Red-flanked Bluetail stuns New Jersey birders
US birders were left stunned when news broke of a Red-flanked Bluetail in a New Jersey neighbourhood in early December.
Found by Harry Riker on 5 December, the bird represented the first record of this Siberian breeder for eastern North America. A large twitch ensued over the following days, with hundreds of birders descending upon the suburb in Manchester Township.
Red-flanked Bluetail remains a very rare vagrant to North America, but records seem to be becoming more regular. Most sightings have been on the Alaskan islands in the Bering Sea, but there are a few occurrences in the Pacific states of Washington, Oregon and California. One was seen in Laramie, Wyoming, in early November 2019, and another made it as far south as the Pacific coast of Mexico in February 2021. However, bluetails had never prevously reached further east than this in North America, making this Atlantic-coast record particularly extraordinary.
The route which the bluetail took to New Jersey is open to speculation, but Amy Davies has postulated on the ABA website that the bird could have come from the east, arriving in the north-east US via Europe. This certainly seems feasible given the arrival of multiple bluetails in Iceland during autumn 2023, and the bird could well have been in North America for some weeks already.
