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Birding world all aflutter over accidental rare bird photo: first blue rock thrush sighting in US
Hobbyist photographer snaps photo of extremely rare bird in 1st U.S. sighting
On a trip to the Oregon coast in late April, amateur photographer Michael Sanchez took his new camera out to Hug Point State Park to snap pictures of waterfalls. Sanchez, a 41-year-old middle-school band director from Vancouver, Wash., recently picked up photography and, by his account, is by no means a bird-watcher. But his trip turned into an impromptu photo shoot that made him the envy of birders.
“I got all the shots that I needed and when I was finishing up, I looked behind me and, still before the sun’s fully up, I see this little bird with black feathers. I said, ‘Oh, well, what a cute little bird, why don’t I practice shooting that bird?” Sanchez, 41, told NPR on Thursday. “When I got home, I started to process the pictures from my trip and I saw that it wasn’t a little black bird — it was actually a beautifully colored blue and a chestnut bird.” It wasn’t until he posted his pictures to Facebook that he learned his bird sighting was extremely rare: a blue rock-thrush, far from its native breeding habitat in parts of Europe, Africa and Asia.
His April 21 sighting is the first time the bird has been seen in the U.S, bird experts said. It’s also the first blue rock-thrush sighting in North America since 1997, according to the American Birding Association, when the species was spotted in British Columbia. The prior sighting had been rejected by the ABA over debate about how the bird had arrived in the area; however, the Oregon sighting may prompt the association to reevaluate its 1997 record.
Brodie Cass Talbott, an educator with the Bird Alliance of Oregon, was stunned by the finding after his team verified the sighting. He said the male bird is the Southeast Asian philippensis subspecies — the only one of five with a reddish-brown belly. “It was just a real shock,” he said. “This is potentially the rarest bird that’s ever been seen in Oregon.”
That’s how Sanchez learned that he had inadvertently captured photo evidence of a bird so uncommon to the U.S., that some experts are baffled as to how it even got here. The bird, which is widely believed to be a blue rock thrush, is a native of Europe and Asia that has rarely – if ever – been spotted in North America.
While Sanchez is not a birder himself, his photos of the apparent blue rock thrush shocked the birding world. The American Birding Association shared his photo on the group’s Facebook page, prompting many members to use adjectives like “insane” and “whoa” to describe the find. Many other birders besides have reportedly swarmed Hug Point to try to find the bird again.
All of the excitement has enthralled Sanchez, who said he may just have to make it a point to photograph more birds in the future as he continues with his budding photography hobby. “I can foresee myself being a little more curious about the birds around me,” Sanchez said, before adding with a laugh: “I’m not counting on seeing something that rare again so all my beginner’s luck is used up, I think.”
