A Rush To See The Dusky Thrush -- Crowds Flocking To See Bird Rare In B.C.

LANGLEY, B.C. - Will someone please explain the attraction?

How did one little wayward bird hungry for holly berries turn Noel O'Brien's snowy yard into an instant tourist destination?

Don't ask O'Brien. He's as puzzled as anyone at the hundreds of faithful "birders" who have swarmed in from as far away as Montreal and Texas over the past week and a half.

They've tromped through his knee-deep snow, negotiated his icy driveway, braved temperatures in the low 20s and aimed their cameras, binoculars and telescopes at a pair of 30-foot-tall holly trees in his front yard.

The payoff is a glimpse of a dusky thrush, a reddish-brown, robin-sized bird native to Siberia that usually winters in Japan or Korea.

Never - until early last week - had the bird been seen in Canada, or anywhere in North America outside Alaska.

"In the parlance of birders," explained Craig Faanes, "this is one real good bird."

Faanes, one of more than 30 visitors to O'Brien's yard yesterday, should know.

He's an ornithologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, based in Grand Island, Neb. Not only does he study birds for a living, he's a longtime "chaser" - someone who will drop almost anything and go almost anywhere to see a rare bird.

Faanes had been on his way to Portland on a business trip when he heard the thrush had been sighted in this town on the U.S.-Canadian border.

He called to make sure the bird was still around, arranged a day off, grabbed a map, booked a flight from Portland to Bellingham, rented a car and showed up at O'Brien's house at mid-morning.

Serious bird-watchers, he explained, compile "life-lists" of birds they have seen. Early yesterday, Faanes said that of the more than 1,900 species recorded in North America, he had seen 1,620.

"Make that 1,621," he exclaimed as the thrush came into view, flitting around the top of a nearby maple tree before settling into one of the holly trees.

Bird experts say the thrush may have traveled south on a ship or experienced what Faanes called "mirror-image migration," heading southeast for the winter instead of southwest.

The thrush was first sighted Jan. 2 by a member of a local bird club doing an annual Christmas-season count of birds in the area.

To the uninitiated, the dusky thrush seems less than spectacular. No wildly colorful plumage, no ear-splitting cry, no amazing antics. Except for a speckled breast and a red-brown back, it looks much like its cousin, the robin.

But Lew Glentworth, a ferry skipper who traveled three hours from his Vancouver Island home to view the visitor, said seeing the thrush was worth every minute of the journey.

Glentworth said the 400-some people who've visited O'Brien's home is small in comparison to what rare-bird sightings draw in his native England.

"Over there, bird-watchers are called `twitchers,' " he said. "And this would be referred to as a `major twitch.' "

The birding bug bit Glentworth about 15 years ago when his children, while out on the family boat, would ask him to identify birds they saw.

"I hated saying, `I don't know.' . . . And, in the quest to find answers to their questions, I developed this interest."

Other visitors yesterday included a man who flew in from Montreal, drove out from the Vancouver airport, saw the bird, chatted for a short while and headed for his return flight home.

A few days earlier, a retired mink farmer from Ontario did the same thing.

All of this has been something of a mystery to O'Brien, a real-estate agent.

His visitors topped 100 a day last weekend, and he expects similar or larger counts this weekend because the bird's appearance has been mentioned on CBC and CNN television.

O'Brien and his wife were away on vacation the day the bird was sighted, arrived home late that night and woke up to find more than a dozen people with cameras and binoculars in their driveway, and more arriving by the minute.

Word of the find spread rapidly through "rare-bird alerts," telephone recordings bird-watchers call regularly to learn of new sightings.

"So far it hasn't been a problem and we've met some very interesting people," O'Brien said. He worries that, as the snow melts, people parking on the edge of his yard may damage the lawn, but his only regret so far is that he didn't put out a guest book for people to sign.

Yesterday, O'Brien even made a pot of coffee for some of his visitors and shrugged off the suggestion that he ought to start charging for it.

Although no one knows for sure, O'Brien said some experts say the thrush may stay until sometime next week, when warmer weather is expected to melt the snow and open up new territory for the bird's search for food.

For Russell Rogers, a part-time contractor who drove up from West Seattle yesterday, the thrush added to a collection of more than 600 species he has seen.

"What's exciting," he said, "is that, since birds have wings, they can show up in places you don't expect them. And it was a lot easier for me to get here than to go to Siberia."