Dear Readers, you might remember that in 2022 there was a lot of excitement when an American Robin turned up in a back garden in Eastbourne and hung around for days, causing quite a stir.

Photo from The Argus (https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/19916682.rare-american-robin-brings-twitchers-flocking-eastbourne/)

However, this is as nothing compared to the surprise of one of ‘our’ robins turning up in Montreal in Canada on 7th January this year. This is a first for Canada, and is a tremendous surprise – while American Robins are migratory, and so are sometimes picked up by storm winds and deposited in Europe, European Robins tend to stick close to home. So, the question arises: did this Robin hitch a lift? Many sailors, and indeed many ship passengers, have noted the presence of small birds resting on board, so it’s not unlikely that this little chap did the same. The bird has attracted hundreds of birdwatchers, and as with the American Robin in Eastbourne, it gives bird enthusiasts.a chance to see a species that they’d have to travel thousands of miles to see otherwise.

Interestingly, rare birds arriving by ship are more common than you might think – the few European Robins that have arrived on the Eastern Seaboard of the US have all been discovered in close proximity to ports, and so are thought to have hitched a lift. However, the status of a ship-assisted bird depends on whether it was also ‘human-assisted’. If a bird is fed or otherwise looked after while on board, it’s considered to have arrived on land with human help, and so won’t be counted as a rarity. However, if the bird arrives without anyone assisting it, it’s thought to have arrived as if it had landed on a bit of flotsam (or possibly jetsam, I’m sure someone will put me right on that one), and so it can be counted as a rarity. Of course, it’s not always clear whether a bird has been fed or not, but one notable example was a Grey Catbird, native to the US,  that landed on the QEII and was befriended by the crew. When the ship docked in Southampton it stayed onboard –  It liked its new quarters so much that it subsequently toured the Mediterranean with the ship, no doubt well-fed all the way, though I have no details about whether it ever attended the Captain’s Table.

Grey Catbird (Photo by By Rhododendrites – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123382664)