The birders have gone “cuckoo.”
A swarm of birders flocked to Long Island after an exceptionally rare cuckoo bird was spotted by a golfer, according to reports.
Hundreds of people traveled from dozens of states to Vineyards Golf and Country Club in Riverhead, starting Thursday, for the chance to see the “common cuckoo,” first detected by Roy William Gardner as he was in a golf cart moving through holes, CBS News reported.
The cuckoo, which has been spotted only four times in the mainland US in history, is native to Europe and winters in Africa.
Gardner snapped a pic of the bird and texted photos to his nephew, who is an ornithologist from Cornell and now a bird biologist at UCLA, the outlet reported.
“It’s pretty amazing that my uncle, who’s a non-birder, can send a text message across the country,” his nephew, Christopher Sayers, told the outlet.
The wayward bird was quickly identified by experts at UCLA and Cornell.
“He said, ‘What you have there is called a lifer.’ He goes, ‘people go their whole lifetime and not see this,’” Gardner said of the conversation with his nephew.
After the word of the cuckoo spread to online rare bird communities, fanatics began to travel from far and wide.
Since then, there have been at least 213 recorded sightings of the cuckoo on the birding site, The Riverhead Times reported.
North Fork bird and bug enthusiast Jay Rand, who was one of the first to come to the scene, believed that the cuckoo “was probably trying to migrate and maybe got blown over by that nor’easter,” which occurred earlier in October, he recalled to the outlet.
Local farms and golf courses have also been accommodating birders onto their properties to spot the rare bird.
“This is an amazing find,” one birder exclaimed, according to CBS.
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