Birders Rejoice! Liz & Tommy's Excellent Discovery

It takes a rare bird to find a rare bird, and Tommy Hyndman is one of the more exotic creatures to be found in the world of men. If Santa Claus and Picasso* had a bastard child, it would be Tommy: he's an enormously inventive artist and hat designer and even in his forties still has the shiny, red-faced wonder at the world around him that a boy of, say, 7, would have.

He has a sort of stop-and-start speech pattern that suggests Tommy is endlessly distracted by his own prodigious curiosity. I've never seen him dance, and my friend Amber says that's a shame for me. "He always looks like he's about ready to teeter out of control, and when you see a bear about to topple over, you tend to give him room. But he never does." I know Tommy through his effervescent wife Liz Musser and together they have been on a grand adventure in fearless, off-the-grid living that just came to a head, much to the delighted twitter of birders all over the U.K. Liz is a lovely, funny and extremely talented producer and videographer I worked with 15 years ago. We shared a love of documentaries (her, making them; me, watching them). I always thought Liz would make a great epic doc of her own. Little did I know she would go out and actually live one.

It was back in 2005 when Liz, living in Saratoga Springs, New York with Tommy and their young son Henry, got stuck in traffic and heard a story on public radio about an ad in a Scottish newspaper looking for a couple to come take over the laird's (or lord's) house in the most remote inhabited island in the U.K., Fair Isle, population, (now) 65, best known for its knitting and its birds. The occupants would live and run a bed-and-breakfast in the old stone house circa 1700, Auld Haa Guest House, where Sir Walter Scott partied with his posse back in 1814.

Liz, Tommy, and Henry were chosen out of 800 applicants, and they packed up and moved to a gorgeous, forbidding place that to me looks like a setting for a Cure song, where Liz says everyone is very interconnected, where there is just one primary school, one world-class bird observatory and not much else, where their Thanksgiving didn't feature turkey but cod chowder, and where a majority of the power is generated by wind. These days Tommy makes his fantastical hats by hand, with a wind-powered sewing machine. As Tommy says, when the wind's blowin', Tommy's sewin'.

And so it was last week when Tommy had his other hat on, as B-n-B proprietor. He was packing up lunches for the house guests who were to spend the entire day out birding. Fortuituous for Tommy, because it gave him the opportunity to spend his own lunchtime gardening rather than hosting. And noon is when Tommy had his encounter with the newest break-out celebrity of Fair Isle: a Citril Finch, the first ever spotted in the U.K. I'll let Tommy take it from here:

I spied the bird's yellow rump.... That's a funny looking grey headed Siskin, I thought! Maybe it's the Icterine Warbler I saw yesterday...{lengthy bird chat here, incomprehensible to us non-birders}. I had to go back inside for my bird book. Getting the right identification for an amateur is total madness. By 1:00pm I was so convinced that it was a Citril Finch that I called the Bird Observatory even at the great risk of making a fool of myself. I got the answering machine and left a message. I said there is a Citril Finch and described the bird and that they should send someone to check it out. The message was full of gaps, pauses and ums {told you!}. It's about 2:15 when an older, and very keen birder by the name of Mike Gee walks down the road and, like usual, asks "is anything about?" To which I say, "a Citril Finch?" He very nicely explains that a Citril Finch would be a first for Britain and that it is a non-migratory resident of the southern Alps & Pyrenees. Mike is about to go when I check the backyard again and there it is. Mike says "so this is your bird, is it"? Mike had up to now been very calm in the way of a Zen master to his student. He lifts his binoculars and now starts to get very excited. He says 'Oh my god it is a Citril Finch! It's a first for Britain!" {Birding pandemonium erupts, Tommy is told he will be famous.} "Then the crowds start arriving, and the sound of cameras clicking fills the air. It's like I won a bird-watching lottery I didn't know I was playing. Fair Isle is thick with fog and no planes can get in, but boatloads of twitchers {those are birders, if you're nasty! had to google that one} start showing up from Shetland. Photos start going up on the Internet, and so it goes.

Tommy, Liz and Henry can now call that little bird the most illustrious guest they've hosted at the Auld Haa, and, as Tommy says, he didn't even have to serve him lunch. Liz, of course, had camera in hand for the whole thing and I trust this clip here is just the first few minutes of something more epic about her family's adventure, their experiment in living apart from the minivans, the shopping malls, Hannah Montana, the daily traffic reports. They left the traffic and all the rest of it behind back in New York for something smaller, slower and richer. Mission accomplished.

*Full disclosure. I had no clue which artist to compare Tommy's work with. I consulted with my only semi-famous friend, a video artist, and said 'is he like Basquiat? Keith Haring?' She said, "either would work, or you could say Picasso if you are feeling generous." And I am feeling generous!