White Throated Robin.....

Above - The scruffy little shit that was responsible for the chaos (image by The Archbishop Andrew Kinghorn)

I arrived at work on that now infamous 6th June and whilst sat in the car having a smoke waiting to 'go in' I casually glanced at the pager and noticed that a Red Flanked Bluetail had been trapped & ringed at Hartlepool Headland. Thinking no more of it, I lobbed the pager into my bag and dragged my feet into work. A few minutes later, the noise that no serious birder wants to hear at 8.30am on a Monday morning started resonating from within my bag! Upon checking what was responsible for the noise, I immediately felt a little bit of sick start to insidiously creep up the inside of my neck... I very quickly blasted out a few texts to associates in order to see if my fizzgogged Monday morning brain was in fact operating correctly and once that was clarified, I began to consider the options...After work maybe? Wait til the weekend? and spuriously, ask the 'boss' if I could take the afternoon off? The third option took a fair bit of bottle to do, considering we were already a man down in the warehouse but surprisingly I was given 'the green light' and at midday I tanked it home in order to rendezvous with my twitching Wing-Man and cane it north east! The rest can only be best described as carnage! For an in depth review of the that epic afternoon, click http://archiesbirding.blogspot.com/2011/06/white-throated-robin-in-cleveland.html

Below are a few images from an event that will prob go down in birding folklore, perhaps on a par with that infamous Golden Winged Warbler twitch in Kent 1989..............??