Scarlet Tanager: Ultra-rare bird spotted in quiet Yorkshire street after being blown off course by hurricane

It is thought the scarlet tanager has arrived in Yorkshire after being blown off course by strong winds from a hurricane in North America.

But the rare little bird has somehow found its way to the back gardens of a number of homes in Shelf in West Yorkshire - much to the delight of bird lovers from Yorkshire and beyond.

Joe Eckersley travelled around 40 minutes from his home in Leeds to see the rare bird on Monday morning. He said he usually travels up to two hours to see birds after becoming interested in ‘twitching’ when he was 10 years old.

So he was delighed when he discovered the extremely rare bird was a few miles down the road.

He said: “I never thought I’d see a scarlet tanager in the UK, let alone in Yorkshire. It should be making its way down to Central or South America from the North East Coast of America or southern Canada at the moment.

“It’s probably been here since October. I think the most likely thing that’s happened is it will have been blown off course by a hurricane. When you’re flying and you only weigh a couple of grams, it is easy to be blown off course by hurricane force winds.”

Mr Eckersley said the last sighting of a scarlet tanager was on Barra in the Outer Hebrides in 2014, but this is the first time the bird has been seen in mainland UK since a brief appearance in Cornwall in the 1980s.

The 28-year-old said scores of people have made their way to the quiet road in West Yorkshire to try and catch a glimpse of the rare visitor.

“When I was there, there were about 60 or 70 people waiting around,” he said. “We waited around an hour before it showed, and it was probably there for six or seven minutes.

“We left because we weren’t going to get a better view of it, but a friend who is there has sent me a picture and it looks like the number of people has doubled. There’s at least 100 people there.”