cheeked bee-eater. Later, George Palmer-Jones denied all knowledge of it. He just shrugged his shoulders and smiled, reminding his friends of other rumours: the gyrfalcon in South Wales, the black-throated thrush in Lancashire. Ella’s version of the story was uncharacteristically vague. She claimed that someone had phoned her from the village on the Friday evening and that she had written the details on the board. She had passed on the information from the board as she always did.

Whatever the origin of the rumour, by late that Friday evening the news that a blue-cheeked bee-eater had been seen near Rushy had become widespread. The species had not been seen in Britain since 1951, but that had been in the middle of June and it was perfectly possible that it should occur again. And the rumour was so detailed, with its exact position, the names of the observers and the time when it had been seen, that it was accepted without question. The names of the observers were unfamiliar, but the story was that the bird had not been seen at Rushy, but on a local authority reserve a couple of miles inland, so it was assumed that the observers were the reserve wardens, or knowledgeable locals, not twitchers. Afterwards, when the hoax had been discovered, it was decided that the story had been too cleverly constructed, too plausible, for the rumour to have been created by accident.

On the Friday night the news was received and passed along the grapevine with intense excitement. Anxious parents consulted timetables, packed up sandwiches and let schoolboy sons, rude and uncommunicative in their fear that the bird might have gone, spend their first night away from home. Students waited until pub closing time, walked through evening streets to motorway exits, and began to hitch-hike to Norfolk. Responsible family men cancelled family plans, filled their cars with students and schoolboys and drove across the country, revelling in the irresponsibility of the night-time drive, the madness and the expense of it all. That was the attraction of twitching: the escape from anxious parents, lectures and essays, work and families, the knowledge that, despite all the effort and the movement, in the morning the bird might have gone.

By dawn on the Saturday morning the big car park at the Windmill was full of cars. There were even two mini-buses and a coach. A few people slept, curled up in sleeping bags on the back seats of their cars, but generally it was a social occasion, a time to drink coffee from a flask and catch up on news. At dawn they drove in convoy to the place where the bird had been found, an area of disused gravel pits, small ponds with a patch of deciduous woodland, which had been designated a nature reserve by the council. A systematic search was organized throughout the area, but nothing was seen. By the time the warden arrived at nine, his visitor centre was besieged by hostile twitchers who wanted to know why they had been deceived into visiting a reserve which supported only common breeding birds. His bewilderment and obvious lack of ornithological knowledge were so genuine—he repeated endlessly: “I’m sorry, I’m a mammal man myself”—that finally most of them left him alone. It was only when this crowd of birders drifted back to Rushy, to the Windmill and the pub, that the village realized it had been invaded.