White-throated Needletail, Scarborough Castle, 10 October 2025 - consecutive frame collage (Mike Watson)
WHITE-THROATED NEEDLETAIL! That’s a name to get a birder’s attention. Sitting at my desk in the Birdquest office, the Birdguides app notification certainly grabbed mine. It had already gone from Tophill Low Reservoir though, so I put it out of my mind. Later, almost at the end of the day… Yikes, it was now at Bempton Cliffs and within a few more minutes it was hanging around! A spam of messages followed as local birders caught up with it, but it was too late to set off from East Lancs for a bird in East Yorkshire. Can you imagine the traffic with lots of tractors on the road at this time of year, plus max. HGV numbers, even if there was just enough time? A couple of things. It had been relocated at Bempton by an Oriole Bird Tours group! There were 2000+(!) photos taken of it at Tophill Low by people who thought it was a Merlin… and then an Alpine Swift! The general lack of knowledge these days is shocking. I have a theory that this has something to do with a reliance on apps that are only dipped into when we need to, instead of books, which we used to read from cover to cover and learn about things we had not yet seen. Or maybe there is just a lack of interest in nature other than as a photographic subject? The last message of the sequence, at 20.46 included ‘earlier seen attempting to alight on cliffs’. That was all that was needed for hundreds of hardcore twitchers to be stood on the clifftop at Staple Newk (the Black-browed Albatross spot) before dawn the following morning. Familiar faces! Alan Lewis, Trevor Ellery, Sam Viles, Ash Howe, Paul Chapman, Richard Bonser, John Hague, Johnny Mac, Lee Evans, Richard Fairbank and even my doctor Steve! Plus an endless series of faces I recognised as older versions of how I remembered them. There was talk of an early possible sighting in the thermal cameras, but this got squashed at the time, attention turned to a lovely sunrise over the sea and I was starting to imagine a swift hawking over the cliffs in the morning sunshine. That was until 09:14. ‘White-throated Needletail, Loch of Skene, Aberdeenshire, one over north-west side briefly’ WHAT? The message said ‘also 4 Ring-necked Ducks’… no-one cared if there had been 400. There was some nervous laughter and then the exodus started. Seven and a half hours/366km away! One car, Andy Clifton’s, even made it all the way there, and that was after a message at 11:10 said ‘still no further sign by 10:57’. I wouldn’t contemplate driving so far for it and I find it difficult to believe that it could be the same bird. Do they migrate at night? Apparently, yes. Time ticked away with no further updates, so I went to work. Maybe that was that?
Again, towards the end of the afternoon, I was moaning to a guest about what I’d been up to that morning when another Birdguides notification appeared ‘White-throated Needletail - juvenile at Filey Brigg’. A lot of swearing and another series of updates followed. Much as this annoyed me, I hoped at least Paul Chapman had seen it. He had endured the most painful series of dips on this one, including the Harris bird being killed by a wind turbine while he was en route. Thankfully he did see it at Filey! He had said how he had already committed to staying in the area, just in case. Next level twitching experience. I had to talk to Bolton RSPB group this evening and managed to get through this without too many yawns and then it was off to bed with another very early start. Only this time I was more optimistic about it being seen the following day. That’s two days in the same general area now. Surely it must just have moved up the coast a little beyond the scope of the birders searching around Bempton? Maybe it fed high in the sky and evaded detection? I can’t imagine that a swift would fly non-stop to northeast Scotland and then turn around immediately and fly straight back to the same stretch of coastline 366km away? Either way, I was back next morning, on Filey seafront this time. Familiar faces again. Paul Chapman was back for more, Archie and the Peaky Birders crew, Sam Viles, Ash Howe, John Regan, Lee was here again (but downbeat about our chances as always), Ian Smith and Trevor Ellery, my Birdquest colleague. Again, it was a sunny morning and looked perfect for a swift to be feeding along the seafront, but again time ticked away without a sighting. A bacon and egg butty was just about to become the highlight of the day, when the hoped-for message came through. Shouts of ‘It’s at Scarborough’ could be heard along the promenade and birders ran to their cars. I didn’t have any experience of daytime traffic in Scarborough. Note to self – it’s awful. What a ridiculous system, so progress from Filey was quite slow until I turned right to a parallel road along the sea front, which had no traffic and then I approached the castle from the northwest, that worked well. Something worth bearing in mind for another day.
White-throated Needletail, Scarborough Castle, 10 October 2025 (Mike Watson)
White-throated Needletail, Scarborough Castle, 10 October 2025 (Mike Watson)
I first set eyes on the needletail over the Sycamore trees from the castle’s barbican, however, the best vantage point is the viewing platform on the inner bailey wall, overlooking the harbour and town, as well as the north bay. Racing up there, it was very nice of the English Heritage staff to give birders a concessionary rate to enter the castle, thanks! The needletail was very mobile indeed, hawking for insects and feeding very widely over the south bay and the castle woods, covering a hundred metres or more in a few seconds. Viewing conditions could have been better as most of the time watchers on the castle were looking into the sun but a couple of times it zoomed low over the small crowd of us on the ramparts. What a setting! The wall we stood on was built between 1198-1206! It even landed very briefly or rather bounced off the wall of the great tower itself. As far as my favourite rarity events go, it is up there with the Doctor’s Garden White-throated Robin, Spurn Siberian Accentor, Anglesey Black Lark, Vorran Island Steller’s Eider and the Salthouse Little Whimbrel. All birds I never imagined I would see in the UK when I was a kid, visiting Scarborough on our summer holidays. What a grand day this one was.
Needletail watchers Scarborough Castle (Mike Watson)
There have been 10 previous British records of White-throated Needletail, one of which was 120km offshore from Caithness, on the cruise ship MV Ortelius. The first two were shot in the 1800s and five were on outer islands, leaving only two mainland records. I missed the first of these, at Fairburn Ings forty years ago, on 27 May 1985 (we raced there from North Norfolk and spent the rest of the afternoon chatting to birders from all over the country but the swift had departed ahead of rain). None of these were in autumn, or juveniles, which makes this one very special. Add to this the fact that the extreme western end of this Asian swift’s normal range, in the western Himalaya, is 5,000 miles away. Most of them spend the winter in eastern Australia!
It would take 70 days to walk to the nearest hotspot from the UK (Google Maps thinks you could walk 68 miles per day!)
The name Scarborough was long thought to have derived from the Norse ‘Skarði's borg’, meaning ‘Scarthi’s Castle’, however, this has been questioned recently - there has been a stronghold on the site of the castle for 3,000 years. The royal castle itself has a long and interesting history. Building of the main fortifications, including the great tower, began in 1159 during the reign of Henry II and it later hosted several subsequent monarchs: King John, Edward I and Richard III. Mel told me that in the English Civil War, a single Parliamentarian cannonball weighing 25kg had split the wall of the great tower during the siege of 1645! It was fired from St Mary’s Church below the castle, where most of the birders parked today.
Recipient’s view of a cannonball fired from St Mary’s Church! (Mike Watson)