Visitor Stirs Interest

Birdwatching

Bird watchers are all atwitter over a visitor from abroad rarely if ever seen before in Idaho.

A Siberian Accentor, which should be in China this time of year, has been flitting around the Wood River near Hailey for the last four weeks.

“It’s causing a national stir,” said Chuck Trost, an Idaho State University biology professor and ornithologist who saw the bird Sunday. “This is an impossible bird to see in North America.”

Bird watchers speculate the Pineapple Express, a tropical storm track across the Pacific Ocean, gave the warbler-like songbird an unexpected one-way ticket to the central Idaho resort area.

“Birders get pretty giddy about this,” said Raymond Clark, an Idaho State University doctoral student in biology.

Clark posted a notice on the Internet last week that a Siberian Accentor was in the United States. Since then he has been getting calls from birders nationwide who want to add the rare find to their Life List - a record of the birds they have spotted.

Many are willing at a moment’s notice to buy a plane ticket to Hailey and trudge around for hours for the thrill of seeing the bird for as little as three minutes.

The Siberian Accentor is about 6 inches long, and both males and females have a black crown and face with a streak of buff-yellow over their eyes. It lives in Siberian forests in the summer and spends winters in China, eating mostly seeds. It has been only rarely spotted in Alaska during the summer.

The bird has livened up the neighborhood. Birders are signing a guest book in a bag suspended from a tree. Children are selling hot chocolate. Artists are selling T-shirts with a sketch of the bird.