Wandering Tattler

Tim Melling
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Wandering Tattler
Wandering Tattler

This Wandering Tattler spent several minutes bathing in a small rock pool and I managed to catch it with its wings raised showing how unusually plain they area, plus its grey rump and tail. This species was once lumped with its Siberian counterpart that we now call Grey-tailed Tattler. They were split as separate species because they have different vocalisations, plus differences in the bill and the leg scaling. When I first became aware of this species it was known as Grey-tailed Sandpiper and appeared in a number of British bird books on the strength of two records in Sussex that were later rejected as Hastings Rarities. The Hastings Rarities were an extraordinary series of more than 500 rare birds of about 90 species that were all supposedly collected within a 20 mile radius of Hastings between 1892 and about 1930. They all passed through the hands of local taxidermist George Bristow who sold the shot specimens to wealthy collectors as "genuine" British birds. Many suspected there was something fishy going on but the Hastings Rarities were included in many major works on British Birds, eg Bannerman, Witherby and Thorburn. It was 30 years later (and about 15 years after Bristow had died) that a paper was published in the journal British Birds that showed statistically that this great range of rare birds was exceedingly unlikely to be genuine when compared with other areas. About 550 records were rejected and 29 species and subspecies were deleted from the official British List of birds. Undoubtedly some of the 550 would have been genuine but they were all tarred with the Hastings Rarity brush. Nearly all of the rejected species have subsequently been readmitted to the British List, including the Siberian Grey-tailed Tattler (Tringa brevipes), though the American Wandering Tattler (T. incana) has never been recorded in Britain. And incidentally nobody ever discovered where the specimens came from, or whether Bristow was actually the perpetrator. It is suspected that they were brought in on ships on ice as a number of contemporary authorities saw the dead birds "in the flesh". The vast majority were Old World species but a number, mainly waders, were American. Here's the 1962 article in British Birds with a list of the birds in the appendices: britishbirds.co.uk/sites/default/files/V55_N08_P299_384_A...

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Taken on: September 12, 2023
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Sets appears in:   • California 2023   
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