They came to see a bird unseen in Norfolk since 1968 — then the birdwatchers raised £1,700 (about $2,300) for the village lifeboat

When a northern nutcracker — a chocolate-brown, white-speckled Siberian bird not recorded in Norfolk since 1968 — turned up in a Mundesley garden on 23 October, hundreds of birdwatchers descended on the village. They also gave something back. Visiting birder Wayne Glossop, from Rotherham, set up a crowdfunding page for the Mundesley Volunteer Inshore Lifeboat, a suggestion from local resident John Hurst; it passed £1,200 (about $1,600) against a £500 (about $680) target, and more than £530 (about $720) more was collected in person — over £1,700 (about $2,300) in all for the volunteer crew that keeps watch over that coast. The nutcracker, fittingly, was Glossop's 400th bird seen through binoculars inherited from a friend.

Mechanism: community action