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| Plumbeous Water Redstart Phoenicurus fuliginosus |
I spent a couple of years on Jeju trying hard, so hard, wishing on a star, to find ‘my own’ Plumbeous Water Redstart. That never happened, and it eventually led to me being confronted by an incredulous official whilst lurking about behind a sewage plant. Sorry sir, official bird business, go back to your station, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for. I ended up twitching one in Gimpo in 2014, and while it was nice to finally observe this enigmatic vagrant, lining up with a phalanx of other twitchers is not how I usually like to enjoy my birds.
So consider me shocked when, at the tail-end of a lazy river ramble yesterday, I spied movement on the far bank, and caught a brief glance of a rich blue-grey ping-pong ball and a flash of deep orange…before it evaporated. I furrowed my brow and cursed in French. A profound “Am I just seeing shit again?” moment. I didn’t have the time to pursue the bird properly, as I had somewhere to be. I knew what the bird was, but wasn’t quite ready to believe myself, even after securing ridiculous long-range smudgy images.
This morning, stupid early, before the sun was up, I struck out towards the river with a mission. After a 45-minute stakeout, and with heavying lids, the flame-tailed river chub-elf appeared again. Plumbeous Water Redstart! I did thirty backflips, then got busy watching this stunning bird. I observed it for an hour, which broke down thusly:
-foraging/tail-fanning in the open: 5 minutes
-being chased around by a male Blue Rock Thrush: 15 minutes
-unseen after being chased: 20 minutes
-sitting immobile on a semi-hidden perch: 20 minutes
All that to say, it’s not an easy bird to spot – small, dark, silent (as far as I observed), and unobtrusive. I have this queasy feeling that it could have been there all winter, and I only spotted it yesterday, in spite of birding in that exact spot precisely 33 times since early October. Headsmack. Flame-tailed River Chub-elf!
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