Stuck in a Rutt Birding

So long and thanks for all the skuas

2011-09-11T10:23:00.005+01:00

So sad that it should come this...

...It's been fun. Maybe I'll see you again, on a different blog, under some different disguise, some time soon...

Outsiders: Two other approaches to the conservation conversation

2011-06-12T16:11:00.005+01:00

John Berger, art critic, intellectual and novelist, has a parable about mice. A man systematically traps and removes them from his house, releasing them unhurt in a field, but as he lets the last one go he feels disappointment. “He had been hoping to see, one more time in his life, a prisoner fly, a prisoner realize his dream of freedom. ”.

(Norfolk Hawker: red listed species with Biodiversity Action Plan)

Freedom, it turns out, has been cost-benefit analysed by economists. Three hundred quid, apparently, is the worth of what I do refracted and rationalised through the spreadsheets of economists. We’ve known for ages now that ecological services underpin the economy to a huge degree, bees for example and their pollination (without which, we’re screwed, and we don’t seem to be unscrewing ourselves any time soon), but now we have a figure, not only for such services but for its psychological effects too. £300 for your mental wellbeing. It doesn’t sound a lot. It sounds rather expendable. Now we have a value, next we can look forward to the boom market. Then the crash. Imagine nature as an asset stripped, recession-struck waste land. Joseph Stalin, say hello the Aral Sea; Chairman Mao, greet my good friend the Tree Sparrow. His sparrowcide was a spectacularly horrible footshooting: the crops failed, harvests decimated and his people starved in the millions. At least Britain has form at fighting against the manipulation of nature for economic reasons. See the mass revulsion at the proposed Forestry Commission sell-off, that lead to a government U-turn. See similar forces at work in the proposed Badger cull. A green economy would of course be a wonderful thing, but what if the numbers go wrong?

Art doesn’t save the environment, people do. Art’s role is different. Art, good art, doesn’t proselytize, but provokes: showing why and the way to new thoughts, not telling how. Good galleries are complicit in this: Smiths Row, Bury St Edmunds, is one such place. A cavernous space in the Market Cross, an old town centre Georgian building, is an oasis from the heat, dust, grime and crowds of the town’s streets. Against a white washed wall, a flock of birds hang, splashed across a three hundred strong swathe of tiles. Stylised and innocently drawn, the birds’ colours are punchy primary reds and yellows, balanced with blacks, green and browns, and dull blues. Taken singularly they don’t stretch much beyond a naïve charm, but ‘in flock’ they’re almost overwhelming; the overlapping edges of individual paintings creates a patchwork type effect, that integrates all the images together. You can take your own meaning of course, I claim no great insight, but for me it’s a wonderfully vivid depiction of how enmeshed the global avifauna is, as well as its beauty and mystery. Take a moment to admire it from the quiet corner in which it restlessly sits.

(Copyright: Rosie Grieve/Smiths Row Gallery)

The opposite wall showed the dichotomy of art. Spread across small slips of paper pinned to the wall, were the stylised tattoo designs of the Ultimate Holding Company. From the obvious Golden and White-tailed Eagle designs, to the esoteric Mole Cricket, tattooing in the name of conservation is not only a very clever idea but a brilliantly original way of bonding person with animal. It’s another one of those all too often occurrences of things I wish I’d found out about; that Scottish Crossbill tattoo (perhaps a play on the traditional Scottish cross tattoo?) would’ve looked good on my arm. Would’ve doubled as a constant reminder to get back to Abernethy, too. There’s more to it than these two works, but they were the standouts for me. I haven’t mentioned the soundscapes, the additional paintings, the touch responsive flower (no really)…

(Copyright: Rosie Grieve/Smiths Row Gallery)

Art goes where photography can’t. Photographs are an everlasting portrait of a moment, art transcends that: the camera might never lie, but the paintbrush or pen tells us more.
I’m not alone in favouring art as a tool for conservation, see The Ghosts of Gone Birds phenomenon, Kurt Jackson taking Cornish hedgerows to the high art establishment, and the proliferation of art inspired nature writing. Where once a book might have been inspired by a series of statistics on the dimensions of a Yellowhammer nest, now we have authors expanding on John Clare, who got there first in a 19th century poem.

It’s a wonderful thing.

“The aesthetic emotion we feel before a man-made object … is a derivative of the emotion we feel before nature” John Berger (The White Bird)

[Smiths Row Gallery: http://www.smithsrow.org/

Is located in Bury St Edmunds town centre, and can be incorporated as part of a day trip to Lackford lakes, West Stow CP, Cavenham Heath, Thetford Forest and Lakenheath Fen. The exhibition runs until Saturday the 2nd of July. On Thursday the 23rd of June, Adrian Parr from the British Dragonfly Society will be doing a free talk, starting at 1:15.pm]

2011-05-31T20:57:00.005+01:00

Sandy soil underfoot again, soft, but solid to the footfall. Strange that, despite the flatness, the social coldness, the parched and dying grass, the first thing that got me, that greeted me as being of home, was the soil. No more of the solid/sodden peat bog dynamic, sadly. The second thing, as I walked to the lake, was the sweating air, heaving with humidity, screaming with Swifts, darkening with clouds. Take a deeper breath and you’ll feel no fresher, just lethargic like everything else, waiting on the rain.

It starts to spit as we take positions beside the lake. A Stock Dove barrelled along the nearest hedgerow, a Sedge Warbler scratched out a few chords. Gulls, many, spiralled over the pig fields to the point of appearing like scratches, or tiny cracks in the clouds. Rain sets in, further smearing the coating of Hebridean sea-salt on the scope and splashing into the eyepiece. Lapwings still career around in hot pursuit of the mugging Crows, whilst Shelducks shelter their just-fledged broods. I suppose the rain is needed. A mere 8mm in recent months has browned the surrounding countryside. The crops are choked.

And that was when dad picked it up. The rain hadn’t brought it in; it had been unearthed at 4 minutes past 4 (exactly), as part of the small amount of inland migrating phalaropes. Spinning and swimming, the Red-necked Phalarope was typically hyperactive, picking up insects in gravity defying vortices. A male, we guessed, in it’s faded, battered rendition of the adult female’s stunning summer plumage, though in the weather everything had an insipid cast.

A Breckland gem. It carried on raining. Puddles filled up the pockmarked field edges, to which pigeons flocked to bathe. Darker light saturates the colours of the rape field, a bright banana yellow against Payne’s grey skies, towering high above and stretching to the horizon, whilst sprinkled red poppies fleck the field margins over which Swallows flit. And still the rain came.

2011-04-30T22:04:00.005+01:00

From my desk I can see the sky in widescreen. Filtering in through three windows, its saltire-blue stretches of cloud free space fade to white at the edges, by the Wallace monument and the fingers of the strand of still bare trees.
From my desk I can also see my laptop, Microsoft word and a half started, disheartening essay.

Discipline cracked. Not that it takes much anymore.

Over the rugby pitches in a swarm of Sand Martins, fluttered a Swallow. Only one.
Spring had arrived.

The raucous Chiffchaffs agree.

***
The hedge sprouted plastic bags, flowered crushed lager cans and blossomed with bleached prophylactics. Twisted rusting metal lay in the undergrowth, the broken beaten body of a nearby fence co-opted as a lurking tetanus trap for the next unleashed dog gambolling the perimeter hedgerows. And there’s a lot of them about. Discarded tabloids flutter as suburban tumbleweed in this lifeless desert of litter, rusting goal posts slump and burn in the harsh sunlight, whilst a lone Goldeneye floats, perfectly still, on a Boating pond for several minutes, meditating with the bobbing waves on the unbearableness of being a Bucephala. And being here. Meadow Pipits orbit galaxies of tiny blue plants, shot through with asteroids of daises and supernovae of dandelions on the short-cropped grass as I passed, pursued by canine hordes after the remains of my bacon sandwich.

It’s a collision. A car crash of worlds, with nature festering away in the shadow of post-industrial Scotland.

It seems contrarian to the prevailing narrative of tacky tartan and golf-course-defiled wilderness that despite the huge swathes of this country left as the great British wilderness, the best site we can do for birding is this scrap of land and sea, nestled three-way between Leith, Musselburgh (‘the honest toun’), and Cockenzie’s power station. That at least would explain why, for a bustling urban nature reserve by the biggest town in East Lothian and capital satellite, there are approximately three notice boards. Top marks for existing but a fail for the worthy environmental evangelism we’re reminded permanently to be a part of.

And yet a Hail Mary pass of the scope over the sea revealed quite why Musselburgh has the reputation it has. The Firth was coated in Velvet Scoter, surfing the black waves from here to Fife’s Forth coast; black ducks anchored like buoys over the shallow beds of mussels - though apparently any mollusc will do - periodically rearing up to flash those curious white secondaries in their wings. But you don’t need to see that to identify them, they’re close enough that the white guyliner or industrial strength bill in regulatory high-viz orange will suffice. And it’s not just them. Standing under a procession of passage Sand Martins and Swallows; two Long-tailed Ducks float offshore with raffish Red-breasted Mergansers and a handful of Eider. It turns out that despite everything, this place aint half bad at all.

***

Slipped into hypnogogia, she lay in an alcove, in the lee of the wind and stretched out on a flat rock in felineesque felicity. I took my time. Perched on a higher rock and buffeted by the Berwick wind, I combed with the scope over the stretch of sand, seaweed and sea. Late afternoon bought respite from the harsh sunlight of midday, and with the temperature in the low-teens; it too was tempting to drift away… White and black. Shaking myself to, Eider, Gannet, gulls dotted the scenery in minimalist colours. Oystercatchers too, piercing calls reverberating off the rocks. Bass Rock in the distant haze seems snow capped with the naked eye, guano capped at 20x and crawling with an ant-like mass of Gannets at 60. Blimey there’s Gannets. From the Fife bank and back, left to right, the sky and sea is covered in the shearing and elegant marvels of evolutionary insanity. It’s not just the five-foot wing span, though that’s impressive in itself. It’s the death cheating, high velocity diving action; plummeting from-
The Oystercatchers erupted. Shot in low, a silver-grey raptor flushed them into a cloud of fluttering wings and piping calls. Too slow on the offensive; it pulls up and lands on the offshore island. A Sparrowhawk, strangely, one of the biggest females I’ve seen, expanding its diet beyond the town’s population of its namesake.

As the afternoon slipped into evening, I woke her up and showed her a Ringed Plover. She giggled, enjoying its clockwork toy running motion. I postulate that they look diligent and humble; she bats it back as intelligent and that it’s her favourite bird of the day. Anti-spectacle too, could a birdwatcher have been born?

North Berwick is the bourgeoisie wildlife experience: the Scottish home of the fluffy Puffin key ring, overpriced fish and chips on the beach and the self-important pink polo-shirted dog walker. It exists, so it seems, through the rose tints of the twee upper-class tourist, wildlife at its most mediated, paid for and predictable. At least Musselburgh contained the element of surprise and, if not in its most spectacular surroundings, one of natures more surprising locales.

***

Perthshire does different surprises. The road snakes through rolling green countryside, Lapwings career across hedges in the throes of passion and bubbling Curlews cant down to the dale-bottom burn. Then the car crests the apex of the valley and drops down into a miniature Glencoe of claustrophobic, vertiginous Gneiss walls, and carpets of heather studded with grouse topped boulders. The car window frames it, a shelterbelt blocks it. The road dog-legs round and the view reappears as a pink rolling sea of heather. Surfing the nearest wave to the verge, a round-winged, black tipped, Short-eared Owl, appears and disappears as its sulphuric eyes clock the car.

Two days prior earlier and the first summer worthy weather of the year had hidden the hills in a veneer of haze. Three flicks of Dave’s sweepnet and the peace was obliterated with Bloody hell, it’s a Capniidae. He’d have hours of fun with this. Sweeping a net back and through the boggy margins, netting countless mayflies, hoppers, craneflies and, most importantly, stoneflies. I was concentrating in not slipping off a mossy hummock and filling a boot full of the fresh Scottish mountain loch water that people pay to drink from bottles. Pipits on the fences were distracting me until I looked up and Dave, DAVE, Osprey.

I’d forgotten how big they are, all six foot of those wings, gently drooping at the tips and sharply drawn at the rear, giving that characteristic languid glide. Despite appearing out of nowhere it was almost above me when I clocked it, and it flew right over my head. The subconscious screamed Osprey, but I dragged out the process, enjoying every second of being reunited with a glamour species away from the visitor centre mediated experience.

Upon a high Tayside moor, amidst a collage of greens, browns, crags and grey skies; tumbling Lapwings and shrill Redshanks, chattering Swallows and flashing Wheatears, and the exposed ears of a (non-mountain) hare receding into a depression. Surprisingly lush, not the expected ascetic experience of being high up above the tree line. Caught in the sweeping movement of my binoculars, a distant flash of grey grazed the grass of the moor. Catching up to it, I expected a Wheatear and found a male Merlin, scything through the Swallows, before vanishing off to the distance. Merlins, masters of the five-second fly-through, remain, to me at least, the most enigmatic of British breeding falcons; it’s a classic falcon, yet like no other falcon to be found. They fly flat, fast and low and haunt these bleak lands, and for 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 55 seconds, of a year remain exist in complete invisibility

I headed off the hill in happiness.

But my absolute favourite place in Perthshire is the little visited SWT reserve Balnaguard Glen. Juniper, an inept conifer that resembles Broom and Gorse, proliferates here, on a stream addled formerly grazed hillside. Pristine is the Scottish landscape cliché, and a misleading one too, but here if you ignore the history and focus instead on the glacial scars, the landslip exposed boulder clay, the tiny path winding down the steep slope to the burn bending its way through riparian woodland and the juniper, matted and enmeshed into a piecemeal spiky carpet covering the boggy upper-slopes that you have to fight your way through; it feels pristine. It feels that it gets a dog walker per week. You can feel alone, sat in an island of grass, surrounded by juniper, and an orchestra of Willow Warblers, one in every bush, whilst admiring Violet, coltsfoot, Cuckooflower and its erratic attendant, the Orangetip. And it wasn’t amazing for birds, as a Pheasant slowly dying under a log rather explicitly pointed out, but that’s not the point. The point is in the pugnacious Green Hairstreaks, the botany, the bumblebees, and the juxtaposition of such life, with the ‘partridge and gulls’ agri-desert downslope. The reason for the vibrant life was shown when Dave changed the alcohol bottle on his malaise trap. Insect soup he said.

(A stonefly, the Latin name of which I have forgotten).
***

And despite my best efforts, occasionally the real-birders birds get in my way. At the blustery Esk mouth, as the mud crawled with Godwits, Turnstone, Dunlins etc, each a copy of the repetitions of the congener that preceded it, a Crow caught my eye as it drifted down to the rocks. I clocked it as a hoody, a glint of grey as it came across the light. The scope revealed what was ostensibly a Hooded Crow: clean cut grey back and black gorget extending in the right shape to the upper breast. But, those cursed black under-tail coverts. 80% is the estimate of others.
At a car park on the River Tay by Dunkeld, one Carrion Crow caught my eye, for in the correct light having a very dark grey upper back and upper breast, with a clearly demarcated black line on its upper-breast where the glossy black gorget lay. 90% Carrion? How far back in this Corvus’s genetic history did its corone become diluted with cornix? Complicating the issue are the amount of hybrids that get seen in Lothian in winter, and the apparent southward spread of Hooded Crow this year. I was without binoculars at the time but I’m fairly sure there was a pure cornix, or at the very least, purer than the Musselburgh bird, present in fields near Balnaguard, where they disappeared a decade ago (I’m told, I’ve also been told they’ve spread further into Speyside this year).

(Musselburgh)
***

Desecrated Daffodils lay dead in the woodland. Bluebells and flowering wild garlic took over the florae flooring of the campus woods. Commas flitted from the bushes in which Blackcaps sang of summer. Still a single male Goosander kicks back with the Mallards on the grass bank of the loch, waiting for the Warburtons, whilst Scotland sizzles under 15 degrees Celsius.
I guess this is Scotland’s week of summer then. To celebrate? The second batch of essays please…

(Nocturne Swans)

The Moths of March

2011-03-25T23:16:00.005Z

Moths are magnetically drawn to my kitchen. It's either the smell of the mould-coated floor, the bins erupting with rubbish or the flatmates that always leave every window open and light on...

Common Quaker (I think)

March Moth (I hope)

Hebrew Character (Probably)

Ruff Reprise

2011-02-11T22:28:00.004Z

This is a Ruff.

More specifically it’s a satellite male Ruff, in at least its 7th calendar year of existence.

Yep, it’s those colour rings that are the give away, and it was rung at Oosterlittens, Weakens; in Friesland, The Netherlands.
In July, a month after it was rung, it was seen near Great Yarmouth. It disappeared for two years before being seen in February at Thornham; repeating this trick again, before finally being seen over December and January at Titchwell. Strangely, for such a distinctive and unique bird, there have been hardly any controls from it, and only ever in Norfolk.

Ruffs are culturally famous of course, for bequeathing the idea of having silly, frilly fringe around the necks to the monarchy and fashionable, status conscious upper echelons of 16th-17th century society.

The University of Groningen (the most northerly mainland Dutch province) is running the study, and they have six aims:
1. What is the size of the passage population using Fryslân and how does that relate to the global population size?
2. How long is the stopover period of an individual Ruff? And what habitats do Ruffs use whilst staging?
3. Where does the Frisian passage population breed? Is it confined to Western Europe or do parts of the population continue eastwards, and breed maybe as far as eastern Russia?
4. What is the annual survival and are there differences between males and females in survival?
5. Do Ruffs segregate into genetically distinguishable populations? The Ruff has a vast distribution range. Other waders with similar distributions in the arctic show genetic population structuring.
6. What is the reproductive strategy of the faeder? Ruff males come in three types: the dominant (independent) male, the satellite male and the faeder, a female mimic on which discovery we reported in the 2004 Newsletter.

More information can be found at their website which I thoroughly recommend you to look at.

2011-02-11T22:15:00.001Z

Dumyat

2011-02-11T22:13:00.000Z

Proved patch Red Grouse (all two of them) in fairly spectacular scenery.

The Suburban Birder

2011-02-08T18:19:00.004Z

Stirling

A Kestrel hung in the wind; wind that swept around the sill of Stirling castle and slammed into the northern side of the city. From further down the sill, beneath the castle by a pair of imposing cannon statues, the view stretches from the Hills of Touch, to the Trossachs, to Sainsbury’s and down the Forth until haze obliterates scenery and fades land and sky to horizon. The Forth meanders its ways across this land in spate; full of thundering muddy brown water, on which a Goosander floats under Stirling bridge; waiting for fish. This end of the sill is covered in scrub and desire line paths beaten through the bush at the behest of drunken rambling, or so the random, topography belying paths littered with the fruit of the Tennants Extra tree would suggest. Insalubrious in appearance, its generally neglected air is pervaded with possibility. Not in redevelopment, not in tidying up, but in the possible biodiversity of this muddy, overgrown fringe. Warblers (what few there are this far north) look like a shoo-in up here, as do the other scrub loving passerines of summer. I’m guessing at 6am, heroin zombies and staggering drunks are the only people you meet up here. Cutting up over and descending in the sill in the shadow of the castle, the wooded end also holds promise, despite its tidy nature. I would hesitate to speculate, but only observe the staggering increase in socio-economic gradient. The Hills of Touch look really good from here. I think I’m coming down with hill envy.

Bridge of Allan

Under supplementary –sodium – lighting, a Buzzard slips through the pre-dawn. Verging on invisible to these human eyes; a chaotic torrent of corvids mobbed it regardless. On the mostly frozen loch, some swans loaf on ice, waiting for the light of dawn, and the loaf of passers by.

An austere dawn revealed the standard Bridge of Allan: Dippers on the river, Goosanders flying upstream, backlit Waxwing’s wispy crest quivering in the breeze. Eight then flew over: flashing translucent bits of wing and contrast in the tail, landing unseen in backgardens.

Edinburgh

An hour later I arrived in Auld Reekie; apparently the most miserable place to live in Britain. I like it.

And from up here it looks good. Perched on the ex-volcanic, sub-highland craggy heights of Arthur’s Seat, the spires, crowns and follies of historic buildings populate the skyline. They feel natural; as if they emerged from a bog in the hollow between here and West Lothian, like Edinburgh itself were a geological feature, eroded into roads, colonised by people and defiled by their paraphernalia. London wishes it were half as interesting. St Margaret’s loch far below lacked its Iceland Gull when I walked around, but now I see. Flying off into the sun, the translucent wing tipped gull. Banishing the spectres of previous dips and appallingly bad views, it settled down on Dunsapie loch, were I pioneered the art of using my phone and binoculars to record a vague impression of the scene in front of me.

Followed up with art galleries and whisky shops, this sub/urban birding lark could grow on me.

Stirling

Rain lashed down on the grey stone street. Wind played, knocking over shop signs, ruffling hair, slapping exposed skin and stealing breath. In a pot, a tree, a high street hazel sat incongruously in the city centre. And yet this weather - anarchic weather that wrecks, weather that can’t be controlled - is somehow evangelical of the wilderness. And in this tree, this tree stood outside a post office turned super pub, this sop to greenery, perched a pair of Siskin. Fragile, spindly branches black against the sky, catkins dangling, the male sullied yellow and black faced contrasted against the white background of a bus, the female perched close to the trunk, sodden feathers humbly streaked green. Amazing what turns up anywhere, what a bit of wind and rain will do, with a fortunately chosen type of tree. Did the desk, from the office, of the building, of the county council ever considered this as a consequence of their actions? You don’t need to imagine buildings as cliffs to go urban birding. You just need to look as all the shoppers speed by, running out of the rain, and wind, and buses buzz past and life carried on its hectic interpretation of ordered chaos.

Bridge of Allan

A clear night and recent rain meant a thick frost was developing; the first few cracks of which were now appearing under foot. Inky blackness stretched from the Ochils to the carse, gently fading to the ubiquitous pinkish orange stain of light pollution. Oh sodium, how we have a bitter relationship. You keep me safe, yet I hate you. You spoil the sky, yet you illuminate the vibrating white underwings of a pair of Oystercatcher displaying over the golf course. You spoil the mystery, the very appeal of nocturnal walking, yet you bring out the clumps of snowdrops like a constellation on the leafy woodland floors and show the rustling in the hedgerow is nothing but a February Hedgehog.
A February Hedgehog?
That’s rather early isn’t it?

Dunblane

And then it ceases to work. Walking around Dunblane in a dismal coating of snow and sludgy ice, another miserable failure of a Waxwing twitch. I could tot up the hours wasted, the birds not seen, the streets pounded, slid on and stood on, but… it would suggest that I had a better use for my time…

Rendlesham (not dipped over the Christmas break).

Rive Gauche Forth

2011-01-31T16:18:00.005Z

Pumice clouds rolled onto the strip of lava orange sky. Backlit, the black saw-toothed hills of Galloway bracketed the volcanic sky-scape. A dip in the road, a crest, and the scene disappears: smothered under dark grey clouds. Later, as Glasgow and its environs spread out in front of the windscreen, a dalmatian city of orange dots in an ocean of darkness, it starts to rain. It’s good to be back in Scotland. As orange streaks and smears its way across the windscreen my thoughts turn to 2011…

The day after dawned grey and spitting with rain. Between the Allan Water and the playing fields, the path dissipated, eroded, attrition worn, freeze-thawed and scoured away by the river. The tentative footsteps of others had forged the beginnings of a new path where there was once the tiniest shard of wasteland. A dark rock, under an overhang on the opposite bank had a moving white splodge: always the first sign of a Dipper. It sung, its electrically distorted version of a Robin, when a second Dipper suddenly appeared on the shingle island. A quick territorial tussle and they were both off, flying upstream, towards a pair of Goosander; drake and duck, elegantly floating downstream. I joked to my dad, Steve Rutt’s Bird Tours always succeeds in year ticking Dippers for its clientele. A bright male Bullfinch in a bush in town neatly concluded his whistle stop tour of the Stirling area avifauna.

In the cloudy afternoon, I walked off in the other direction, up into the Ochils past Cocksburn Reservoir. Around the bend, along the Scot’s Pine lined car park, the excitement calls of Common Crossbills drifted down. A flock of 9, possibly 10, mostly immatures and females with only one male decorated a tree. The first I’ve seen locally, capping a decent day of local walking. Of course, when I get back I found out how many Waxwings I’ve missed locally...

***

When I say Stirling; ‘where?’ is the standard reply. And this is in a country with the best Geography teachers in the world. However, what it lacks in pop geography it gains it historical importance. This whole area is really very old, from the genuinely old Stirling Castle; inextricably woven into the last millennium of Scottish history, to the faux-historic William Wallace memorial/Sauron’s tower (a mere 150 years). History however has nothing to do with birds, but the geography does. So, scratch beneath its shiny surface as ‘the gateway to the highlands’ and what do you find? The Ochil fault is the most obvious thing. Perhaps more accurately than the gateway to the highlands, it should be named the doorstop of the highlands. From the north the Ochils slope gently up to the plateau, from the southern or Stirling end, they stop suddenly and drop vertiginously, as if they couldn’t be bothered to finish them, leaving a long and impressive ridge stretching east. The Ochils are reminiscent of the less interesting Lakeland fells, nicely rounded, grassy and not overly big, with not much heather, or dazzling scenery. They are exceedingly wet though, and the numerous burns have carved their way down the southern ridge, opening up tight little valleys, which have been infilled with deciduous woodland. Alva Glen is a big example but an hour’s walk, Blairlogie is smaller and overgrown but only ten minutes walk away. Obviously the hills and moors have been taking up most of my time, but the rest of the carse has some potential attractions. Flat grassy farmland, Cambus Pools by the River Forth (just off patch) and clumps of attractive woodland by the memorial and castle. The woodlands up slope, beside campus and above Bridge of Allan are stuffed full of tics and hold promise for the summer, being deciduous and airy, despite Rhododendron creeping in from the east. This winter they held Woodcock, and there are apparently Nuthatches up there. The conifer plantations on the moor are usually dead, though there is the occasional Crossbill. Sheriffmuir big wood is reputed to hold Red Squirrel; the onslaught of Greys, of which campus has an offensively large amount, have apparently not spread there. Yet. The Allan water by Bridge of Allan holds Dipper and Goosander; though the stretch north to Dunblane holds many more Dippers by a twisty but attractively woody path, and Airthrey loch is the last word in confiding Goosanders.

The Carse holds some of Scotland's most productive agricultural land.

Alva Glen weather

Hills of Touch, Graham's Dairy pasture. There's a temperature inversion going on, you just can't see it.

Dumyat from the north.
So, precisely my new patch stretches from Alva in the east; Dunblane in the north; Helicon (the River Forth) to the south and the M9 to the west. Or, 6.3 miles from East to West; 5 miles from North to South; in a bent triangular shape. It borders two counties, Stirlingshire and Clackmannanshire; and features, as far as I know, only one nature reserve, Alva Glen.

Allanwater

Sills.

Dumyat's western flank. Aka, the view from my kitchen.

Road up the side of Dumyat.

As of several months in Autumn and Winter, I know I have Peregrine Falcon, Hen Harrier, enough Buzzards to give a game keeper apoplexy, Common Crossbills, Goosanders, Goldeneye, Dippers, Grey Wagtail, Kingfisher, Redstart, Woodcock, Raven, Chiffchaff, more Waxwings then I will probably ever see in my life (dipped too many hundred strong flocks), Nuthatch approximately 10 metres from my flat, Bullfinch less than a metre from my window, and the friendly flock of Long-tailed Tits that survived the big freeze (-15!) that tell me when the local Sparrowhawk is passing over. And this is all the fruit of isolation, boredom and economy enforced wanderings to Dunblane and back…

Dumyat and other Ochils.

Snowy carse.

Airthrey loch sunset.

Campus woods.

Target Species:
1: Red Grouse must be around here somewhere.
2: Wood warbler and Pied Flycatchers in spring.
3: Merlin.
4: Snow Bunting on the high moors.
5: Any eared owl. So far I’ve only seen two tawnies, but I’m eyeing the conifer plantations that border those upland moors; and the lowland agriculture bordered by thick, tall and old trees.

Hit the Norf(olk)

2011-01-24T10:32:00.005Z

As I raced the snow south to Suffolk in mid December, I relished the promised feast of scarce and rare birds driven by the harsh weather to seek succour on the Suffolk marshes. That’s the nature of the illusion, the mirage of rare bird news. See how alluring BINS looks from a freezing flat in Central Scotland: listing desirable birds in neat rows, highlighted in blue and illustrated with high-res record shots; painting the picture of Suffolk as some kind of under watched and under appreciated avian nirvana, as you check daily, fingers crossed for the continued presence of Minsmere’s King Eider*. But then you arrive and find it dead. The countryside reduced to browns and greens under white skies; the wader scrapes populated with a single lonely Redshank, and the rank green grass of North Warren covered in White-fronted Geese. Actually that wasn’t so bad; and neither was the Shorelark flock on a snow striped Dunwich beach. But the gap between expectation and reality - short sold on my anticipation and with no right to return – couldn’t help but disappoint. Including the obligatory Green-winged Teal dip, not even oddities like a Ruff on a semi-frozen Sailing Lake at Lackford could ease the nagging sense of... well… it being a bit rubbish.

Five weeks later I cracked. This time it was to be Norfolk. Old Norfolk principles: no twitching, no Titchwell and no tick and running behaviour were conveniently overlooked.

Titchwell had an ocean sky; the expanse of clean and clear atmosphere was a beautiful blue, fringing darker over Brancaster and Thornham. A devilish wind whipping in from the wash made it a brisk walk, tinged with regret for forgotten gloves as fingers stiffened, numb and pink. The plan was to head straight to Parrinder, pick up a Water Pipit, hit the beach, search the sea for grebes/scoters and leave before the cadaverous lines of people stood passively looking at nothing got to me. It didn’t work out like that. It never does.

I got lost in the angular maze of the newly reformed Parrinder hide. A waste of money and an architectural monstrosity to the purists and conservatives; a much-needed renovation to the conservationists, and a well planned and nicely fitted sea-watching hide for the forward looking; it’s revamp has divided opinion. So here’s mine. It’s alright. Confusing window opening mechanisms and not enough visibility of the sky are outweighed by its solid modernity and it’s capacity for a big twitch is much better than the old Parrinder hide. This cynic also sees it as nicely comfortable for the RSPB’s target market. But shout Water Pipit and its window will still be crowded out by the selfish, ensuring only the hastiest few get to see it (and not me). I was too busy watching a colour ringed satellite Ruff, running over the islands, sparring with other males and harassing Reeves, amongst the mega flock of Golden Plover, Lapwing, Dunlin… Lazily a Marsh Harrier would drift from the reedbed over the marsh, scattering panicking plovers, flushing them up as a great ribbon of gold, before they would turn and shatter to white and grey. The sea held only a Slavonian Grebe, a 1st winter drake Eider, Kittiwakes dancing offshore and a scoter flock. Velvets were seen but the curse of me and seawatching continued, the flock remained too distant, too obscured by waves, too poor through my salt coated ‘scope to pick out the white wing flashes. We turned after 10 or so minutes, sauntering inland with our sights set on Holkham. But then, it didn’t quite work out that way either.

(Still from video taken at Boyton Marshes earlier this year.)

I hadn’t planned, I hadn’t cared. I’d come around to the ID having been sceptical. I was even looking the wrong way when it was called. But a quick head spin as t’Northern Harrier slipped out from behind the parallel seawall and low over the marsh, on a smash and grab wader raid. Dangling its broken leg, extensively rufous-orange underparts, chestnut hooded effect… it was the bird widely touted as being ‘Circus cyaneus hudsonius’. But I didn’t count the bars on the longest under primary, the diagnostic feature. Can I be sure that there’s only the one orangey harrier with a broken leg in northwest Norfolk? Of course not. And so birding’s pursuit of splitting feather barring and forensic examination in the search of ever more refined ID of the smallest differences leads to head spinning, feather spitting and ambiguity when clarity is required. Headaches and ethics; who said birding was relaxing?

In the lee of its conifer windbreak, Holkham was the post-Titchwell idyll. Sun shone strongly, filtering heat through and a touch of haze just coloured the atmosphere. The marsh to the south was heavily backlit and pockmarked with the thousand strong flock of Pink-footed Geese; the pathside trees crawled with Coal Tits, Goldcrests and the hazy fringe was haunted by a Barn Owl; ghostly white, haloed golden in the strange light. This part of central North Norfolk is home to subversive Barn Owls, quartering the marshes and fields in the middle of day and Holkham was stuffed with them. 5 was the count, spread across the marsh and scrapping with the Rough-legged Buzzard we’d come to pay homage to. Hazily backlit, but with white in the right places and dark bits where it needed them, the rough-leg was sat on a distant mound, not doing much but preening. There’s something about them, something mysterious, some alluring high Arctic chic that shines through, despite their chronic laziness. I’ve seen three now. I’m not convinced they can fly for more than a minute at a time. Why fly, when you can sit?

Cley. Hindsight is glorious but I was worried; history had set the precedent and the deserted east bank was ominous. American Wigeon was the target, and the straggling Wigeon flock straddled several the long grass, obscuring vital features. Light was fading, leaden clouds crowded out the sun and a chill wind scoured the unbroken stretch of marsh east. Several birders joined the hunt, setting up scopes on this causeway betwixt reed and grass. Time slows, as lined birders hunched over scopes methodically grill and discard sections of the flock. Methodical not meditative; the systematic hunt looked troubled. But all it takes is three words, three words to make a twitch worth it.
‘I’ve got it’.
Typically it was the other side of the marsh to where I’d been searching. Belligerent, the American Wigeon chased, bullied and agitated the other males in the flock it was walking through. The bottle green swathe of feathers around the eye flashed as it turned its distinctively head; off-cream forehead patch instead of butter yellow; mottled brown chin; and pink wrapped around from the breast onto the flanks instead of grey; a subtly attractive duck, when it wasn’t terrorising the male Eurasians. It even obliged enough to flap Persil washed axillaries, following a nearby Eurasian’s flashing of grey underwings. It wasn’t needed but it was the ultimate clinching feature, the seal of genetic purity and fully winged heritage.
Subtlety is a hard quality to communicate to the Swaro’ toting walkers from suburban Surrey just passing by. Peace might be hard to come by on the North Norfolk honey pots, but the birds - they make it worth the effort, the questions, and the strange looks.

((© Kay Donaghy))

*Now I’m not casting aspersions but it had clearly been checking term dates. September the 12th it turned up, also known as my first day at uni. And now I’m the only Suffolk birder to not have this county first residing on my list…

Book Reviews

2011-01-24T10:25:00.005Z

Two recent book reviews for the BirdGuides webzine.
1: Facing Extinction. Click here to read. I'm not the biggest fan of straight scientific works, but this was a marvelous book to behold.

2: The Jewel Hunter. Click here to read. This review has been described as a kicking. If you think it's an evisceration, then you don't read enough book reviews.

Interlude #4: On a Peregrine Falcon seen from a moving car, on the Dartford Bridge.

2011-01-24T10:24:00.000Z

Spiralling. The steel grey backed falcon, gets height over its hunting grounds. Below a rank greenish scrap of London tumbles into the Thames foreshore, imperiously overlooked by neat lines and rows of the freemarket metal and glass hedgerows. Grey skies blur and conceal, a lorry steals the view.

Political Interlude

2010-12-28T20:54:00.003Z

From The Guardian:

"A Downing Street source said a vote [to repeal the ban on hunting foxes with dogs] would also look like a skewed sense of priorities, and remind some voters that the coalition can be seriously divided on social issues.

Cameron, a self-confessed "shire Tory", has said he is a country man at heart and favours hunting, but he recognises it is a highly divisive issue and would play to negative stereotypes around his party."

Don't get me started on our forests.

Edit: Some good news from The Independent.

National Rail

2010-12-18T20:19:00.005Z

Erratic, noisy, unpredictable, unreliable, and always in the search of a subsidy...

...Coming to sprats, provided by the RSPB for the aid of Bitterns and other reedbed wraiths that quite like dead fish when the Rudd are protected by an inch of ice.

Also showing from Bittern hide:
Points for anyone who can turn it into a Northern Harrier.

Scolopax situationism

2010-12-04T18:14:00.002Z

I never claimed to be any good in the field. My self-sabotaging shyness renders myself silent around other birders, my naturally drooping head means I’m much more likely to spend my time avoiding rabbit holes than picking out autumnal Honey Buzzards and my east coast self-found passerine score is, well, erm… nothing worth shouting about shall we say.

But that’s not the story though.

5 years of birding has rubbed off on me. Is it instinct? Is it the 6th birding sense? Is it sheer luck? Has it always been this way but now I know where, when and what to look at and what its name is?

It was Tuesday night when it first happened. Sodium security lights had stained the snowfall orange, whilst heavy cloud hung above the central belt. I’d shifted, from the blank essay on my mac to my window, to check the snowfall. It was a flash of movement, of dark on pale, which set the alarm bells ringing. I took a second look and between bushes in the courtyard a dark shape was rapidly moving towards my window, shooting through the orange light. It bent up and rocketed out of sight, bent wings pumping its potbellied shape in an evasive, emergency flight.
That was close. That must’ve just shaved the roof. That was a Woodcock…

Cut to today, about an hour ago, and I’m walking flatwards with a bag full of food. Old snow, crystallised and lumpy like old sugar, crunched underfoot. Painted by the dusk, the cool purples of the sky, blurred into pink from the streetlights.
It’s beyond bitterly cold; I haven’t seen a Wren since the night it was -16 °C.
A car slammed on the breaks, skidded on the slush and missed a bus by millimetres.
I cut through a small strand of trees and down a bank to the lochside for my daily dose of off-path rebellion.
There was no motive for me to look up. A rational being would’ve been looking ahead, looking where they were going. But rational beings don’t pick up on the little things, the pretty things, the things unexpected. They don’t pick up on the Woodcock, asthmatically flapping overhead, having broken from the cover of the Ochils. The black, potbellied being on bent wings wheezed its way overhead, before struggling to clear the trees I’d cut through, before disappearing into the light pollution of an industrial park.

It felt good to me.
Even if I can’t explain it better than that, the skill-lessness of just happening to look in the right place at the right time when reason says you shouldn’t.
But I’m not bothered about the why.
It felt good to me.

Obligatory Snow Post

2010-11-29T21:44:00.002Z

Snow is nature’s aesthetic correcting fluid.
For example: this used to be a golf course.

And all it took was a night of falling frozen crystalline water to tipex away its tidiness - a blemish on the unkempt wilderness of the Ochillian shadow.

Last Saturday it sabotaged me. Nature soc made it as far north as Boat of Garten, before the road, sky, trees and buildings were erased in white. Hightailing it back over the Drumochter pass before the blizzard hit, a few roadside Red Grouse were the only birds I was going to get.

But the best thing about snow is the clarity. Reflected light shows up every barred feather in the variegated underparts of a soaring Buzzard; 4 in the sky over Yellowcraig crag were a case study of Buzzard variation.

Take a right, over the burn, and you pass along the crag. Up the road and turn left and you enter into Hermitage woods. A sprawling mixed deciduous woodland along the sloping southwestern flank of the Ochil plateau. Clouds crowded overheaded, killing the Buzzards’ blue soaring sky. Amongst the snow clad skeletal trees there was a sense of claustrophobia. A tight winding path of deep snow on ice, a periodic stray footfall would send a leg slipping, perilously close to a snow covered slope.
White, brown and black.
A landscape in negative. Trees stood as vertical bars, branches intertwined in an ornate web of black against the blank sky.

And the snow carried on falling.

And I follow the tracks of deer, the only other animal on the path.

Two Blackbirds flew across, followed by a Redwing. It perched up by a path, illuminated in the strange light of snowfall. Colour shone despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of light; the blood red stripe searing through the snow. Yellow suffused the supercillia, and brown streaks dirtied up the pale breast, but that didn’t spoil its looks: a stunning bird in special conditions.

Rhododendron has infiltrated these woods, as the only scrap of vegetation the deer won’t eat. It is a good for nothing invader, an alien and a weed. But its dense canopy and layering of leaves has blocked the snow out, giving a shred of cover. I walked up to a wall, peered over the other side at the rear of a bush and catch two seconds of the inimitable waddle of a pissed off Woodcock, walking back into deep cover.

(An epic post of autumn/early winter will come. I wouldn’t dare to say how soon…)

Further Suggested Reading

2010-11-08T15:33:00.003Z

I'm still alive. I'm also still the only blogger with not a lot to say and even less time in which to say it. So on that note, here's a few things for you to read instead:
1. Jonathan Franzen (he wrote the Great American Novel, twice, and is a birder) writing in The Telegraph (I was surprised) about Songbird trapping and hunting in the Mediterranean. It's long and heavy going but worth reading: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/8102878/Songbirds-poached-and-eaten.html
2. "Before every excursion he must negotiate with the local police and military commanders and, if needed, ask for an escort. He has only been shot at one single time, Fadhil says. And that was a misunderstanding." Birding in Baghdad. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,724511,00.html
3. The Loneliness of the Chinese birdwatcher (in the Economist, of all places): http://www.economist.com/node/12795527?story_id=12795527
4. "America is adrift, stumbling forward with a road map drawn by shock-jocks and gas bags. When lost we tune in our favorite bloviator and ask for directions. Yet there is a real behind the unreal, a wonderful store filled with goodies behind the facade. If you want to know the American story, you must experience the American places." And finally from the American Birding Association, a pyscho-geography, philosophical essay on why place is important in birding: http://blog.aba.org/2010/11/space-for-place.html
Read, digest, enjoy and let me know if you find any other interesting articles in unusual places.

Bracklinn Falls

2010-10-14T09:49:00.000+01:00

See the sky about to rain

2010-10-02T22:43:00.006+01:00

MOTD

And Josh Jenkins Shaw is gripped by the contents of my kitchen. Personally I’d have called it the Pesto Moth, but that’s just the flavour of my personal nomenclature.

“and sooner or later, it all gets real”

Saussure’s theory of language, Henry V’s deeper meanings, rain, lunchtime lectures, pasta without sauce for 7 days a week, buses to the train station, trains to the bus station and buses to the rain sodden ascetic landscape of my choosing.
And did I mention the rain?
Ceaseless. Grey, miserable, depressingly monotonous. Blue skies fade to grey, clouds swell like bruises and that inveterate Scottish element, rain, falls 5 minutes before my walk and stops 5 minutes after. It’s pointless going outside without a bag stuffed full of cagoules, smocks, coats, winter coats, fleece coats; got to match the garment to the precipitation type. Because Scotland doesn’t just have one type of rain.

I have actually done some birding. And it’s not all miserable, because out of the things I like, lochs and ducks rank quite high. So the discovery of a redheaded Goosander on the loch was nice. I say nice, it was at times about 6 feet away from me in clear water. You could see its pink legs paddling, and that unique way it puts its head below the water whilst it swims, the finely serrated edge to the tapering bill that suddenly plunges into a mean hooked tip. Or as I scribbled in the corner of my work pad at the time, right next to the sociolinguistic variations of t-glottalisation, ‘Fish fear the femme fatale of this neo-noir duck pond’. I can’t explain how, or what, or why I wrote that. It's a loch for a start. I might blame the Wallace Memorial. Standing on a jagged ridge of rock in the middle of the flat carse, dominating the skyline from every angle, infecting everything with a slightly gothic tint. A gigantic monument to English folly and stupidity. If it was needed.

One day back in September I had a juvenile Redstart, timidly trembling its fiery tail from a pathside post, then a bush. A few weeks later I walked into the first Stirling University Nature Society meeting to be told that I was the only one who’d seen one on campus. Shamefully it was only the second I’ve seen all year.

And actual real proper birding, at an actual real proper reserve? Today at Montrose. It cost me about £20. I saw about as many Eider as I’ve seen in my life time. But not quite £20’s worth. At least in a few years time I’ll have enough experience to write the guide on Scottish birding by public transport…

Proper birding and proper blogging will resume.
Sometime.

Of Paupers and Kings

2010-09-21T10:48:00.002+01:00

Staring out over the yard through the slatted blind. It’s 3 o’clock. A Saturday, pale grey skies - the kind that Scotland does so well – and trees verging on dying. Fellow youths mill around like directionless ants. Stillness. Boredom. Better get used to this, no one to take me birding, no transport, just the after effects of a night of cheap wine and Mogwai. 30 minutes later and I strode through Blairlogie, having aimed for Cocksburn Reservoir, and, erm, missed. By quite a way. But amongst Ordnance Survey’s tangle of contour lines and A roads, was a path skirting the north of the village, that bent up to the 400+metre summit of Dumyat, the most westerly mount of the Ochil range.

Chest height bracken- time to turn back. Not so much the path less trod, as the path that hitherto only existed as a cartographer’s daydream. Squelching slippery mud shifted under foot, the tendrils of dead vegetation clutched at and entangled my legs, whilst male and female Peregrine Falcons drew dizzying circles in the sky.

To dad: The size difference between male and female Peregrines is quite striking…
And instantly, with the sending of that text, I received one.
To Steve: King Eider v. distant…

I had to get the story, get gripped off on a Scottish mountainside.

The Battle of Sole Bay
You know it’s going to be a good day when the sky is blue, not a summer deep blue but that ‘Battle of Britain’ September lighter blue, and when the horizon that has been heat haze or just plain haze for weeks is a clear line. You know the day might not turn out so well when the car in front accelerates from strictly observing the 30 limit to 40mph – on a wide straight stretch it might reach a dizzying 45, but no chance of overtaking due to traffic coming the other way. Slow, slow traffic on A1120 – why does national drive at 35mph on a clear road day co-incide with a time limited birding foray? Therefore a slightly frustrated twitching ‘non twitcher’ makes the decision to park at Dunwich Heath car park as the King Eider, quarry of the day, was last reported there 2 hours ago. Pay £4.40 to park then receive the BG text that bird is ‘between Dunwich and Walberswick’ – Walberswick! That’s several miles north, and if the bird is as stated ‘drifting north’ it’s probably across the Blyth estuary past Southwold never to be seen again except by the person who always sees good stuff at Kessingland. This is a big area to search – almost all Sole Bay. Disconsolate I decide to walk north along cliff top from Dunwich Heath to Dunwich ‘village’ – or rather the remains s not yet under water (To see the future of East Anglia with climate change, visit Dunwich) – This is a stupid, stupid mistake because path goes away from cliff top due to danger – the National Trust keeping you at least 100m inland ‘due to the cliff being unstable’ – 100m worth of unstable? That’s pretty bad especially as in the caravan park next door people as holidaying in caravans that look a lot closer to the edge... The path goes into woods and its ages before the sea is back in view. A small flock of Common Scoter are visible, nice duck to see quite close in. Eventually the path emerges onto beach at Dunwich car park after well over an hour of quick walking north, I then receive a Text that the KE is off Minsmere, so shouldering the scope I head south down the beach, having another look at the scoter and wondering why its is only juvenile Herring Gulls who stand on the waters edge staring into the surf looking really bored. I get back to Dunwich Heath more than 2 hours after setting off, sit down eat a warm snickers bar and wonder why the crowd of birders I saw through my scope from Dunwich ‘village’ are no longer here, well it’s pretty clear, there are no birds. 15 minutes of looking at Herring gulls (plus 2 juvenile Black Headed Gulls for interesting variation) bobbing up and down I then get confused between Red Throated Diver and Shag (it was a RTD), just seemed to have a blunted bill. About 800m (possibly more) out I spot a duck stand up and shake its wings, its biggish, dark, white visible under wing when it flaps and an odd flash of white on the back, it take several minutes of 50x study before I see the ‘double point of sail and tail’, sometimes not visible, but after the traditional stand up flap and shake the sail re-appears. An ‘ex birder’ comes and asks me what I’m looking at, I explain, he looks says it’s a Herring Gull, I look and yes, there is a HG in view about 300m closer than the eider! The ‘ex birder’ gave up as he could not afford a good scope for sea watching’ – he has a young family in tow so I understand, especially as his children try to jump up and down in front of the scope waving, as youth the world over is want to do when they see a lens. I’m delighted to see the Eider, even feels better than joining a crowd and having it pointed out. Shame it wasn’t as close in as earlier in the week, but it is a good bird to see – especially in Suffolk. I watch it some more, wondering why sea duck to the ‘stretch and flap’ – doe sit help digest the shellfish – if they swallow shellfish whole that might need a bit of stretching to get the whole thing down.
Feeling that it was a good day after all I start back down the A1120, out of Yoxford the car in front accelerates to a maximum of 38mph!

Asthmatic and bent double, the strenuous exertion of trying to ascend 100 or so metres at a steep gradient has never agreed with my soft southern stamina.
Splutter.
Pausing just a moment- a catch of breath and a reminder of what the scenery beyond the tortuous path looks like. The burn burbled quietly to itself along the fissure in the rock; sheathed, cast in shade and almost obscured by the fecund growth of oaks along its steep side. Dense and dark cover, harbouring a Tawny Owl.
Wheeze.
Stop. Analyse the evidence again. In the shaded sheer rock face of the other side of the burn, a growth of Ivy coated the oaks. Fused to its branch, this paler, greyer lump looked like it was carved by nature out of the oak it perched in. Dappled greys on warm brown, its crown plunged down passed the eyes, bisecting the facial disk and giving it the typically austere face of an owl.
Splutter.
Not rare, not attractively coloured, just a complete surprise. Unique unpredictability- it’s what birding’s brilliant for.

Carse of Forth. Or Stirling. Geography varies as to whether you use wikipedia or local websites...

Origami Winged

2010-09-18T21:41:00.001+01:00

Angle Shades

"Still, I'm Moth free 99% of the time..."

2010-09-13T22:05:00.005+01:00

and low cloud danced along the cliff top, obscuring, then unveiling the distant crag at atmospheric whim. Light killed the colour; the grass-covered ridges were flat ochres, green only existing further down amongst the tree lined lower reaches, and the artificial green of the pitch.
Maybe I’d have an interest in rugby if all playing fields were like this.
A fifty strong flock of seagulls were spread out over the pitch, creased up, heads tucked in and turned towards the wind.
Maybe not.
I pulled my hood up further, and turned into the dreich. I’ve never heard it pronounced, but in my mind I harden the second syllable to a guttural sound of disgust. The perfect word for the weather, a pathetic fallacy; not bad enough to be interesting, yet too bad to bird.
Kicking up stones from my shoes, my gaze naturally fell towards my shoes; thoughts drift… languid wing beats piqued my interest. Carrion Crow.

Then.

Ripped from the grey, part of a path side bush fell off, spreading 4ft of wings and flying off, emitting a sharp shriek at its Carrion Crow escort. Banking, it turned around the tree I found my self unconsciously standing under, and powered off over the rugby pitches towards the tree-lined crag. They might be the wings of Britain’s commonest bird of prey, but that classic raptor shape, the size… There’s no need to intellectualise a Buzzard. To do so misses the point for the web of pretentious ramblings one leaves. They’re just thrilling birds.

The path wound past the loch, taking me up to the bridge and across to university - wrapped up in a hydrophobic rush of banality. “This brolly isn’t waterproof- what a rip off!”
My daily dose of wilderness, just five minutes from the flat, and better for being sodden and unexpected.

Who needs rarity?

Terror Nova

2010-09-12T18:02:00.004+01:00

My new patch.

Airthrey Loch, and the surrounding parkland habitat of Stirling uni campus. Campus list (why not?) already includes Buzzard, Treecreeper, far too many Gray Squirrels and a golf course full of fighting Rabbits. However opportunities for birding are restricted with Barad-dûr leering from the local hillside...

So long and thanks for all the…

2010-09-08T21:33:00.004+01:00

Ticks
Year:

Cambs. Seen 4, dipped 20+...

Life:

Landguard
And a variety of both from the Isles of Scilly:

Teeth Kicks:
4/09/10
The air buzzed with apple abdomens, and blue-notched thoraxes glinted in the September sunshine. Assorted trees surrounded the rough track- the vegetation climax from the surrounding sandlings resulted in an almost secluded suntrap. Twenty tired sets of eyes scanned the sky, branches, anything that moved. A Fox, assorted Martins and Swallows, Migrant Hawkers for the Odonata-aware... But birding is base, a sixth sense. Alerted by a shout, a collective twitch of heads saw a Hobby shoot through. Low, over the stunted path-side shrubbery, it was a dark shape for 2 seconds, maybe less, and yet confidently identified by all present- for there’s nothing more viscerally exciting than a Hobby in attack mode. For the following ten minutes it hawked hawkers, low overhead. Flying, towards us, down the path, pulling dramatic turns to connect its talons with a dragonfly, flashing of its buff washed underparts, and, when executing the tightest of deft, left turns, the fresh pale-fringed coverts and pale tail tip.

Avian Red Arrows, it was the highlight of the morning. It became the anecdotal answer to ‘what’s about?’, involving dramatic hand gestures and pained intonation, ‘it turned that tight’.

And the low point, a touch of schadenfreude for my regular readers.

Twenty birders from the Suffolk Ornithologists’ Group, stood like soldiers on the cliff top at Dower House scoping the shifting, muddy brown waters of the North Sea. Semi-blinded by a steady stream of Gannets passing in front of the reflection of the rising sun, we settled for one Arctic Skua as the only decent bird passing in the past two hours. We left at 9:10am.

We got a text six minutes later, from the scarily efficient Suffolk grapevine. ‘Cory’s Shearwater: 1 flew north past Sizewell at 9:15.’
Cory’s being a North Sea mega. A serious Suffolk rarity. Dower House is the clifftop to the immediate south of Sizewell. We greeted the news with sullen disbelief, followed by a session of post-trauma analysis. We agreed it flew past the very second we picked up our scopes and turned our backs…

Consulting my lexicography of clichés: we were robbed. Returning at midday to the cliff top we see further thieves, kleptoparasitic Arctic Skuas marauding their way across the horizon in the pursuit of Kittiwakes. And then Ash looked up from his scope and phlegmatically said, ‘I’ve got two Skuas, I’m pretty sure they’re long-tailed.”
He wasn’t joking either.
Retina busting range, black dots soaring against a white sky, nicely fringed by pink and blue chromatic aberration. These were beyond the ability of me, but it was unquestionably distinctive- elegant flight action, high above the water, before plunging seawards and then pulling up, with hesitation as to whether it wanted to fly north or south. Its wings with thin, long and angular, and its size was deceptively small. It crossed in front of a container ship I was expecting it to go behind, and thus was about half the distance I thought it was.

An hour later we walk north along the coast, by about a minute as the shearwater flies. In the shadow of the affront to architecture and ageing hippies that is Sizewell Nuclear power station, the stark shingle banks offer a viewpoint over the warm-water outfall. Cool water, sucked in from the sea to cool the nuclear reactors gets flushed back into the sea as warm water. This attracts fish, this attracts terns and gulls, and the hard work has been done, with a prime flock of skua bait. But more than just waiting and watching for skuas, the species here include copious amounts of the locally nesting Kittiwakes, and enough Little Gulls to keep me happy for quite a while. (This caused slight embarrassment, for I had refused to look at a field full of gulls earlier, for ethical reasons, in front of some of SOG’s finest gullers.)

Distantly some Arctic’s chugged over the waves before a cry of skua and a flailing arm pointed out one at half the range. Big and brown, the instant reaction was bonxie, which was almost instantly refuted by the pale underwings, flashing with every lift of the wings and full-bodied gull mugging. A double primary flash on the underwings, amongst other features nailed it as a juvenile pom. And then the Little Gull flock was torn asunder, as a strangled cry came from my dad’s lips.
Skua!
Exciting- each individual bird an adrenaline shot.
This, a fully spiked, pale morph adult ripping through the gull and chasing terns- jinking right, harrying, chasing, flying right over the beach and up over the dune in pursuit of one gull. Whilst my DSLR was in its bag. That situation was quickly rectified but the bird never flew close by again, choosing to drift in the warm water current offshore, before flying back and around to harry the flock again.

Backlit and perched on a chain link fence, a Black Redstart waved its flaming tail, amongst the bleak industrial detritus of the power station. A county year tick, I scarper before the nuclear police could interrogate me again, for being a person on public property…

06/09/10
Rare birds, they always turn up on Monday’s following migrant starved weekends.
Weather, always worsens before an evening twitch.
Birds dislike bad weather and they dislike me.
Thorpeness once again.
Greenish still eludes me.
(Fantastically vague name though- if I had my way every bird name would end in ish.)

Capping Up...

2010-08-18T23:27:00.003+01:00

...Cuts confusion.
See:

Great Shearwater

great shearwater

Trip report, and video, from the Birder Special Pelagics to come when my brain remembers how again correct order the words.

White-faced Lappet Thing

2010-07-31T21:51:00.003+01:00

I can’t remember the sky. I don’t remember much of the walk. I just about remember there being 80 swans and three people to one scope. On the pit, the islands were small, thin and covered in thick and tall, purple vegetation. Scanning with bins only threw up a few Green Sands and fragmented bits of birds, the odd wing, head, pair of legs or tail sticking out from the copious amounts of cover. And then Grantham got it.

Rewind to 2009, and on the first Wednesday of my first week of my work with BirdGuides, a Blue-cheeked Bee-eater turned up in Kent. I didn’t see it. 2010- the first Wednesday of my first week of work with BirdGuides and the news was a studied example of why I hate July birding. Until 11:12am when up popped those three red exclamation marks.
Mega.
White-tailed Lapwing at Rainham.
I didn’t realise my work schedule controlled bird vagrancy.
The sequel, post Seaforth and Bloemendaal excursions, with the bird having crossed the North Sea for probably the second or third time this year. It had to pitch down on the wrong side of town, stifling office excitement- what was wrong with Barnes? My only option, Menzie didn’t fancy the cross-town traffic and left me with a long evening of working out the difference in length and time from West to East London and from Merseyside to Caerlaverock…
It was a one day bird, scotching hope by disappearing west to Slimbridge, where the WWT promptly made a fortune by holding twitchers up by their ankles and shaking them until 10 quid fell out. I’m not sure what’s more impressive, the plover’s flight-path or the WWT managing to get £10 out of a twitcher.
Apparently to finish its erratic tour of the UK’s unique reserves, the plover chose Dungeness. By now the office excitement had morphed into chin scratching, ‘it’s just too far’ and contrived indifference, ‘white-faced lappet thing’. Except for Mark Grantham, who was going to pull off a quick trip to Dungeness on his way to Norfolk and wanted to know if ‘The Steves’ (Menzie and I) would like to come…

Well.

I wasn’t going to say no.

By the time I’d got to the scope it was gone, lost in its veil of purple. Keeping faith I zoom out by degrees, scanning to the left and the right. Amidst the strands of vegetation, there was a gap. A gap of brown mud and water. A gap that was suddenly filled with a pair of legs. White-tailed Lapwing legs. The name is essentially meaningless, the rarity value is just a statistic decided upon by a committee, but those legs. The longest yellow legs I’d ever seen. And just two seconds on view before it disappeared again into the purple.
Considering I was birding with one of Britain’s best ringers, and someone who spent 90 days in a caravan in Catalonia, professionally ignoring Garganey, I, perhaps without properly thinking, found the Garganey and called it out as a stripy-faced duck, much to everyone’s disgust. But their disgust was short lived as it turned into a discussion of the ageing and sexing of the duck. Juvenile/eclipse drake? Sounded good to me.
After time, maybe half an hour the lapwing became more adventurous. The sandy head poking above plants became more frequent, it even indulged in several minutes of standing in the open, and a bout of stretching out its wings, flashing snowy white unders, bordered by black primaries.

The summer of no sunsets continued, as the sun sank straight behind a bank of grey clouds. 8pm. Briefly the scene is bathed in a weak golden light, enough to pick out and highlight individual grasses in a halo of white, contrasting with the sharply defined black outlines of the electricity pylons. Denge marsh- it was a quick dash by car to this modest looking reedbed. Geographically it’s perhaps the most obvious place for a pair of nesting Purple Herons, but compared to the gargantuan reedbeds of Suffolk it seemed underwhelming, surprising that they’d succeeded here and failed at Minsmere. As time and light, the banes of the working birder, slipped away, as massive flocks of Starling took to lining the pylons and swarms of Swallows and martins slipped overhead on their way to roost, Denge marsh was resolutely quiet. Only a sole false alarm with a distant Grey Heron. Colour faded, reducing most to different shades of dark.

I think it was Menzie who called it first. I can’t remember, it doesn’t matter, it was a moment of extraordinary convergence. Three birders all looking one way at precisely the moment the bird flew.

Rakish was the word used at the time.

*All photos © Stephen Menzie.*

I was below the orange stained night of East London, under the harsh lights of the tube system. Caffeine buzzed through my veins in a post-twitch effort to combat the soporific air, hum and sway of the District line, as it dawdled for its 70 minute length, taking me from east to west, with nothing to do except contemplate my apparent control of bird vagrancy…

July 2011: Isabelline (Western Olivaceous) Warbler at Beachy Head?

Grace Under (High) Pressure

2010-07-11T16:15:00.006+01:00

This summer has been bad for sunsets and once again the sun sank at an oblique angle behind the pine tops. Briefly it paints the blue skies with a wash of insipid yellow, before draining out to a lifeless, gull-back grey. The gloaming- it’s when The Kings Forest is at its very best. Because the lifeless monoculture fills with portentous sound, from the guttural bark of Roe Deer to the cryptic, motorik beat of the Nightjar, via a squeal. A squeal that David didn’t recognise. And that’s my acid test for quality of bird…

Sound and Vision (25/06/10)

It sounded as field wisdom suggested- a squeaking gate- the sound of pressure applied to rusty metal. But emanating from a loose stack of old pines, with a wide grassy ride and surrounded by clear fell? The sound of pressure applied to rusty metal with a sharp begging intonation?

This wasn’t expected. All I was here for was a Nightjar year tick.

The air was muggy and the atmosphere was dense but charged. The sort of atmosphere that demands nothing less than exaggerated stealth.
Crack.
I cringed as my stray footfall cracked a parched twig against the loose rock track. But the screech carried on regardless.

It was David who got the bird first. This loose stack of pines has particularly wide gaps between the rows of trees, making an impossible job a lot easier than it should be. He’s normally phlegmatic- naturally, in his line of work, he’s seen everything before, but his voice was raised a few notches by what he’d just seen. An adult Long-eared Owl, feeding a fledgling, high up in the overlapping canopy of the trees.

The adult remained elusive to me- the stealthiest bird in Britain giving only glimpses in flight, but the fledgling was fine enough- loud, exposed and easy.

Evacuating the vicinity out of an anthropomorphised respect rather than any risk of disturbance, we weren’t allowed to reflect on what we’ve just seen. Because the ‘scurring’ of Thomas Hardy’s Dewfall Hawk fills the air. Scurring, churring, call it what you want, but it’s easy to hear and see why Nightjars are shrouded in apocrypha. It sounds like it has the potential to suck the milk out of your goat and make it go blind, and infect your cattle. It straddles the border between the sound of ethereal mystery and perfect creepiness. It even looks weird. And I was looking back across at the pines, when the tallest top of the pine seems to cleave in half, detach and fall off. Except it isn’t- it’s the Nightjar materialising and flying straight for me.

Against the cold-coloured sky it’s still possible to make out details. The bulging of the head, thicker and wider than the body, tapering to the tail, and the two-foot wingspan, kinked back at the carpals in the manner of a falcon. It’s a male, the large white blotches in about three of the primaries, and edges to the outer corners of the tail see to that, whilst its flight path takes it low enough overhead to make out the indistinct markings of its bark like camouflage. It disappears behind the pines bordering the path and goes into ‘maximum churr’. All it’s missing is the wing clapping. I almost feel moved enough to clap for it.

Iteration (10/07/10)

Conservation might be for the masses, but rarities are only for those with a tenner to burn to get through the gates. And mere River Warblers don’t thrill me at all. It might be agonisingly close to the WVC Suffolk border, but being shepherded to hear a brown dot? I’d rather go on Xeno-Canto and stand, dehydrated, in the sun at the weedy bottom of my garden. It’d be cheaper and infinitely more pleasurable.
Listless- sweltering summer weekends infect me with this terrible lethargy. But in the relative cool of the evening I get restless- time to re-emerge back into the field, into the crepuscular chill.
This time accompanied by my dad’s colleague, Penny, and her husband, Mark, we have the added pressure of a guiding role- to prove that Springwatch doesn’t lie about the existence and greatness of Nightjars*. But as we strode down the track towards the stack of pines, the Long-eared Owl chick, so tortuously noisy, was ominously silent. So instead it fell to the Breckland outback to produce another bizarre surprise. A Hummingbird Hawkmoth, hovering over the tiniest patch of purple path side weeds- an honorary bird, and ‘inherently awesome’ as Charlie describes them. I think he’s right, although Penny and Mark didn’t seem so impressed. It was tiny for a hawkmoth, and hyperactive, hovering a decent distance from the weeds, whilst it’s fine proboscis got to work, feeding on the nectar. The old world’s best attempt at a hummingbird, or a surreal example of convergent evolution? It kept buzzing around until the sun slipped completely behind the pines, the hawkmoth becoming nothing but an orange and greyish blur in the gloom… When the tortured metal squeal of the juvenile Long-eared Owl pierced the dusk.
Taunting.
Is being a bird guide always this stressful? It squealed from a patch of dense, new growth pines, at times just metres from the path. Increasingly exasperated we split up down the path in search of the bird, scanning every tree. When visible light has almost disappeared, sound becomes amplified, and every crunch of gravel, snap of twig, rustling footfall on decaying pine needles becomes amplified, to a maladroit failure of stealth.
But it always seems to happen this way. I abandon the owl, cup my hands around my ears and listen out for the churring of the Nightjar. I heard nothing, casually raised my bins and there it was. An owl shaped corona of moonlight in a sea of black.

Frantically waving I have a moment of mini-panic. The job of a bird guide is not for me to see the birds- it’s for me to show them. And I have no idea where the bird is; it’s invisible to the naked eye. But it disappears, vanishing as wraith like as it appeared, as Dad, Penny and Mark arrive.

I feel like a failure. Offering my apology, as the owl starts calling again in the furthest corner of the pines, I turn away, looking skywards. And spot a Nightjar.
“NIGHTJAR!”
In sync they spin, and see, the nocturnal falcon-esque bird as it erratically flies overhead, before jinking off at a 90-degree angle, over to the clear fell. Here, pines just bracket the path, 5 deep, and we rush through and get further brief views as it hawks in the dull night sky, before disappearing in the dark.

Suitably impressed the final performance of the night trumps even that. Picking our way back through the pines to the path, we are treated to the Long-eared Owl, perching on the stubby branch of an old pine on the opposite side of the path, nascent ear tufts glowing white and flickering as it calls.
Nice.

*I’m reliably informed that Springwatch said that Nightjars were amazing and exist on a lowland heath near you and you can experience this spectacle by heading out at dusk and waving a white handkerchief around. I am of course, far too elitist and conceited to watch such dumbed-down, anthropomorphic, mass-entertainment.

Postscript
With the summer solstice 20 days ago, the long descent to winter has imperceptibly begun, but that’s of cold comfort when the average temperature is around 30°C. When the racket of lawnmowers takes over from bird song, and the scent of distant burning barbecues takes over from spring blossom. Time to count down the days, hours and minutes until return wader passage really kicks in.
Back at home the local Tawny Owl chicks were begging like mad. Two, creating a racket in the tall trees the other side of the road. They’re more nasal, buzzy- what The Sound Approach knows as harmonic- but incontrovertibly different. And not nearly so special…

Here’s two sonograms.

The first is of begging Tawny Owl, recorded last year on my phone and ‘sonogrammed’ on Raven lite. The second is of begging Long-eared Owl, recorded recently on my compact camera and ‘sonogrammed’ on the strangest piece of freeware I’ve downloaded because Raven lite wasn’t working. It’s probably grossly unscientific and terribly bad practice to compare the two because of this, but it’s worth a look anyway. The Long-eared Owl begged every 4 seconds, rising, and then dramatically falling off in pitch, with not much harmony, whilst the Tawny Owl was more frequent in its call, of a level pitch and has much more harmonies. (Highly dumbed down explanation about what all this means is here)

Staring Down the Barrel of a Birding Cliché

2010-07-01T08:42:00.002+01:00

8pm and Fen Drayton was bathed in the golden light of impending dusk. With verdant green banks and reeded fringes it was hard to tell that this was a completely man-made landscape; only the regimented barring of islands on the scrape gave it away. Lapwings and other plovers chased after their chicks along the bars and Greylag Geese lazily wasted space, whilst the sound of Cuckoos filled the air, before one eventually flapped its way across the vista; like an elasticated simulacrum of a falcon.
Not this, nor a Bullfinch defying its appearance and gently feeding on a patch of weeds, could cheer me up. The drake Blue-winged Teal had flown not more than 30 minutes ago. Fen Drayton is a tortuous complex of 12 gravel pits with even more lakes in the vicinity but off the reserve. It could’ve been anywhere.
Walking back frustrated. Too frustrated to enjoy a summer evening in the Cambridgeshire countryside. Tufted Ducks fly overhead and drop onto the lake. A few Mallards follow suit, which with the benefit of hindsight should’ve been a flashing fluorescent warning sign to stop; to get back to the scrape. But I pressed on. Dad reaches the car and drives on a short distance; I elected to walk. Ferry Lagoon, the largest of the lakes gets a cursory scan. It’s not teal friendly - too deep, too big, only the preserve of the big Aythya diving ducks surely?
I turn away and see 3 ducks flying over. Mallard, Mallard and… and I forget what sex and plumage because they were rather overshadowed by the company they were keeping. Half moon patch on the face, electric blue wing coverts- not the speculum- body apparently all dark- Blue-winged Teal! A jaw dropping moment as they twist in flight and shoot overhead and away at an oblique angle- back towards the Ferry Mere scrape, its blue wing coverts flashing in the gathering gloom.
Argh.

Run. Shout to dad and run. Run, hell for leather, cameras bashing my chest, puddles splashed up my thighs, ragged breath, asthma inducing running, bent double, muscles on fire. Stop.

Asthma. Stand up straight, head back, fix the distance with a steely gaze and walk.

Fast, burgeoning panic, the result of my passion- a passion that makes me run. There are laws preventing me from running. It’s grossly unnatural. I never run. But I wanted this, I wanted to pin it down, I wanted the lifer; I wanted to break my twitching duck…

No sign. A Barn Owl silently hunting the grassy banks was rudely ignored, for trying to make shapes out of the mist. Steamed up eyepieces at full zoom, not a recipe for good birding at dusk. Heel kicking; disconsolate in the dark, we walk off at 9:20ish for a final look over Ferry Lagoon, for no further sign of anything of interest.

It’s the classic lister’s dilemma; do I tick, based upon what I saw, taking in trust that other birders eliminated hybrid combinations of Australasian Shoveler? Is it better views desired or is that just a cop-out for the not-so-serious? Even the anti-lister can get ethical about lifers…

American Ducks Dipped This Year
-Lesser Scaup, Dozmary Pool, Cornwall (lake was frozen)
-Ring-necked Duck, Porth Reservoir, Cornwall (bird was relocating to Devon at the time)
-Canvard, Cavenham Pit, Suffolk (Hybrid Canvasback X Pochard that returned the year after I found it. It sort of counts as an Americanish duck)
-Green-winged Teal, Eyebrook Res, Leics (copious amounts of teal friendly vegetation)
-Surf Scoter, Largo Bay, Fife (I’m bad with sea-duck as well, so two American sea-duck…)
-Blue-winged Teal?…
PS. The Blue-winged Teal was seen on the scrape at 9:30 until dusk and was still there the day after. It has subsequently moved to Berry Fen, where it was discovered to be bearing a metal ring. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an escape; Suffolk’s first ever record, on the River Deben back in October 1971, was shot by a wildfowler and found to be bearing a ring. It was traced back New Brunswick in Canada, where it was rung on the 7th of June, and was the first recovery of an American rung duck in Britain… [Ref: Birds of Suffolk]

Dust

2010-06-30T17:20:00.005+01:00

Or perhaps; why I failed my A-levels...

However, I have been temporarily unleashed from various academic shackles, and expect to be back blogging soon, just forgive me for some rust that has accumulated around my adjectives and stained my syntax...

The Annual Hiatus and Introspective Blogging

2010-05-09T20:13:00.002+01:00

All around me Europe is in chaos. If volcanic ash isn’t going to kill us then it will paralyse our air traffic, Greece’s economy is as healthy as a day old Donor kebab, and good old Great Britain is politically prevaricating between an unpopular party and an even more unpopular prime minister, and has temporarily ended up with neither. I’m sorry to be talking about the ‘real’ world, but I feel like a Zoo animal after closing time. Because I’m standing in my sty of a room and watching the weather through the windows- drizzle so fine it’s barely precipitating from the monochrome clouds. It’s early May, in a north easterly wind and things shouldn’t be this way. I should be out birding, cutting through the wind and rain to find flocks of Yellow Wagtail and pontificate about how not to race them and coming up with insightful and provocative opinions about world affairs. Not pouring over Geography textbooks and trying to convince myself I know my way around Shakespearean prose.
My mind slips, as is its wont, into a nostalgic day dreamy haze. To a weekend ago in the Wyre valley, out west in the fresh air, and oak woodland, on one of those periodically unbloggable trips out. I contemplate getting lost in my pretentiousness and trying to blog about it as a trip through the colour spectrum, from the white breast of the Wood Warbler to the black back of the path side Lesser Spotted Woodpecker. Via, obviously, the flaming male Redstart in a black tree against a white sky. I might even reference Iggy Pop in the title because that’s a new and trendy thing to do. Though I suppose I’m much more likely to write something embarrassingly purple about its ‘post-punk’ song, before going on to label Red-rumped Swallows as overrated.
But I can’t blog, because blogging takes time and I’ve entered the mind-numbing torture of revision season. Cue trite complaints about me being over stressed, and the media perpetuating another set of headlines about A-levels being impossible to fail. All I know is that the British education regime is terribly anti-birder; I want to get into university and the words “you’ll be fine” ring hollow the hour before you sit the exam you haven’t revised enough for.
So, I’ll be on hiatus until late June, when there will be nothing to blog about anyway! At least by then I might have sated my desire to experiment with everything in my posts. In the mean time I will try to crowd source some guest blogging, but until then, go read Tilmouth’s regularly updated blog instead, or just look at what's turning up in Cornwall...

Interlude #2

2010-05-05T21:12:00.000+01:00

…Hitherto the typically transient weather of spring had settled upon white skies and a biting northerly wind. Across the cropped grass of the paddocks and passed the regimented pines it had made for a brisk walk. Through the margins of land use, from horses to farmland, the path dissipated into encroaching scrub. To the left: a horse’s shed, dark grey, pockmarked with rust and mosses and ringed by stinging nettles. Ahead a gap in the hedge takes the path through to the bleak agri-desert, whilst to the right is a strand of trees, I forget the species, fencing off a pool of further nettles from an anonymous pine shelter belt.
Light doesn’t penetrate down here, and it has it’s own sterile microclimate. Mild and stuffy, the air stagnates with the smell of horses and buzz of insects.

A shrill scream ripped through the air. Repeated, 3, 4, 5 times it rings the clarion call of death and danger.
There are times when birding transcends itself- an instinct instead of conscious action. It’s programmed itself, through repetition to make me stare upwards at the harsh white sky, as a shape shoots through, chasing its reverberating screams. Angular- a visceral shape to excite the senses, thin and long body, streaked dark on pale, with wings precisely folded back like origami. It disappeared in seconds from over the slice of clear sky I could see, but through the nude branches of the trees it could be tracked. It swung around, screaming all the time, whilst another bird takes off from the pine tops. Angularity doubles- a shape built for speed but not power- as it chases the original and smaller bird, still screaming as they disappear over paddock and pines. Suddenly the behaviour is clear.

Through the agri-desert the weather remembered transience; the white sky shifts to grey and the result was rain and hail, whipping into bare cheeks and freezing faces and fingers, until the metal of the tripod becomes uncomfortable to touch. Spring has been so slow April’s turned up in May and is making up for lost time.

Slowly, the sun reappears, gently re-illuminating the fields of green crops. High above, the steel grey back of one of the two Hobbies glints in the sun as it circled, searching for insects and intruders…

Metawriting: Stuck in a Good Birding Book

2010-05-04T20:24:00.005+01:00

Is it the smell? Or the way that the letters and words bleed into real life, colouring in the next Blackbird we see with a vivid social history and cultural context? Maybe it’s just the vicarious pleasure of a Shetland seabird colony on a wet Sunday afternoon or miserable Monday morning commute? Are you the heavy-duty literature student wanting something relevant to their hobby or the tabloid-reading twitcher wanting a break from Birding World on the way to the next Bluetail for the year? Whatever the reason, there’s no denying that we all love a good bird book and recent years have seen a resurgence in the ornitho-lit genre.

Essentially there are two types*. Firstly, the scientifically accurate identification guide or monograph, of which I’m barely fit enough to cast comment on, and secondly the books about flogging east-coast migrant traps in October after 5 weeks of westerlies. The books where you can smell the salt on the breeze and feel the pain of the brief rare-looking pipit disappear out of sight. And chucking in a few pretentious literary references for good measure is always fine by me. It’s not that I’ve got anything against emarginated primary diagrams, they’re just a bit sterile and I only see emarginations on Chaffinches that are 3 feet above my head...
But this is birding, so of course that sweeping generalisation is taxonomically incorrect. There are books written to fend off impending debt after manic year list attempts, memoirs of a misspent life with a pair of bins, social histories of birdwatching, the cultural impact of birds and many other varieties and hybrids of the above. Some are obviously better than others, so here is my take (and feel free to disagree) of one classic, two modern and one different approach to writing about birds…

The Peregrine by J.A. Baker

Welcome to genesis. What hasn’t already been said about this book isn’t worth saying; ‘Magnesium like intensity’, ‘glorious evocation of the Essex wilderness’, ‘best bird book ever’ and ‘fake and fictionalised’. No book I know of manages to combine such effusive praise and violent detractors. You either love it or hate it, but there is no underestimating its importance- this book is the reason why we have nature writing today.
Its context is murky. Apparently from total obscurity, in the late 60s, debut author, recluse and naturalist, J.A. Baker, emerged from a ten-year fascination with the winter wandering falcon, with this book. And apparently not a lot happened until literature lovers picked it up from under the noses of the anti-anthropomorphism science obsessed birding community, held it up to the light and discovered a jewel.
Because it sparkles with Baker’s turn of phrase and style. Nature writing (and I will hold both hands up to this one) is mostly verbose and directionless, an act of self-aggrandizing lexical one-upmanship. But Baker, without any apparent competition, ploughed a furrow of brevity, short sentences and pared down prose, which then violently contrasts with his use of vivid imagery. It can, at times, be utterly and unashamedly thrilling.
It was published in 1967, the summer of love was in full swing and a little known band called The Doors had just released their astonishing debut album. It isn’t recorded what J.A. Baker thought of this, but the similarities between this album and The Peregrine are quite striking. Because in the rarefied world of ornithology the list was in, egging had been kicked out for a decade and ornithology was a serious and stuffy pursuit for retired colonels and vicars. And then this outsider comes from nowhere with a book, that compared to the average issue of BB** is verging on the psychedelic. No wonder it took the world of literature to ‘discover’ it.

As the pioneer and classic, you can’t so much see the D.N.A. in other books as take the inspiration as prerequisite. It was and is the gene pool from which Mark Cocker, Robert Macfarlane and Tim Dee’s prose flow.
So why do people think it could be a fake?
It’s probably the ending, in which Baker felt an ‘irresistible’ urge to walk 8 miles to the coast, and ended up stalking a Peregrine until he was 5 yards away from a roosting bird. He describes this as lucky. As an ending to a book it is pretty much perfect- tense, exciting (unusual in a bird book) and beautifully written. The final sentence, ‘And he sleeps’, is a bittersweet ending, the zenith of the book’s beautiful prose and leaves the reader requiring sleep and rest from the exciting world of J.A. Baker’s birding. But there’s no denying that if I ended up 5 yards from a roosting Peregrine Falcon, would you believe me? No, I would be hounded out of the ‘blogosphere’, libelled on forums and all my county records would be returned ‘not proven’. And it’s not helped by other parts of the book, such as the 25th of January where he flushes a probable Great Snipe or the 27th of December where he describes a Peregrine in the canopy of a wood chasing a Sparrowhawk through the lower reaches, before it eventually is flushed into the open and killed. The former is stringy; it was seen in foot deep snow when it should’ve been in Africa, whilst the latter doesn’t ring true to me. He could have seen a Peregrine chase a Sparrowhawk into a wood, or whilst in the wood, but the way it is described he must’ve been in 3 different places at once. It can feel artificial and fictionalised in the name of good reading instead of ornithological accuracy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there are limits, especially in a book that otherwise comes across as a truthful eyewitness account of wintering Peregrine Falcons. But at no times does it reach the lows of The Big Year, or fiction for birders.
At other times it doesn’t always flow, ending up as meandering and self-indulgent, such as his insatiable desire to describe the plumage of the Peregrine and its actions in minute detail. Fine when introducing it, fine when it does something unusual, really not that necessary every page. After all, and this may be sacrilege, but most Peregrines do actually look the same… This isn’t me attacking the founding blocks of nature writing in a fit of iconoclasm, I hasten to add. It’s more of a structural security test, is it still sound? Is it still the book to judge other books by? For it’s style, the proto-cocker branch of lyrical nature writing, than yes, this is the benchmark, the one to beat.

It is structured like a diary which makes it’s easy to dive in and out of, which is the best way to read it (thus the endless descriptions of the Peregrine don’t grow as old as quickly). It isn’t a bedside book, it demands full concentration and a serious read without distractions like music, a pair of binoculars or other people. Retreat to a quiet room and let the words paint the pictures in your mind. Let your self love the desolation like Baker and free your mind to the freedom he finds in Peregrines, if only for five minutes. Treat it, if you will, like a fine wine or malt whiskey. Savour it and revel in its uniqueness, instead of racing through its short length like a drunk with a 6 pack of special brew before moving on to the next distraction…

**I’ll just make it clear that BB is the best journal money can buy, when it isn’t dedicating whole issues to Caspian Gull ID papers…

While Flocks Last by Charlie Elder

…Which could well be this book, published last year to some acclaim***. It ticks all the boxes as well: part travelogue, part elegy for the lost, part nature writing, part environmental call to arms and part boy’s own adventure.
And the conceit behind this publishers dream?
To see the entire British red list in a year, why they’re declining and what’s being done about it.
And a twinge of jealousy passed through me, gutted that I was beaten to this fantastic idea.

It’s the polar opposite of The Peregrine; J.A. Baker was a recluse and a debut author; Charlie Elder is a family man and a journalist. And that is my big problem with this book. Journalists are good at representing information and telling other peoples stories in an interesting way with a short word count. But a whole book? If, like me, you’re allergic to journalese and cheese then you’re in for a bad time from the start. Like the worst uncle from your childhood, he is incapable of saying anything straight. It all needs explaining twice, with an anecdote, bad example, silly joke and heavy emphasis on vague ironies. It’s fun to a very small extent, but the birds are the celebrities, the reason why I’m reading the book, not the author.

The annoying thing is that it isn’t bad all the way through. It could’ve and should’ve been good. If it was consistently patronising, cheesy and journalistic throughout, then fair enough, perhaps I’m the wrong audience for it; I’d judge it on its merits in that context then. But the further through the book you go, the further down the spiral of birding addiction he, (a self confessed dude) goes, the more seriously he takes it and his book transcends its embarrassed beginning and starts hitting the heights for birders. Who can’t identify with the low-level paranoia and caffeinated diet preceding a twitch, the mad run at dusk to reach a singing migrant Marsh Warbler and sleeping in lay-bys in North Wales for Ring Ouzels? That next text might bring news about his next red list species on a Monday. Will it still be there by Saturday? His writing shifts in tone from the journalist’s attempt at a sub-par travelogue to the poetic prose of the nature-writer. This is a good thing for us birders (I nearly didn’t get there), but runs the risk of alienating the non-birding audience that the first part appealed to, or convince them to pick up a pair of binoculars.

However the journalese cheese does have an advantage. For a book about what could be a very depressing topic, the elegy for the lost takes up only a very small part of it, which leaves the rest of the book to be quite hopeful and at times uplifting. Which certainly contributes to making it such an easy read and is possibly a more effective way of introducing conservation to the non-green masses. After all, no one likes hearing tales of woe, the more Elder makes it sound like we have a chance of saving something, the more likely people are to try and save it. For that reason, it works well as a companion to ‘Last Chance To See’, (the TV series last year with Stephen Fry, but the book by Douglas Adams is a must read).

The Running Sky by Tim Dee (known in America by the horrendous name, ‘Four Seasons In a Life With Birds’. He isn’t dead!)

Blinded by the hype of the new Collins bird guide, I didn’t see it coming. If I am a Pigeon, this was like a Peregrine- dropping from the sun and blindsiding me. This was not what I expected at all but the similarities to J.A. Baker were there from the start. A debut author, crafting his prose to moments of sublime beauty and championed by the world of literature- in this case Andrew Motion, ex poet laureate. It’s genuine too; acknowledging the debt it owes to The Peregrine, from being the first non-scientific bird book that Dee could identify with, through to the chronological chapters, via his lyrical style. However superficially at least they couldn’t be more different books. Whilst Baker’s masterpiece was almost claustrophobic in its lack of scope, The Running Sky revels in its eclecticism. From Shetland to Turkey and from urban birding as a child in Bristol to the African bush in Zambia, it is such a vast trawl of nostalgia, leaping from location to location and blurring time in the space of a few paragraphs. It would be disorientating if it weren’t for the common themes of youth, growing up, Bristol and the insatiable desire for birds. The breadth of its influences and themes is incredible for a 258-page book; it feels like it could quite easily by twice the length. But that would be a very bad thing indeed, because it should’ve made an excellent 200 page read…

It had the constituent parts of being an excellent read, but like ‘While Flocks Last’ it is patchy in quality, in places feeling like it was written to reach a word count. The month-per-chapter idea might have seemed good on paper but in print comes across as an arbitrary gimmick. The chapters don’t tend to link in with each other so come across as a series of short essays linked by those few recurring themes.
For example, October saw Tim Dee in Turkey, contemplating the view across the Aegean Sea to Greece, the late autumn landscape and Achilles. It then slowly focuses in on the migrant birds he sees: Swallows, Robins and Redstarts. As an introduction it is cinematic in its style, like the slow pan around the landscape before zooming into the character. I like it. So it’s downhill all the way from here, as he tenuously links that Turkish Redstart to those that John Buxton observed as a prisoner in a South German prisoner of war camp before he wrote the monograph on the species. This leads into the inevitable literary criticism (read as effusive praise) of both ‘The Redstart’ and the poetry of John Clare (who pops up in most chapters). John Clare then leads into the type of nature writing he read as a kid and those he was embarrassed by, which segues into the art, music and literature with subtle bird influences. Of those he mentioned I’d only heard of Ian Drury and Ted Hughes… And then it mentions Ezra Pound observing Swallows from his prisoner of war camp, a pointless Lithuanian scientific study on Swallow migration, then early observations of migration before ending up on John Clare’s insanity. It’s a breathless traversing of birds in culture from an innocuous start, but doesn’t quite flow, it feels a little contrived and the return to John Clare at the end adds to a sense of meander. And October is an excellent month for birding; surely this Redstarts and culture essay could’ve been better placed in a different month?

And they all start off with two selected, unexplained and highly annoying quotes- an increasing practice in books that leaves me annoyed and confused. Why? What’s the point? Is the author trying to prove their cultural superiority over me? Once he uses a Kafka quote, arguably one of the best writers of the 20th century, but to me it doesn’t really fit, or have any influence on the chapter at all. That Kafka is one of the most commonly used authors in the act of cultural one upmanship doesn’t help…

September, however, is superb- a seasick stained soliloquy to Shetland birding with migration in full swing. It buzzes with the excitement that the next brown bird disappearing into the bottom of a geo could be a lancy and not another Dunnock. But it’s real; this isn’t a wonder week and so rain, boredom and Ring Ouzels feature strongly, mixing in nostalgia for previous visits in the quiet moments. The lack of literature and cultural references make it light going compared with some other chapters, but this chapter is purely for the birders. But don’t confuse it with other birders memoirs and recounts of birding trips, the quality of the writing here is on a par with Mark Cocker.
It’s the second time Shetland features, after appearing in the opening chapter. It predictably opens with the Shetland seabird colony in summer, the kind that inspires writers to write exactly the same, standard, detail rich prose that sucks the breadth of the spectacle out, no matter how awe-inspired the writer was.

How do you like your nostalgia? Dee’s sepia tinted memories come tinged with a sense of melancholy and regret, for missed opportunities and for the Wood Warblers that no longer breeding on Avon Gorge. At times it is wistful like an Elbow album, at others it is darker, such as the suicide he witnessed from Avon Gorge whilst on his paper round. These aren’t the random anecdotes of a blog or lister’s book however; they’re all focused, explaining the making of the man and are linked somehow (sometimes too tenuously) to birds and birding. It is rarely a happy book, preferring to be serious and heartfelt which I can empathise with, being 40+ at heart and with a taste for lonely wilderness. Which is excellent because in a book so intrinsically self-centred you never get annoyed by Dee- his distance allows breathing space for the reader and the book is blessedly free from any attempt at banter or cheese.

I have, perhaps, been a bit harsh on The Running Sky; it manages to bridge the birder/non-birder audience gap better than While Flocks Last and is perhaps the obvious successor to the spirit of The Peregrine, because in parts it is sublime. Take the last chapter for the ultimate example of this. May, after a false start with Swifts it gets on track, birding in an oak woodland on Exmoor, and observing (not ticking and running- actual observing) Dee’s ‘holy trinity’- Wood Warbler, Redstart and Pied Flycatcher. And I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that chapter makes the £17 and the meander worthwhile…

The Poetry of Birds, compiled by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee

… And it’s worth considering this as the sister book to The Running Sky and not just because it’s jointly compiled by the author. Instead, the poetry of John Clare makes frequent appearances in The Running Sky. You might like his lyrics that Dee quotes but are hesitant to purchase an anthology of his. Well here’s the answer- an anthology, compiled in taxonomic order (at this, the ornithological nerd in me goes hooray,) of the best poetry written about birds, compiled jointly by the best poet in the British Isles and Tim Dee. It features lots of John Clare too, with plenty of Yeats, Keats, Hopkins, Hughes, Heaney and Hardy as well.

There’s an undeserved negative stigma about poetry. I can understand it; bad teaching nearly put me off reading for life, but it really isn’t that hard. It’s just words about birds, expressing meaning and feeling, through rhythm, rhyme and metaphor. It’s not scary at all, which is the strength of this anthology. From the beginner to the experienced reader of poetry there is something in here for everyone to enjoy. After all, the difference between birding and poetry, culturally at least, is very narrow. They’re both unfairly stigmatized as activities for the wimpish and bookish. Or from my alpha male perspective, ‘not for the real man’. Which as we all know is rubbish, poetry is far more violent than rugby and birds are much more interesting. Cheaper too. Birds are beauty for the eyes; poetry is beauty for the ears and the mind. You can take birds and poetry on the superficial level, or you can dig between the feathers or lines and uncover a whole lot more. And you can dig between the lines of bird poetry to find out more behind the feathers, or behind the eyepieces of those binoculars.

John Clare: an alcoholic, mental patient, peasant, birder and one of the most important poets of the 19th century. I must admit I haven’t studied the work of the 19th century poets, so I’m taking this on the authority of Tim Dee, but I can believe it. His finest work is meant to be about the natural world. And then we have Raymond Carver; America’s laureate of the 20th century dispossessed. He takes a break from writing short stories with more brevity than Baker and wades in with a poem called ‘My Crow’. It’s an American Crow, I presume, the species isn’t mentioned, but that’s what the whole poem functions off. No species, no labelling, no pigeonholing. “It was not Ted Hughes’s Crow, or Galway’s crow… This was just a crow. It sat there… Then picked up and flew beautifully out of my life.” A dose of the anti-pretentious. And anyone who has ever felt the weight of the binocular strain against raised wrists and hasn’t felt similar emotions, that connection between you and a bird that only makes sense and means something to you, is either not birding correctly or is criminally unimaginative. And if you have, then this poem will mean something to you. There is, as I said, something for everyone in this book. Even if you only read as far as the superficially twee nature of Emily Dickinson’s verse to quote as your Birdforum signature.

This is the most original bird book of all that I’m covering here, and for it, it needs to be at least attempted. You might surprise yourself.

*With the exception of the first two volumes of the beloved Sound Approach, which is the only bird book I know of the traverses the boundaries with impunity, and does it successfully. And not all identification guides are boring; see the Yellow Wagtail plates in Pipits and Wagtails by Alstrom, Mild and Zetterstrom and be inspired.
*** If you read the hyperlinked review and wondered, Birdscapes is intolerably dense and Birdwatchingwatching is the complete opposite.

My review of Anthony McGeehan’s Birding From The Hip can be found on BirdGuides, here.

Ps; I’ll be your best friend for life if you recommend me a good birding book.

Caledonian Capers: Part 2

2010-05-01T19:35:00.009+01:00

View part 1 here. Note that Red Grouse, or just grouse, is known elsewhere as Willow Ptarmigan and the Ptarmigan referred to is Rock Ptarmigan.

Breakfast or crested? It was no contest- Crested Tits couldn’t wait.
Loch Garten was stunning. Serene, calm as a millpond, surrounded by the snow capped Cairngorm peaks and self-seeded Scots Pine forest. A thick layer of mist hung above the water, curling, rising off the surface, given colour and contrast by the gentle golden light. However more importantly, and disappointingly, the loch was lacking in birds, only two male Mallard, a pair of Tufties and a red-headed, Red-breasted Merganser- a duck that bridges the gap between quirky and delicate, all retroussé bill and shaggy head.

We carried on, like a pair of truffle hunting pigs, locked in the relentlessly focused search for the prize Cresty. Flocks of Coal Tits were grilled, consumed and spat out in the search. 3 territorially interacting Treecreepers? Interesting but irrelevant- I told you it was focused.
And unsuccessful.

The woods thinned out again as the path descended to Loch Mallachie, path side heather now interspersed with bog. Mallachie is like Garten but even more secluded, backing on to Tulloch Moor. Minus the mist, a dead tree bisects the serene calm of the surface, with even less ducks than Garten. The calm is the catalyst, but the past few hours catch up with me. I take my bins off, lay them beside me, stare at the water and drift away…
All the way to June 2008. Caught in the depressing drizzle that Scotland so ably does, where it sets in at dawn and clears up 5 minutes before dusk. It was the day we left the pristine wilderness of the North-west Highlands for Speyside, safe in the knowledge that lots of ticks would be throwing themselves at me. After all, everyone says that Crested Tits are ‘eeeeeasy’ and ‘undippable’. Well I was finding out at Loch an Eilein the inescapably dull truth that nothing is undippable and it was added to the Speyside hitlist- a carrot for my not exactly begrudging pony.
A call snapped me out my reverie- a sharp repeated rattle, an urgent call to rejoin the real world. I looked around and saw my dad on the phone and my bins lying on the ground. I picked them up, bent my neck back and locked onto the first movement I saw.
And my brain went into overdrive.
The left side of the mind clocked the features, slipping into its well-trained groove of converting 5 seconds of views into feature listing. Crest. Long, elegant crest, dark back, pale unders. Small passerine, long elegant crest, black vermiculations on pale, black lines around its head, dark back, very elegant crest.
Whilst the right side is lazier, just mentally logging the aesthetics for a later session of memorised ogling- thick green with a golden halo, an elegant passerine with a beakful of moss.
Cresty!

To strike, whilst the iron is hot, stay on a roll and go tick Ptarmigan whilst you can.
*Chill out, find coffee in Boat of Garten and recuperate by sleeping/raptor watching at the same time…
Strathdearn hadn’t heard of spring. The roadside trees were contrastingly naked after the evergreens of Abernethy and the Findhorn was full of snowmelt, presumably relegating the Dippers to the innumerable mountainside burns. I don’t know for sure, we didn’t see one all holiday. At the far end of the valley we relaxed, exhausted after possibly the best dusk-dawn birding we’d ever experienced. It was why I vetoed looking for Ptarmigan and it probably saved my life.
Strathdearn- or the Findhorn Valley- is possibly the most divisive place in Scotland. You either love it, or hate it. You either sit it out, or you walk it. You either see 3 Oystercatchers and a Buzzard, or a parade of Scotland’s finest feathered killing machines. I can handle it, valley life- Scottish style. Lying on the long grass by the car park, stretched out in the weak sun, scanning the shaded scree slope at the opposite side of the strath. Finally I felt like drifting off to sleep when a tentative voice comes from my dad.
‘Erm’.
It normally means he’s got a bird and this was no exception. A falcon, that was obvious enough, but perched head on, on a rock 300 metres higher up the valley side, not a lot else is helpful. Outrageously my first thought was pale morph Gyr- it made sense at the time, it was obviously a large falcon, pale breasted and lightly streaked, with a fairly plain head pattern. Slowly I gradually got more excited, until it shifts sideways. Thin moustachial, brown back… Kestrel? Did I really just confuse a Kestrel with a Gyr? And then it flew. I’ll give up now, because it was a large and bulky falcon, but grey backed and with a big dark moustache. The standard large falcon across broad swathes of Scotland…
No such identification troubles with the kettles of buzzards, 5 being the total count, the ‘kronking’ Raven, the pair of Common Gulls or the ubiquitous Oystercatcher looking incongruent in a field. The first field Oystercatcher in Scotland is interesting. When there’s a pair in every field calling incessantly they wear a little thin. There were about 10 by the Findhorn, doing nothing except for a periodic shouting contest…

Driven by clear skies we walk for a few miles down the valley, but only succeed in hearing a Ring Ouzel, seeing two Wheatear, a few more Buzzards and enough Oystercatchers to last me a lifetime.

But it’s ok, because nearby I re-found my favourite place in the world. The Farr road- all the fun of the single-track highland track, with gates. It started off innocuously enough, a tributary of the Findhorn road, meandering through intensive woodland and bizarrely out of place Leylandii. The gradient gets steeper; the bends tighter, the trees darker and the Buzzards are reduced to fleeting glimpses through the trees. The gates are more frequent, bigger and heavier before they stop entirely, the gradient levels out and the trees thin out before falling off completely. Pull over into the roadside snow remains and take in the view. 600 metres up and prime heather moorland stretching off either side into the haze, a dark purple blanket above the green of the forest and grass of Strathdearn. Two Red Grouse bomb past with the caricatured flight typical of game birds- all flapping for very little action, flashing white feathers in the underwing as they go. They land out of sight in the thick deep heather, but I don’t mind, because grouse come in waves. What just minutes ago was bleak and bird-less moorland, now reverberates with grouse ‘grousing’. Go back? To me it’s more of a generic guttural complaint and etymology would suggest I’m on the right lines.
I took a walk down the road, where grouse appear everywhere, albeit distantly. Quirky, their shape doesn’t so much invite anthropomorphism as beg for it- anything with feathered legs and feet can’t be taken seriously.
The sky clouds over, and with it the temperature plummets to the normal Scotland in April levels.
To my right a grouse poked its head above the heather line, another jagged shape on the serrated edge of heather and white sky. A male with a fluorescent red comb. I stalked, getting low and traversing a snow-filled dip and lying on the heather to get close. It knows I’m there, it’s looking straight at me, but crucially, it doesn’t flush. Instead it just stands on a rock and displays on. I adjust my settings, to overexpose slightly to get colour against the white sky, But I forget to readjust for when it comes back in front of the heather and I overexpose the lot. I kick myself for such an amateurish mistake.
It dips between two furrows, puts its head above the ridge and tips it back at a jaunty angle. I seized the opportunity- exposing correctly and sort of get something near sharpness.

Spot the grouse...

That’ll have to do. Grouse, I love them.

Loch Ruthven is allegedly the most scenic of the RSPB reserves, (notice how by now I’ve given up on pretending there is a scrap of originality in this- it was pure guide book birding). I can’t really say because, I’ve never seen it in the sun. With low clouds obscuring the distant mountains of Strathnairn, this was as close as it came to rain all holiday. The dark purple heather by the loch side is interspersed with long boggy grass and the flat light suppresses the colours. In a few months it will be shockingly bright, descending to the pale loch populated with eye-popping Slavonian Grebes, whilst Redstarts add flame to the lichen clad woodland. But time and bird migration, the two great uncontrollables conspire to keep Loch Ruthven desolate- a pair of Wigeon, a pair of Teal, a pair of Mallard…

No Herons and desolation equals frog heaven, and they were delirious. The path is not a Common Frog friendly place, especially if it’s twice the size of the female beneath it. A Hen Harrier, ghostly grey male, drifts over the moorland to the back of the loch, quantifiably the most interesting bird since the cresties. The cresties? The capers? Was that really only 12 hours ago?

I don’t look good in sunglasses so I don’t have them. But I needed them bizarrely, because snow-blindness 800 metres up in a Cairngorm corrie, surrounded by the mocking calls of Red Grouse, is not fun. Ptarmigan are also easy and undippable, and once again the fat kid from the lowlands, up to his knees in snow, would beg to differ. 17 of the most depressing miles trudged up and down the Carn Ban Mor in 2008, for 4 Golden Plover and a Dunlin- not fun. This time it was different, there was snow for a start but there were actually birds this time. A pair of Wheatear, enjoying the big boulders against a backdrop of snow were ornithologically anachronistic, whilst the grouse kept coming in waves. The path periodically petered out from stone to a thick covering of snow. Tracking the footprints of others was a useful clue, but it inevitably led to plunging through the snow up to your thighs. Not fun, in fact an utter slog, each step reinforcing the lack of Ptarmigan. And then I heard it, a reverberating grouse call with a difference. It was hard to pin down the difference, but amongst all the path side grouse, gradually tailing off with their calls, it sped up- more of a sharp crescendo. It had to be Ptarmigan- it could be nothing else, but it wasn’t showing.
Time to press on.
To slog through the snow, periodically falling through.
Into the silence and white.
We make the final patch of boulders before the corrie bends right and becomes the summit of Coire-an-t-Sneachda. Ahead the scenery was a wall of white, snow streaked with black lines of bare rock, low cloud, and white sky. To the left and right are spurs, the sides of the corrie with huge swathes of snow and bare rock patches. And a calling Ptarmigan, echoing around the valley, somewhere…
5 minutes, whiteness and black rocks, reflected light burning its way on to my retina. No birds… and then a shout from my dad. I dash over and jam my eye to the eyepiece. Ptarmigan!
“Unless it’s snow,” he cautions.
Mindful of the Gyr/Kestrel/Peregrine/distant bird half way up a mountain incident of yesterday I take another look.
Snow.
It’s snow, a splodge, patchy against the rock. Fooled, by a windblown freak of the weather. That was inexcusable. And then it stood up, turned its head and I gave up on birding.

A Ptarmigan. Fantastic!

Pressure off and we watch it- distant, a mostly white bird standing on a grey rock amidst a blank canvas of snow. It waddles- the standard grouse walk- off the rock, into the snow and disappears. Further searching of the scree slopes and snow of the two spurs proves fruitless and we head back down the valley. Past the waves of grouse, past the Wheatear, past the two snow holes next to the path and around the curve of the spur as the whole of Rothiemurchus and Glenmore forest park opens up in front of you- pine forests of varying quality carpet the lower levels, surrounding and swallowing up Loch Morlich, whilst heather coats everything else in ‘dark’, leaving just the snow on the highest tops to add atmospheric white. It’s a breath taking view, which after a wheezy climb, is not exactly what you want.

Ignore the hype, Ptarmigan, for me at least, are very far from ‘undippable’.

And then Glenmore car park- a hive of self-important skiers. I used to think birders were the least fashionable people alive. I was wrong, that accolade definitely goes to fluorescent blue and peach clad skiers, milling around the Cairngorm visitor centre like ants around spilt cake at a summer picnic. It also poses the philosophical question; does a wilderness exist without a visitor centre, gift shop and café?

In reality, this was the long dark final afternoon of the trip. Exhausted and mentally battered but ultimately successful, and with no target species left, we travelled. In the search of divers, ducks, new places and nothing in paticular. Lochindorb sounded good, and not just because it comes from the Gaelic for ‘Loch of Trouble’- it is one of the best places for divers. Or so I was led to believe. For this was where reality played catch up.
And onwards, up around, all the way to the Bridge of Dulcie, and the keepered grouse moorlands of the B9007. I spend about 3 hours; I see a drake Goosander, a few Red Grouse, and the obligatory Greylag Goose, sat in the middle of a sea of heather. Loch Vaa held a pair of Little Grebes and several Goldeneye, whilst Loch an Eilein produced the only Buzzard of the day, a pair of Goosander and a few more Goldeneye.

(^All Loch An Eilien)
And that was it. It didn’t really end, more fizzled out in an exhausted sweaty heap with two full SD cards…

And you can read the epilogue here.

Caledonian Capers: Part 1

2010-04-20T21:16:00.009+01:00

That it’s almost pitch black outside doesn’t help. Almost, because the sky is littered with pin pricks of white, an almost unreal starscape that hitherto existed only in dodgy television CGI. But I can’t gaze at it and contemplate deep philosophical questions such as the role of Sir Patrick Moore in British broadcasting history, because I need to shift position to get the correct angle to view upwards out of the car window, and to shift would wake my father up, asleep in the seat next to me. So I sit surrounded by black plastic, watching the glow in the dark hands of my watch sluggishly tick the night away.
1:05am, 1:10am, 1:25am, 1:40am…

I think back to two long days ago, recuperating from the long stuffy drive up from Suffolk in the cool of Caerlaverock’s concrete hides. Across the verdant sun drenched grazing marsh of the Solway Firth, black dots are irregularly scattered in loose groupings. A scan with the bins showed them up, geese with geometric black, white and grey barring, glossy black necks and large white faces. Barnacles of the Branta kind, not the blistering or arthropod kinds. I gloss over Suffolk’s feral flocks as an aesthetically pleasing but unnatural inconvenience. Here, the entire Svalbard breeding population comes to winter- you don’t get much wilder geese than these and they, in their own Branta style are pleasing to the eye. Not just because they’re only the second truly wild ones that I’ve seen. But it was strange, watching several thousand Barnacle Geese in cool conditions on a hot day whilst listening to Willow Warblers.

Strange, or was it the perfect reintroduction back to the mind-broadening experience that is Scottish birding? All that fresh air, silence and wilderness, can do strange things to fragile minds.
2:20am.
I never expected to find a WWT reserve worth the kidney-donating entrance fee, but then I never expected to enjoy Dumfries and Galloway so much. We were only driving through, but we took back roads, with the stark contrast of Radio 4 and rugged upland scenery, terrible news from Poland and Hirundines flocking over the river Nith, dry political news and tight tree lined valleys at dusk.
2:35am, 2:40am, 2:45am…
Yesterday we must’ve driven 3/4ths of Scotland. What other country would mix ex-industrial woollen mills conserved in memory of a Scottish enlightenment era philanthropist, a 1920s hydroelectric power station, the snaking river Clyde and a pair of Peregrines showing at amazingly close range?
I love this country. I love how with repeated sweeps of the hooked bill over a Starling, the Peregrine disappears behind clouds of plucked breast feathers. I love how it was producing green energy in 1920. I love the industrial, thick, high-vis yellow talons, and searing yellow eye-ring. I liked how some kids I let look through my scope said it was ‘eating something red’.

2:50am.
Yawn. I’ll blame the Fife coast for this lack of sleep. Its short grass covered rocky coastline by Ruddon’s point was too tempting in the mid-day sun. Tuck up against a rock, hunch over the scope and mentally switch off whilst watching Eiders.
2:55am.
Or was it three hours spent looking at a load of distant scoter flocks? After several thousand flapping wings, 3 eventually had white secondaries and none had boxy heads with white bits and bulbous bills. 6 Long-tailed Duck, 3 in winter plumage, 3 in summer were slightly more impressive, with tails like aerials. They could’ve been remotely controlled actually, going by how hard they were to scope.
2:56am.
Up.
2:57am.
Swing the scope around, zoom out, locate the bird, zoom in and…
2:58am.
Dived. At least they were no longer ‘coldsquaws’.

4:30am.
And by now attempting further sleep is pointless. I look outside into the inky darkness. Black, like the grouse I saw yesterday.
Having left Fife slightly later than expected, we were caught in the slow traffic, caravans and contra-flows of the A9. The sun was slowly setting over the Monadhliath mountain range and the map reading was tense as we threaded our way through the tiny roads surrounding Loch Garten. We arrived at the correct area on Tulloch Moor by luck, rather than considered judgement, although slightly perturbed by the presence of a caravan. Which turned out to be the correct response, as I got slowly more frustrated and stressed by Carry on Caravanning, parked on the edge of the moor. Slamming doors, screaming kids, dropping plates and shouting, flaming my map-stressed brain. I wanted these grouse that much and they weren’t showing. I wanted an evening lek to save me from an early morning and obviously the only reason they weren’t showing was disturbance from the noisy caravan. I cursed my social inadequacies preventing me from going over and telling them to shut up. I turned away from the moor in frustration and looked over the birch woodland behind us and
‘GOT ONE’!
I spin around, raise my bins and am confronted by exactly the same scene. Dark purple heath, bog, short grass and long grass, all caught up in the golden rays of sunset. I begged for instructions from my dad and eventually get the bird, one the edge of a heather patch just to the right of two old birch trees. I turned to dad, he to me, and we shape for a high 5 before thinking better. Didn’t want to be hypocrites.
“It’s a hackneyed phrase, but YOU BEAUTY!” I half-whisper. He just grins.
Three male Black Grouse showed in the end- each and all of them stunning, bright red combs, lyre shaped tails and iridescent splendour. They’re moving all the time, walking east before disappearing behind more birch woodland as the sun slowly slips behind a distant mountain. And then the bubbling and cooing of the lek started.

4:50am.
Scottish single-track roads are brilliant. They’re the cherry on the wilderness with birds cake. Having chilled out by Tulloch moor until well after dusk, we left to find food in Aviemore. As you come off Tulloch moor on one of the most minor of all the Cairngorm roads, tarmac gives way to gravel, ruts get progressively deeper and water coverage gets more frequent, whilst forest takes up the very edges of the road. Not the place you want to meet on coming traffic, but we did. Slam on the brakes, dip the headlights and stop.
Just in time too.
A shadowy shape moves, running over the road between us. As it passes through the headlights it mutates from shadow to silver, black and a reflective white. It’s got a face like a zebra crossing and the reflective power of a zealous cyclist. It’s a Badger.

A Badger!

Bumbling is too twee and indirect, the way the Badger moves is far more focused than that but the short legs and plump, pear shaped body hinder its desire for speed. It disappears out of the headlights into the forested edge at the side of the road and leaves me high. A (to me) mythical mammal, seen at last.
Badger!
And I don’t care about American sea ducks off Fife- 4th American duck dip of the year- because I’ve seen a surprise Badger and surprise lifers are always the best kind…

5am.
And not even the Robins are awake yet.

5.10am, a mythical time that doesn’t exist and I haven’t slept a wink. I staggered out into the pre-dawn quietness and the chill instantly hit me, cutting through 5 layers of clothing. As dawn inched closer we queued up to enter Loch Garten as a paler grey spread across the sky, creating an abstract contrast with the patchy canopy of the Scots pines. The inane chatter of cold birders, clunking tripods, slamming doors and car engines are the only sound, whilst flashing car lights temporarily blind us all.
We funnelled in to the dark hide having our membership cards inspected, with just the narrow windows allowing light to trickle in, barely enough to see where to go. Over the clearing the pale pinks and peaches of dawn silhouette against the Osprey nest site, the bare branches bent like a claw with a threatening pair of gargoyled Ospreys on either side. The Banksyesque addition of the CCTV camera to the right of the nest is incongruous, seemingly spray painted against the sky, a satirical comment on man’s desire to keep nature under control? But it’s there for their protection- the Loch Garten Ospreys are a high profile target for the low life wildlife hating, egg collecting, vandals and the anti-raptor anti-science anti-common sense brigade. And it’s all very peaceful as I take my position by the open window and…
“I have a Caper”
…Panic ensues.
There’s a rush, a tidal wave of telescopes and tripods wielded as weapons as panicked people rush to the windows to tick a Caper. Any time pre-coffee and 10am and I’m not really with it, so blithely I watch the Ospreys and admire the dawn. After all, this isn’t really happening is it? Capercaillie? Showing? I thought I had a tendency to dip guaranteed birds and this sunrise is really quite nice and Ospreys are lovely and…
I come round and kick my gormless self into action.
So I start to panic as well; no directions, nobody was giving anyone any directions and only two scopes were on the bird. Which, being a wild, elusive and male horse of the woods has now disappeared behind a tree.
Argh.
The RSPB have rigged up another pair of CCTV cameras on the Caper lekking area, thus allowing you to watch some very good quality pictures of the strutting bird behind the tree. You can even watch it as it walks right back out into the open…
Panic ensued once more. I join a scope line; only it has a short woman at the front who needs a box to stand on to view it. In the tense frustration of being so close to an amazing bird and not seeing it, I move on, to locate someone else watching it. Fortunately the first person I ask had it and offered to let me look through his scope.
It sounds Hollywood but some things in real life do happen in slow motion. I remember walking up to his scope, the eyepiece coming closer to my eye and then disappearing. As someone, walking from the right kicks the legs of the tripod out from underneath it. I catch it and hurriedly tried to point it back in the direction it thought it was- as the bird walked behind the tree again.
Argh.
It was leaving the Capercaillie-less to rue their patience and manners.
Time for a new plan. To jettison the scope at the back of the hide and mentally prepare to beg, borrow or commandeer my way to a lifer. It was the caper effect and I was finally in the zone.
Because good things come to those who wait.
The call comes again, I force my sizeable frame to the front of a scope queue and I shove my eye to the eyepiece. Buried, half obscured in the waist deep heather was a Capercaillie. It was smudgy initially and came in two parts- a satellite head around a massive Japanese fan like tail. It strutted; a funny bobbing motion when you can only see the two ends of it. The buzz wasn’t instant- more relief than the surprised high of the Badger. Truth is, this smudgy blob is too distant and dark to tick on anything other than the word of the crowd. Thankfully over the next hour or so the bird shows regularly and well enough, coming out from behind the dead pine tree. I shut myself off from the rest off the hide, find a knee height window, kneel over the scope, cover my ears, and properly enjoy it. The scrawny neck of most grouse seems particularly incongruous on the giant caper, with its scruffy head, wide staring eye and horn coloured bill giving it a prehistoric look. Apparently caper views are excellent if you can see the white shoulder patch, well we could even see the pale in the tail and all of the displaying movement. Neck raised, lowered, shaking, and jerking. Though the champagne cork popping noises had to be provided by my imagination. People bravely brought their small kids along and I let one of them have a look through the scope. “It’s just a big Turkey” she said in thick Glaswegian and I think she summarised perfectly.

We fled as the volunteer started the obligatory speech, emerging back into the pine forest as golden light started to penetrate the depths. The only Red Squirrel of the trip bounded along the path, looking strangely pale in the early morning light, before finding the nearest peanut feeder…
Part 2 to come.

Speyside 2010

2010-04-16T12:48:00.004+01:00

Prologue

Epilogue
12 hours of finest hardcore field ornithology for 3 days running. With no sleep and even less rain (I assume anti-cyclonic high pressure weather systems in Scotland in April are as mega as murrelets) coupled with a diet of stale bagels and warm water, it was going to catch up with me.
And it did.
Or rather it overtook me when dad drove too fast around a bend near Dunkeld, a lovely village in Perthshire. So I was otherwise engaged when I should’ve been looking for Dippers. I should’ve drunk more water, taken a slower pace and chilled out, instead of birding myself into the ground. But do you know what, I wouldn’t have wanted to have it done it any other way…

Trip list: 91
Lifers: 4
Year ticks: loads, probably. Not that I would know…
Selected Highlights
Whooper Swan- still present in small numbers at Caerlaverock
Barnacle Geese- 7,000ish still present at Caerlaverock (2nd wild I’ve ever seen)
Eider, Common Scoter- large numbers in Largo bay
Long-tailed Duck, Velvet Scoter- 6 and 3 in Largo bay
Red-breasted Merganser- double figures in Largo bay, individuals on Lochs
Goosander- pairs around Loch Morlich and Loch an Eilein
Capercaillie- 1, displaying male, Loch Garten Caperwatch
Black Grouse- 3, all males, Tulloch moor
(Rock) Ptarmigan- 1, mostly white, Corrie an t-Sneachda
Red Grouse- everywhere on the Farr road and around Corrie an t-Sneachda
Hen Harrier- 1, male on moorland to the south of Loch Ruthven
Osprey- 2, the Loch Garten pair
Peregrine Falcon- 3, Falls of Clyde and Findhorn Valley
Crested Tit- 3, Loch Mallachie

Quality over quanitity.

Itinerary
Saturday: Caerlaverock
Sunday: Falls of Clyde, Largo bay, Tulloch Moor
Monday: Loch Garten, Loch Mallachie, Findhorn Valley, Loch Ruthven
Tuesday: Cairngorm mountains, Lochindorb, Bridge of Dulcie, Loch Vaa, Loch an Eilein.
Wednesday: the A9 and the M6!

Accommodation was found from the Scottish Youth Hostel Association’s many hostels. They’re cheap and cheerful, a bit like Portland birds obs meets a Travelodge. Gordon Hamlett’s fantastic Birding in the Scottish Highlands guidebook is well worth purchasing and is one of the few guidebooks actually worth reading.
A massively grateful hat tip must go to Andy Hirst for providing essential trip gen. Thanks!

Binary Birding, Aka: The Youth of Today

2010-04-08T11:35:00.004+01:00

Normal type: Stephen Rutt
Bold Type: Ben ‘lambo’ Lambert

Ah the entrance track that speaks of so many memories. Many bad, balanced out by the utterly sublime, but it never fails to evoke the emotions. Twisted trees line the roadside, obscuring the road from the nature reserve, and building anticipation up…
I could have sworn I had been before, but as I walked down the trail from the visitor centre lined with Easter eggs and bunnies, I knew I was wrong.
The two of us made an odd pair; I had my Granddads’ old zoom binoculars and a plain old backpack, and Stephen looked like he was ready for anything: tripod over his shoulder, bins and camera round his neck, prompting a fellow birdwatcher to ask how his neck was.
…Anticipation that, as always, is knocked down by Minsmere itself. The Easter egg trail? Do they know this is a nature reserve? Actually, it brings in money for the RSPB and keeps kids entertained whilst the parents get blackmailed into buying memberships. Clearly this is a good thing, but I would be lying if I didn’t have reservations about it. Whatever would Bert Axell have thought… (Would he have thrown me off the reserve for such a trite response?)
Today saw a change of line up. My father, otherwise engaged with work, was (temporarily!) replaced by Ben Lambert; a schoolmate, far too clever physics geek, vicar in waiting, and most importantly, possessor of a valid UK driving licence and interest in birds. The significance of the latter two weren’t lost on either of us but I was still surprised when he wanted to go birding with me. Minsmere it was to be then, clearly one of the better places to introduce people to birds.
We headed up towards the island mere hide, passing a pair of Treecreepers on the way. I love seeing these birds defy gravity in yet another way, hopping round like an undersized squirrel. It was to be a good warm-up for a day defined by the small birds we saw, though the woodpecker eating ants round the corner was another good start and stopped our discussion about the best management of woodlands in its tracks.
However, the still leafless woodland on the way to Island Mere hide was gently filling up with avian distraction for me to test Ben’s skills out with. Treecreepers? Passed with ease, but I got onto the Green Woodpecker hopping around the path first.

Chiffchaffs were making a racket path side racket whilst a Coal Tit did a passable impression of being something more interesting. A Cetti’s quickly drowned them out from the scrub-reed fringe at the other side of the wood before suddenly exploding from a Hawthorn further up the path.
As we walked into full view of the hide, the 5th Cetti’s Warbler burst into song next to us and swallows flew overhead. We couldn’t just walk on, so scoured the unpromising reed bed for the elusive bird. Suddenly, a flash of brown and the Cetti’s had moved!
When the first Cetti’s started I related a little anecdote to Ben. Unlike most of my irrelevant, mumbled, verbose and rambling anecdotes, the one about how I got into birding via a Cetti’s Warbler is actually interesting and concise. Ben was excited and my work was partially done. He was amazed when we located another one, just feet from the path, periodically exploding from a bramble bush. And then it flew, short tailed, warm brown and manages to disappear in the most minimal cover again, before letting out that explosive song once more.
Buzzing from this early success, (it was my first positive identification of a Cetti’s, and confirmation that spring was here with the swallows) we head into the hide to be confronted by a wall of gulls, milling about on the water and erupting as the Marsh Harriers flew overhead. The Harriers had bigger fish to fry, as they flew past with multiple sticks with people in our hide discussing Goshawks. A Bittern was spotted, after giving its requisite booming sound, so much like a vibrating mobile phone, but alas, I missed it. That was the only one we saw all day.
With the arrogance of youth I’d made the bold claim: “you can’t dip Bitterns at Minsmere”. Well, if you’re experienced at looking for smallish, brown herons flying over the tops of the reeds at the other side of the mere, then yes, you’d be doing better to miss them then to not see them. But I forgot about Ben, fiddling around with his zoom binoculars and flicking through his RSPB photo field guide. Oops. At least the Marsh Harriers are spectacular enough, with females passing back and forth with nesting material and Swallows carving up the air in front of the hide.
We moved on to the hides around the central pool, passing a film crew that sets us off about the one show. After looking at a few birds behind a hide, we enter on a whim. We settle, and break out the first of many coffees from my thermos. Several young greater black backed gulls hold my attention, till an explosion of sound calls us to look directly left: a Cetti’s Warbler not two meters from the hide! It stays there for as long as it takes to reach the camera in typical style, and then flies off to taunt us again with its song. A few Avocets later, we head on past the sluice gate and back up towards the ruins of the abbey.
Upon exiting Island Mere I thought I could hear a foghorn amongst a crowd of people. Turned out to Be Mike Dilger, probably filming something soporific for The One Show. On the walk back we skipped Bittern hide, and plan to go straight to East hide, but, on whim we head into south hide.
I’m not a great fan of west and south hides but that might change. For as I found the first of many Mediterranean Gulls, Turnstones and Ringed Plovers on the Scrape, whilst introducing Ben to the delights of feral geese flocks, a Cetti’s mere feet from the corner of the hide erupted in song. I dashed to the hide window to see it, lovely warm brown and grey, utterly indistinguished and featureless except for that song and their skulking behaviour. And yet from the unusual viewpoint of the hide, looking down into the bush, it was just over a metre away. Absolutely amazing. I’d never had views like that in my 4/5 years birding. Moments like this are electrifying, and my garbled superlatives directed at Ben were enough to make even him even more excited. I stop short of guaranteeing that he will never see one like that again (I’d learnt my lesson about sweeping but impressive sounding generalizations) but I thought it…
The next stop was the levels. I take a short scan with the scope, Little Egret, Teal, Mallard. All expected. But that paler bird shuffling along the fringe of the grassy pool? It shuffles into full view and outrageous thoughts pop into my mind. Wader, no wagtail, no… pipit? It’s pink and grey… WATER PIPIT!
Wow.
This was not expected at all. The first I’ve seen outside of the very grey Thames foreshore at Rainham marshes and the first in summer plumage. It’s a very smart bird, compelling me to whip out my notebook and make some field notes (a very rare occurrence). The white supercillium is the obvious field mark, bold and wedge like, from the bill back to over the ear coverts, whilst the blueish grey crown and nape contrast with the brown tinge to the grey back with faint black streaking. The throat was clean white with an absence of a malar stripe, and a peach-pink flush extended down from the throat onto the lower breast. The flanks were completely untouched by streaking, whilst the flight feathers were all neatly fringed clean white. Maybe I should whisper this, being a pipit and all, but it was stunning.
The Little Egret was obvious against the darker reed beds. Not so obvious at first glance is the Water Pipit pecking at the ground in front. It was stunning, with its pale peach breast and white eyebrows (I know there is a technical term, but they are basically eyebrows!) I look back towards Sizewell, dominating the skyline and reminding me of physics revision to come, as I run through how it works in my head, scanning the slate-grey skies.
I told you he was annoyingly clever, so I told him how to nearly get arrested by being near it. We swapped our respective political views on nuclear power (my Green V.s his Lib Dem) before agreeing that although they were both right in the long term, in the short term nuclear fuel is what we need, if only to bridge the gap between dirty fossil fuels and shiny new clean renewable energy.

To the lark ascending…
A sharp, sweet sound drifts down, and sure enough a skylark is above, singing as its winging its way across the sky. They may not be the rarest, but they bring back memories of Duke of Edinburgh awards, when they were all that kept us going along a long, hard cycle path, and through bracken when we lost the path. Eventually, it dives and we head back to the shore.

There were no birds of great note on the pebbled beach, and as we move towards a hide discussing the definition of a species, the scrape erupts with a cacophony of gulls taking flight. A Sparrowhawk darts across the path ahead, before turning south and heading down the beach below the shingle bank. We turn to the hide, seeking out Mediterranean gulls among the throng of chocolate coloured black headed gulls, like an ornithological Where’s Wally? Several are spotted, and we start to examine the Black-tailed Godwits, along with the Oystercatchers, Avocets and assorted other waders. One has forgotten to moult, looking very silly with its summer plumed friends.
We move topics from politics to wagtails- the obvious change. This neatly segues into the semi-impressive sounding biology that I learnt from old issues of BB. Which is basically taxonomy. What makes a species? Look at the wagtails and look at how many the Dutch split. Yeah crazy I know. Have you ever seen a White or Blue-headed Wagtail? Yeah, it’s all utterly arbitrary, phylogenetic species concept rocks, etc…
Whilst I pontificate, the scrape’s masses of gulls take to the skies. Ben suspects raptor, but I advocate caution- a couple of low-flying Greater Black-backs or Herons will have a similar effect. Then I spot it out of the corner of my eye, dashing passed the scrape, low to the right. It flips up and over the bank, hugging low to the ground all the while. It comes up and over the beach, showing off the steel grey back, blunt wings and striped underparts. Sparrowhawk, which then, surreally, flew up the beach and along the shingle ridge. Birds never do normal things when I’m around, I’m sure.
From East Hide I attempt to spread my anti-gull propaganda to Ben, scoping up a flock of about 5 Med Gulls amid an island full of Black-headed. I then show him some summer plumaged Blackwits to counteract the effects of gulls- in brick red and grey of summer plumage they shine like beacons on the scrape. A Bearded Tit flitted along the reedy fringe in front of the hide. Apparently this wasn’t a lifer for Ben, which surprised me, but he went further, proffering the almost sacrilegious opinion that Oystercatchers are better than Avocets, because their black is blockier. I violently disagreed, I hate the bill on an Oystercatcher, it’s a high-viz, health and safety bill, where as the Avocet is one of the most elegant birds in existence.
Having made repeated scans over the scrape with the scope, and having failed to locate the Caspian Gull I ask the person next to me. Who turned out to be John Grant, a Suffolk birder of some repute.
We move on to ask about the Caspian gull. A bank of what looks like young Greater Black Backed Gulls contains the suspect, and we are told on no uncertain terms that they have much longer wings and legs, only for it to stand up and to my untrained eye have neither. Stephen foolishly confessed his loathing for all gullkind, and was barraged with a torrent of praise for these birds, whose dynamic and expanding range as far as I can tell are what makes them stand out. Personally, I think it’s just nice to have something to send people diving to the nearest guide for, with them all looking just subtlety different like a series of cars, all the same kind of shape but with clear differentiating features, if you know where to look.
I don’t.
Apparently John Grant looks like my dad but I don’t see it myself. He located the gull through my scope, which felt a little bit like cheating, but my first impressions were indeed correct. Caspian Gull looks very much like any other form of gull. I groan and foolishly express my hatred of gulls. Rules for birders#1: never express Larophobic tendencies to a Larophile. The result of breaking this rule is a long lecture on dynamic populations, identification challenges and why gulls were crafted out of the Queen’s finest swans and really are the finest birds alive. This gull does have very long and blade like wings, it would get arrested if it walked through London with them and legs long enough for a Black-headed to swim through. More about this when I refind the BB special issue on them and can be bothered to split the atom regarding its ID. I still refuse their right to exist though… Although this bird isn’t the colour ringed Polish 2nd winter that had been seen recently- apparently Minsmere has a large turn over of Caspian Gulls at this time of year. Interesting (ish)…
It flies strongly off, which makes me realize that in all this time I failed to show it to Ben. Oops, though he looks at my digiscopes and claims to have seen it. I get back on safe territory by picking out a White Wagtail, which John Grant confirms and Ben fails to believe.
We finish our lunch as we turn the corner back towards the visitor centre, and hear a Frog while we discover just why the little brown birds love Minsmere. A Bearded Tit was the highlight of our journey back, though various other songs can be heard.
The amount of Cetti’s at Minsmere this year is quite incredible. On our circular route around we count at least 15 individuals singing, an amazing number considering the winter we had. North Marsh produced a Bearded Tit, pinging through the reeds before briefly clinging on to the top of a reed head.
A quick trip out to the Bittern hide with the Marsh Harriers perched on poles, and Sparrowhawks flying around, and we get back in the car for the short journey down to the heath.
In my attempt to prove that Bitterns are undippable at Minsmere we give Bittern Hide one last go. From its raised panorama the view over the reedbed is unbeatable, but the heat, from it being packed out with sweaty birders was also unbearable. I had to retreat to the shade of the wood after 10 minutes of viewing Marsh Harriers, Sparrowhawks and a Greylag Goose going insane. Time to try Westleton and forget all about Bitterns, gulls and Lesser Kestrels.
I am warned on the way: Dartford warblers are even harder to see than Bitterns, and there may not be that many. After a condescending identification of a Long-tailed Tit, two black and red birds dart across our path... surely not! We turn back to follow them, and standing proud on top of a sprig of heather was unmistakeably a Dartford Warbler, who stays still for long enough for the scope to be perfectly set on it. The moment that camera moves though, he jumps and is soon off again.
Condescending? Me? Well…
Ben: “and in this tree… looks like a kind of tit…”
I: “Yep, and what do you notice about this tit?”
B: “It’s tiny and has a massive tail.”
I: “And can you think of any adjectives to describe this tail?”
B: “Straight.”
I: “Not quite, look at the size of it compared to the body”
B” It’s longer…
I: “Yes!”
I’d warned Ben about the difficulties of Dartford Warblers- after the winter I’d expected them to be decimated, leaving two or three birds left enjoying prime territories in the middle of the heath. I didn’t realize it had driven them to trees. As we walked towards a pathside tree, I spot two birds fly out. Dark, reddish, small, long-tails. Dartfords? Erm, Ben…
They flew to the heather, we tracked back, they perched up and we scoped, in synchronous motion. I zoom into the full 45X, and we’re rewarded with the ultimate view of a Dartford Warbler. Singing, with the frenzied intensity of the mating season, full frame, clinging to the top of a swaying sprig of heather. I can barely believe my eyes, which explains the lack of photographs, but the deep red breast, slate back and white spots on the throat all glow intensely while it powers out its song. I remember to let Ben get good scope views again, and judging by his reaction, they lived up to my hype. Phew.

We see several more warblers, darting around the blackened heath, and another woodpecker, but the weather feels like it is turning and we too turn for home. A Willow Warbler taunts us as we finally leave the car park: What a lovely day.
Amazingly we encounter about 4 Dartfords, all showing excellently by the path and disappearing when the camera comes out, but I managed two photos…
A Wheatear is present on a distant pile of stones, looking like a piece of living, breathing, moving flint. The skies cloud over and the forecast rain looked imminent, so we high tailed it back west, with the sweet cascade of a singing Willow Warbler in the car park as a farewell…
I think he had fun.

Thetford Foray 4: Not Quite Summer

2010-04-08T11:34:00.001+01:00

It took me by surprise. The links between sound and place are inextricable and well trodden but that doesn’t mean you can prepare for them- the link is only propagated by the sound, not the place. I wasn’t expecting it. Cavenham Pit, 7.30am (the closest that I, a slugabed, will be getting to dawn for a while) in the rain, scanning a flock of Tufted Ducks on the grey choppy water. They failed me, again, by not holding ‘my’ canvard (more about this in another post). Twitching, and dipping, my own hybrid duck find (albeit a year later), it’s so far, so winter, and wishing I was in bed.

Then in an instant I’m transported to a lazy summer’s day, and swirling flocks of Swallows, squabbling House Martins and skies dark with Sand Martins. A simple, rapid fire chattering was all it took. I looked up from the scope just in time, to see black on white, an elegant V shape shooting overhead. It doesn’t need bins to identify it- my first, and long overdue Swallow of the year. They fly with such speed and elegant irregularity that it normally requires the first two or three of each species to get back into the groove of being able to do them by jizz, but this year I didn’t need that, the views were so good. It lands in a pit side treetop and indulges in some gentle sub-singing. Is it mentally marking out its new territory or chastising itself for its late arrival? One of those is anthropomorphic and thus clearly bad… In the insipid light its colour is desaturated as I set the scope on it. A back of Cadbury’s purple, a face darker still and underparts a muddied grey, whilst the fragile black twigs on a white sky added a bold element to the scope view.

By now the rain had doubled up its anti-birding offensive and all around us were grey and white clouds. Night had long since departed but day was hardly getting a look in. To fight; resolutely scoping the pit in hope of a put down migrant, or to flight; heading back to the car for shelter, breakfast and a scan of the heath?

Flight sounded good to me.

For a slow half hour of searching through rain sodden optics I saw one distant, flying, Stone Curlew, whilst dad was busy finding a bedraggled-and-not-best-pleased-about-it looking Buzzard. Slowly the onslaught of rain eased, before suddenly clearing up. This sparked us to action, leaving this deserted area of acidified grassland for another and it paid off instantly. As soon as we park up and wind down the windows, a brown stone in the middle of a grassy knoll surrounded by gorse morphs into a Woodlark. Amazing views at point blank range, of this normally elusive or distant species. It’s the first I’ve seen here; normally it’s a big enough area for them to disappear into. It shows for less than a minute before shuffling off under a gorse bush, hugging the floor at all times. The pale brown plumage is adequate enough as camouflage on the lifeless, washed out green of the acid grass, perfectly off-setting the pronounced supercilium and the white-black-white pattern of the primary coverts. It might basically be a Skylark, still timid after being attacked with tipex, but they are one of my favourite species.
It melts away into the gorse, so I take the opportunity to leave the car and walk down the track. I’m met by a silent flock of pipits, teasing me to take a look and daring me to string an early Tree Pipit. I refuse; life is too short to string a silent pipit- I’ll leave that to the Caspian Gull classes... Instead whilst I waste my life away analysing the extent and thickness of flank streaking, my dad pulls out a pair of feathered lumps, standing proud of the ground. Stone Curlews- pre-historic looking birds with snake like heads, befitting of the ancient landscape of the true Breckland, before Thetford forest ruined it all. It stood on thick mustard yellow legs, trying to hide behind a clump of longer dead grasses, before giving up and standing proud on top of a hummock. Fantastic, un-obscured views, without heat haze, of a stretching Stone Curlew. Nice! If only they ever showed at less than several miles distance. With time on our side, Cavenham cleaned up, and the sun finally breaking through the clouds we left for Lackford…

Slowly, with the steady beat of flap, flap, glide, a Sparrowhawk ascended to the peripheries of visibility. Then, with a casual disregard for safety, it collapsed its wings, flipped beak over tail and plummeted earthward bound, playing chicken with the treetops and daring gravity to do its worst.
The Sparrowhawk wins.
It might have pulled out of its descent just before the treetops, but in the process it managed to aggravate a whole host of Corvidus and left a female smitten with its display of avian machismo. Initially the white sky background strips me of all reference points for a size judgement. Bigish… Accipiter is clear, but those secondaries don’t bulge and the tail is sharply shaped. And the fact that I needed to think about it, should make perfectly clear its identity…
Down from the trees reveals the Slough, an obscure name for a shallow tree lined lake. A duck Goosander bobs like a log, grey bodied with its rufous head tucked under its wing. Sleeping seems like an affront to the Great Crested Grebe’s courtship dancing, being enacted right in front of the hide. Balletic birds, head shaking and preening, but too shy to take it all the way to the weed holding stages.

Leaving the hide installs an idea in my head. There’s time enough, the weather is good and I’m on a roll. Continuing the cyclic, good day/bad day, that seems to be characterizing ’10, we choose to gamble and head off to * that Goshawk site *, the one everyone knows about and is willing to tell you. Except me… The gentle cascade of a singing Willow Warbler pauses my mental diatribe on open reporting of Goshawk nesting sites. Almost immediately it sparks up a rival Chiffchaff from the opposite side of the path. The Willow dived into the Chiffchaff’s bushes, where they were both obscured but they shot back across the path into the Willow’s bushes, were it proceeded to run rings around the Chiffchaff and generally beat it up, before it could make its escape.

As the sun reached its zenith, so did the Goshawk. Slipping beyond the range of even optical aided eyesight, it disappears back into the space from whence it came. What would Newton have thought if instead of carelessly sitting under apple trees, he’d watched a gos flagrantly disregard gravity with nary a twitch of its wings?
It’s a king-sized killer of an Accipiter, with the massively broad wings converting invisible thermals into spiralling, effortless, uplift. The massively swollen crop was a nice touch and fuels speculation. Was it doing Britain a favour with Grey Squirrel removal, selectively culling the local Woodpigeons or was it one of the more interesting items recorded, like Sparrowhawk or Jay? Its self-absorbed attack on the laws of physics nearly came to a spectacular end when as a stratospheric dot at 45x, it narrowly avoids a mid-air collision with a Buzzard, before slipping beyond the physical limits of optical aided vision.
They’re amazing birds, you know when you have a Goshawk- they’re a gosh-hawk.

And the Crossbill count reached the dizzying heights of three…

...and look how horrible Thetford Forest is.

A Two Tick Triptych

2010-03-31T22:30:00.005+01:00

[Tuesday
I didn’t want to see this in my inbox...

“30/03 17:25 SUFFOLK : Lesser Kestrel, Westleton Heath [A]
appeared to go to roost in pines beyond the fence on the SSE edge of the heath, about 1,600m from the viewing area“

Like an expert in fine wine, from this 'les kes' (French grapes, you know) I’m getting a strong terroir of Brown Shrike, the meddling fingers of meteorology and just a hint of 5am Easter Saturday revenge…]

Monday Monday

So it came to this, struck again by the curse of the Westlelton Heath Mediterranean mega. I sweated and struggled my way through a rainy day at school, to be here, at 7pm, with my suited and walking booted post-work dad.
It’s miserable.
The visibility was less than 500 meters, drizzle pervaded the air and the clouds were low and uniform pale grey. Vampire clouds, sucking life out the heath and enthusiasm from the few remaining twitchers, straggling out across the heath. It’s not cold enough, neither is it windswept enough to be bleak.
It’s just miserable.
And, like the Spectacled Warbler of May 2008, it’s not like I didn’t have a chance with this bird as well…

Sunday, Palm (Swift) Sunday

One of the potential problems with blogging is semantically fencing myself off into a corner without friends and birds. I think, so far, I’ve managed to avoid it. However, I did say this…
“Kessingland, a small seaside town that apparently only functions to rip off tourists in summer.”
And I would like to take this opportunity to add another clause to the above quote, just to give myself some breathing space. So it now reads…
“Kessingland, a small seaside town that exists for two functions; to rip off tourists in summer and to have the best sewage works in Suffolk.”
Because although sewage works are intrinsically the same all over Britain, Kessingland is located slap bang on the east coast, in the heart of the land of the lounge lizard, and the middle of prime vagrant hunting habitat…

Sunday was all going rather well and being rather, ‘Family Sunday’ish, until 11am when BirdGuides hit the browser…
Oh.
Pallid Swift still at Kessingland. That wasn’t expected. And then I read the rest of the sentence- ‘still with Alpine Swift at the sewage works.’
Oh.
Ooh.
Not the most advanced or eloquent thought process I must admit.
I mentioned it to dad. He didn’t get the hint. I waved the laptop around in his face, pointed at the report and promised, twice, that I had no homework for Monday.
He got the hint.
But he was concerned that we’d been twitching too much recently. What constitutes a twitch? Setting off to places that we otherwise had no intention of visiting and not exploring further after seeing the rarity? Excellent, by that new definition I do absolutely no twitching whatsoever, and needed to seize this opportunity…

It felt like summer by the coast, with the omnipresent sewage works stench initially overpowering. We followed the now well-trodden footpath along the side of the sewage works, surrounded by thick green hedges with Chiffchaffs chanting in surround sound. The blue sky held the thick fluffy white clouds of summer.
And then I saw the light.
Because a swift flew in front of the sun.

This spring is surreal. It’s not even April, I’ve seen less than 5 spring migrant species yet and scything through the Suffolk sky, like demented punctuation, are two pairs of wings with bodies attached. One is a mega and the other is a monster. They’re hypnotic, racing around in tight circles like an avian scalextric before a twitch of their wings sends them off on a dizzying tangent, spiralling through the air like a leaf blown by the wind. They live in a wind tunnel and they look like it.

I track the monster as it spirals off and smashes my preconceptions. We’re all allowed a stringy skeleton in our closet and mine was Alpine Swift. For 10 seconds of viewing, in my first spring of birding, over the garden in April. The fact that I spent ages trying to rule out Sand Martin should tell you something. Most of my surprise stemmed from the breast patch. In the harsh light it was very hard to see, but that monster set of wings wasn’t hiding its identity from anyone. It passed over another sleek set of wings and I transfer my bins to tracking them. Stubby wings. They’re what I’m looking for first. It has them- to a point- but it’s not exactly paddling through the air. It is presumably the Pallid but I need better views. It disappears and leaves the crowd and I ogling the Alpine.

We investigated further down the path and found another viewing area over a larger reedbed. Initially only the Alpine shows but the presumed Pallid shows up in the end.
Tricky was the word for it.
It required scoping and for it to make a pass across the reedbed that was lower than the horizon to see any colour. After a series of frustrating near misses and losses it eventually all comes together. Dipping low, tilting its body away as it pulls up, revealing pale dusky greyish brown inner primaries and secondaries contrasting with the rest of the wing and the outer primaries.
Clinched.
Chill.
It all came together, clinched with that scope view. Without doubt the toughest bird on my life list to identify.
And then doubt wriggles its way back in. Did I see enough? Not nearly good enough views for a committee anyway. Would I have been able to pick it out if I had been the finder? No. Can I tick it and still sleep at night? Yes. Probably. The only thing I can be certain about is the ED50, with the 13-40X eyepiece, being the perfect optical instrument for scoping swifts with, even if you do look slightly ridiculous. StuckInARutt: always out ‘scoped, never out birded.

Slowly we ambled back, basking in Alpine flyovers before scanning the filter beds of the sewage works. Pied Wagtails were in abundance, devouring the masses of early insects, whilst a single Grey Wagtail added a dash of lemon yellow. A bit of searching pulls out the first White Wagtail I’ve seen for a few years. It comes as a mild shock, amongst the scruffy and swarthy pieds, and a few borderline cases, to see a bird so crisply monochrome, clean white and pale grey contrasting with much reduced levels of black plumage. Pieds maybe underappreciated because of their status, but whites are still scarce enough to truly appreciate. The bushes just down the path from here held a single Firecrest, a bird so stunning it seems hyperreal, like it has had its plumage imperfections airbrushed out…

Basking in the success of a twitch done well, and with no desire to visit Sotterly or the Blyth estuary we headed home, having comprehensively written off a disappointing Saturday. It was warm, we were chilled out and not even the reported Goshawk south over could ruin the day. So we set off on the journey home, passing Minsmere at just past 4pm…

We were too far gone when we heard about it. Frustratingly. I’m a natural born cynic so you can imagine my what I thought when I got the text message, ‘Lesser Kestrel at Minsmere, 4:10pm’. Pah. Where’s that, in the north bushes? Did they see the pale claws? Typical RSPB honey pot string. And there’s no point in turning back. We’re too close to home…
Ouch.
And then the day was just comprehensively over-shadowed.

Saturday

Distil blood lust into a 3 foot bag of feathers and muscle, attach a pair of talons and you have a Goshawk. They don’t win beauty contests because they attack the judges and kill the competition. They are the meanest creature to hunt the forests of the northern hemisphere and one of the most bloody-mindedly elusive beasts that there is.
In Thetford Forest.
The birds of the Breckland had been playing me for a fool all spring, but where two pairs of eyes have failed, 25 surely couldn’t? So a crack team of field ornithologists assembled; Gi, Bill, Ash, 20ish others, my Dad and I- a collective with enough birding brains to rewrite BWPi twice. It could only be the S.O.G. organised Breckland field trip. Which would also explain why it was raining.

And dark- the sky was the leaden shades of a Peregrine’s upperparts. I’d forgotten my coat. Overlooking clear fell into the heart of Thetford forest. Distant conifers were reduced to a serrated black line, the segregation of man from the edge of the Goshawk territory. Where raptors soar and glide and kill. Atmospherically a Woodlark sang across the clear fell- teevo cheevo chevio chee- the tune that turned Gerard Manley-Hopkins to write euphoric poetry. In its airy arena it fails to strike the same rapturous chord, instead it is merely a momentary distraction as it traverses distant firebreaks, perching on exposed branches like a singing cleft. Time dragged, clouds shifted, showers passed, bins were raised, hopes were dashed, but only the incongruous sight of a string of Golden Plover flying over provided any interest at all. This was like sea watching minus the constantly changing landscape. It’s a long and hardcore session of beard growing.

Where birders congregate, ego’s flourish- we all want to be the best birders in Suffolk and we want to show it. And true to form, I was terrible at it. Such as stumbling over my tripod legs before walking on ahead of the rest of the group and getting in the way of them as they scoped a pair of Bullfinch in the scrub. Pfft… scoping Bullfinches? Actually, they were quite nice… In the conifers Bill Stone was on fine form, pulling out Goldcrests, Coal Tits and Treecreepers from a shadowy flock flitting through the trees that I couldn’t be bothered with. I just wanted a caffeinated sit down.

Prior to this, three Sparrowhawks provided interest on the walk here. With really good views of the bird in its element, marauding the canopy and a pair soaring, you can really understand that they’re just a cuddly, U-rated, child friendly raptor. I wouldn’t be surprised if their talons came with cork balls on the sharp bits. Oh and there was one Crossbill. One male Crossbill (I will refer you back two posts...)

From here onwards things stayed much the same, nice birds but for an awful lot of work:
Cavenham heath, acidic grassland with a brisk wind and Stone Curlews. All three of the elusive distant moving molehills, whilst there were 4 Buzzards circling and soaring at twice that distance again. The pit lacked the ‘Canvard’ but had two Green Sands and the first Sand Martin flock of my spring.

Lackford lakes, a surprise inland Redshank and apparently West Suffolk’s best Tree Sparrows, with another Sparrowhawk distantly over the Kings Forest. The group was reduced to less than 10 people now, mostly lured away by the false attraction of rare swifts on the coast. I had dedication, to the cause but I bet they don’t stay until tomorrow.

One of those days that doesn’t look too bad on paper, but to judge it as that would be to rip its beating contextual heart out. Effort in, again, didn’t produce the rewards out. Again.
Oh well. It’s always nice to see Crossbills.
And to think, I turned down the choice of getting drunk in Yorkshire to do this…

Interlude #1

2010-03-24T18:47:00.001Z

In the sub-urban heat bubble, the first day of spring is never very pleasant. Heat and light, reflected off of glass, metal and tarmac, stagnate in the windless air whilst the first touches of haze descend on the horizon, blurring with the exhaust fumes from cars and buses. I’m trapped, in the urban wilderness, wedged between the A14, a sports track and a swimming pool, in the kingdom of the Feral Pigeon and the oxymoronic seagull. My mind drifts, captured more by the prospects of lunch than by my friends talking about their Xboxes and the politics of Facebook. We walk on, across a muddy bank, a tiny, food motivated act of rebellion. Neat and tidy berry bearing trees populate the bank, the urban development sop to greenery.
In the winter a Grey Wagtail was a surprise here, as were the Redwings, driven by the snow to the last supply of wild food. Now only a solitary Robin fills the air with its song, trying to battle the curse of the common. The curse of being judged permanently by its population rather than on merit, and thus being merged into the background- part of the omnipresent scenery. It competes with background traffic noise, the blur of distant drum and bass, the chatter of voices, the insatiable compass of my stomach pointing at food, the daily bombardment of signs and noise; the visual and aural detritus of life. The Robin valiantly looses. But amongst the cacophony another voice emerges, with an onomatopoeic punk refrain, shouting defiance. A 10 gram, 10 cm long bundle of feathers, mocking me for my relative laziness.
“I’ve flown from Southern Europe, what have you done today?”
I heard it for less than 10 seconds. Did I hallucinate it? Was I hearing things born out of desperation from spring’s apparently latest ever start?
No.
I don’t think I was, it was too much of a surprise.

So spring can start now.

I heard that same song again this morning. From my bathroom of all places, over the buzz of the electric toothbrush, originating from the trees over the road. A very noisy Chiffchaff turned up to 11, as if to make up for lost time…

Thetford Foray 3: Saved By The Bill?

2010-03-18T20:31:00.005Z

Red list species- they’ve never had it so bad. Amongst Europe’s common birds the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker is a conservationists second worst nightmare. With a 7% annual decline* and numbers less than 20% of what they were in 1980, times are bleak as they slip through the outstretched fingers of conservationists on their south-easterly retreat.

And yet I’ve enjoyed excellent views of them for the past 3 years. At that site, the one which apparently every birder in East Anglia knows about and converges on when I want to find one in peace and quiet.
Water is the reason why.
The Little Ouse offers a vein of life running through the parched Thetford Forest, bringing deciduous carr to the anaemic heart of the Forestry Commission’s monoculture. But where there is life there is death and the carr lies where it dies. Which is excellent news for the tiny and apparently insignificant insects that equate to the strong head of woodpeckers, with just a few lesser spots still clinging on.

For three years I was faithful to the site. But now I’ve outgrown it and I’m fed up of the crowds, a collective that apparently looses all shred of field-craft at the first opportunity, or drumming lesser spot. Another visit would’ve been boring, yielding the same haul that I’ve had for the past three years.

For three years I had all the site fidelity of a migrant Dotterel, that patch of dead and dying trees being my Pendle Hill. But every year the flocks of birders got bigger and the views got progressively worse. I’m not pro-suppression but I’m not pro birders running towards drumming woodpeckers either. Now, clearly, was the time to peregrinate…

Creative map reading brought me here, and going by the furtive glances from a few other birders, we were on the right tracks. We looked over a comparatively large area of prime riparian deciduous carr; a swathe of woodpecker nirvana surrounded by conifers. But like all areas of large habitat with small birds (sparrow sized is true but overused, try European Storm-Petrel sized) access is limited- just one short bank side stretch. I gave it an hour before the colder than expected wind forced me to make a move. In that hour only a Great Spotted Woodpecker was heard, amongst the cacophony caused by Great, Coal and Blue Tits, euphoric in the late winter sun. Whilst their calls and song reverberated around my eardrums, a snatch of rhythmic high notes emerged from the aural murk. It sounded a lot like Willow Tit but a misspent youth sound tracked by Led Zeppelin on my Sony Walkman has done it’s best to rob me of my ability to hear birdsong. Shame, because down here Willow Tits are as, if not more, rare than lesser spots…

It’s counterintuitive but the way forward with these conifers is to chop them down. It goes against the grain and runs roughshod over conservation instinct, but whilst a block of conifers will hold a pair of Crossbills and a few Coal Tits, neither of which are of any conservation concern, whereas the same area when clear felled will hold Woodlark, Adder and other surprises. Clear fell isn’t a fixed habitat; it rotates and moves at the whim of the forest management, so the patch that I’ve found just one block of trees away from the road complete with confiding Woodlark seems a bonus of luck for all the effort I’ve put in. But today a cold wind blows over a resolutely empty area of bracken, earth and stumps. Only the one resilient Wren that survived the winter snow sang stridently in its empty arena. Sad. Interestingly as I left an accipiter hawk called loudly and repeatedly, with sharp notes piercing through the air. Bearing in mind what I said earlier about my ears it did sound suspiciously like a Goshawk. Either that or a bad TV drama was being filmed nearby involving a scene of dangerous yet atmospheric wilderness…

We retreat. Dad and I, mentally stung by failure and fenced in by time constraints went with the final roll of the dice to a place past its prime. Mayday farm, overtaken by other sites and victim to fashion, it’s only good for Crossbills now. Water is the reason why. It has one path side puddle; pond is too grand a term for it. I slumped on a path side log and waited. For an hour, in the shade…

Have you ever seen a Siskin display? It’s quite impressive. For an attractive species that doesn’t really do much, it was quite a surprise to get a male, parachuting with frenzied wing beats in a slow arc around a conifer, spitting out trills and tweets quicker than a Def Poet with a point to prove. Impressive but he tried too hard, the female finch seemingly unimpressed by his display of bluster, flying off shortly after he finished.

There’s only so long you can spend staring at a conifer before things get a little warped and you start to make abstract shapes out of the shadows between branches. A solitary Common Buzzard overhead does little to relieve the boredom until a solitary calling finch flies into the same conifer the Siskin displayed in. As I’ve said before I don’t trust my ears to identify birds at all. But Crossbill is unique enough for me to manage. It perches up, a shade of dirty brownish green, proudly brandishing that caricature bill.
They’re a 21st century Darwin’s finch for the Phylogenetic Species Concept generation. For those that recognise The Sound Approach as the most important bird book of the last decade. A species to dedicate your fieldwork to, to get tattooed and to laugh at before they get split into every diagnosable form possible. I like them. They remind me of Manx Shearwaters, species that have hit their evolutionary apex and have nowhere left to go other than to diverge in to as many cryptic species as they see fit. They’re refined so far as to be utterly utilitarian and because of it, totally beguiling.

But 5 hours in this charmless forest for one?

And you always meet the “It’s always nice to see Crossbills” brigade.

Yes! I agree, but…

PS: Rules for readers #1: if the title’s a question, the answer is no.

*Reference: The State of Europe’s Common Birds 2008 PDF

Reservoir Owls

2010-03-15T22:29:00.003Z

To see all 5 British breeding owls in a day… it’s been a dream of mine for a while. It’s the latent completist in me, the last of the listing habits that I’ve yet to kick.
Unfortunately.
I didn’t plan it. Realistically you can’t plan on seeing a Long-eared Owl anywhere. They’re too elusive, the near mythical inhabitant of surprisingly insignificant habitat and chronic bogey bird for the beginner.
Perhaps I should’ve planned it. Did you expect better of me? The anti-twitcher was back for another bite of the roosting Long-eared Owl cherry. Elmley Marshes, August, 2007, with North Kent feeling like the Spanish steppe, (albeit a heavily industrialised and user-friendly version) it was the diametric opposite of today. Rutland Water, late February 2010, merging with late winter’s low blanket of mist and living up to my stereotypes of the midlands: grey.

It’s an avian maze.
An organic ‘Where’s Wally’ in brown.
Tracing along tangled twigs lead to the feathered heart of the thicket. The flickering of an ear tuft and a winking amber eye being the only sign of life. Fused into the bush it materialises and melts away with the turn of the focus wheel.
It’s presence is special, special enough to beckon 8 middle aged men to crowd around one spot on an extraordinarily muddy path and contort their bodies and stare into bushes through binoculars for half an hour.
They were, however, irreverently loud, forcing me to seek solace in the form of Fieldfare hide.

From the darkened corners of the hide, a flock of Teal and Wigeon showed very well on the shore of the reservoir. Very much an underrated duo, with bags of character, it’s a shame that they slip into background. Just part of the flock, the chaff through which to search to find the American cousin.
The hide door slid open, filling the hide up with the Starlings of the birder world, obviously now bored with the owl. My pleasure from the Teal and Wigeon is cut short. Time to get on with the serious methodical attempt at rarity finding.
Out on the reservoir vast numbers of ducks were flocking in ‘the grey zone’, where mist and reservoir meet. Goldeneyes and Tufted Ducks were reduced to black and white blots of blocky conformity, distinguishable by shape alone. I choose to pass with the female dabbling ducks…
I gave the Long-eared Owl one more look from a different viewpoint. Further down the path crept up the side of a slight hill (by Suffolk standards) and allowed views over the back of the scrub, where blending in only by the hyper-real virtues of its plumage was another Long-eared Owl. It was all very brown, but in the relative openness of its location it was stunning, bad light almost blurring the edges enough for it to resemble a Lars Jonsson watercolour. It felt almost vulnerable stripped of thick cover but the enigma was preserved by distance. 60X zoom however allowed a full view of its head…

Enough to make Realtree look high-vis.

Incongruously a Barn Owl appeared from nowhere and flew along then over the scrub. 2 Owls down before lunchtime and the idea hadn’t entered my head. So tellingly we left for Eyebrook reservoir on spec, without really knowing what, where or why, with only the vague idea that there might be a Green-winged Teal there. Anyway, it's always good to put a place to a name I frequently read on BirdGuides. Although apparently not recently enough. As shall become clear.

The stone brick villages of Rutland and Leicestershire have a certain charm about them, though the re-introduced Red Kite effortlessly gliding over helped. They feel much less anachronistic here then they do gently hunting the verges of the nations motorways. They belong in these gently rolling grassy areas. And that’s the extent of my conservation science skills…

I didn’t expect this; I was pleasantly surprised by the attractive and natural look of the reservoir. And if that was a pleasant surprise, I was downright shocked by the scope view. Because you don’t expect, as you shake off car-cramped legs and let the eye take in the grey chop of the reservoir’s water a small, monochrome grebe surfaced.
Dulled by the poor light and the low tempo birding, the birding synapses in my brain have gone from blunted to non-existent. I don’t grill, don’t really look, just stand gawping at the eyepiece with my mouth open at an unusual angle, brain trying to comprehend the obvious whilst my open mouth struggled around the consonants. The grebe dived, breaking the stalemate and allowed me to cough out the word. ‘Slav…’

It was an overreaction born from shock rather than any actual rarity value but it preceded 5 minutes of surreal scarce bird action.
I passed the scope over to dad to grill the Slav. If every action has a reaction than raising my bins precipitated my jaw dropping. Another grebe. Still monochrome, but scruffier, charcoal not pen and ink, grunge not mod. I scarcely believe it. Black-necked. The complete set of 5 British wintering grebes. Excellent.
And then passing the scope through a wildfowl flock I found a drake Smew.

The frisson of excitement that comes from self-found birds was tripled. And then cruelly snatched away when I realise that they’ve been here for weeks. Just nobody told me…

The rest of the reservoir was pleasant. For that you can read birdless, and more importantly, no Green-winged Teal. How many Green-winged Teal have I dipped now? I’ve already seen one as well. There’s nothing that these binoculars can’t see…

We walked a short way down the road away from the reservoir. In the middle of an expansive grassy field stood a lone, gnarled old oak tree. Backlit against the white sky its twigs tangle to fracture the light, black hairlines against sheet white. Investigating the branches reveals a lump out of sync, a gnarl on a gnarl. The telescope further reveals a pair of yellow slits glaring back from a cold greyish brown body with white splodges. The Little Owl sports the more abstract form of camouflage than the Long-eared Owl’s hyperreal plumage, but when the light illuminates the rough edge of the bark, spreading white spots over a colourless tree, the Little Owl could be natures gargoyle, sitting proud but fused out of the wood.
Anyway, it’s amazing what people will tell you if you push their car out of the mud.

And that was when the idea struck. 2 Short-eared Owls were reported about 20 minutes from my house. Tawny Owl is a garden bird. There was probably no better time to go for the set, all 5 in a day. So we did. But first we went back to one more viewpoint over the res... Which produced a pair of Goosander and a Red-crested Pochard at the limits of 60X scope vision. Because the idea of all 5 owls in a day, wasn’t quite appealing enough. By now time was at a premium, it was Rutts V.s light upon re-entering Suffolk. Critically a torrential downpour had slowed us down enough to make time very tight. We had to be back home at 5pm, which cancelled out all time to look for owls. They had to show as we drove pas the site, which was very much a possibility, however unlikely.
And as we drove up a pale set of wings flushed up from the roadside verge and dropped into a nearby tree.
Owl!
Hopes were dashed by white underparts- the second Barn Owl of the day. It stayed in the tree as we drove past, I could only have been a few feet away, as we passed, separated by glass. If a Short-eared Owl’s eyes invoke terror and a Long-eared Owl’s invite mystery, Barn Owl’s eyes are utterly inscrutable all-seeing pits of inky darkness.
My hopes were high but dashed. It felt like it was gloating at me.
In the final field there was a pair of Grey Partridge, my first this year, and the first good views of this rapidly declining species that I’d had in a while.

It’s bittersweet to fail with a Barn Owl. It shouldn’t be a failure and this is why the listing habit is bad. And seeing all 5 British owls in a day is merely a pointless act of birding self-aggrandizement that serves no purpose or requires any modicum of birding skill or field craft at all.
Right?

For a Breckland Bean Goose

2010-02-21T13:39:00.005Z

Birding puts me in awkward positions. Like being slumped in the passenger seat of the car at an awkward angle, one eye screwed tight, and the other screwed to the eyepiece of the scope resting on the car window.

Bored of snow, the fickle nature of British weather almost gave up on its icy onslaught and relented to spring.
Almost, if you were inside and not looking at the spectacularly thick frost, still lying on the ground as dad and I escaped the house at 10am.
How rare is an early start for us? Oh about as rare as wild geese in west Suffolk…

60x zoom is never pleasant; factor in some haze, harsh light and a flock of grey geese, mostly rump on in a stubble field with the first pollen of the year being gently wafted into my nose by a light breeze. They’re the pink-feet, that’s easy to work out, but as I pass the scope back across the distant flock the bean remains well hidden. The problem with the stubble is that it obscures the legs of the geese, so they’re only visible for the split second where they goose step above the level of the stubble.

Which had something to do with the on-purpose overshooting of Lackford lakes.
Geese in west Suffolk tend to be either feral (Egyptian and Greylag) or escapes (single Pink-foot at Micklemere, Barnacle and Snow etc.) So the flock of 6 Tundra Bean Geese that turned up at Lackford, from Steggall’s hide was a great record, for those that saw them. Not me. Their stay straddled two weekends, the only two weekends of the year that I was too tied up to go for them.

5 minutes of scoping and hope starts to fade.

Frustrating? Yeah you could say that…

10 minutes later and I don’t really want to be here.

And then 10 days later a Bean Goose was back.

15 minutes later it was a bad idea to come.

Minus 5 of it’s fellow species for a flock 50 Pink-feet, commuting between The Slough at Lackford and surrounding fields.

Remind me why I wanted to twitch it anyway?

I know what I’d rather have had and where I’d rather be but I dislike missing out on patch birds…

After 20 minutes of continuous scope hogging the 50 geese eventually fragment and move enough to reveal a darker backed bird at the back of the flock. It keeps its head down, infuriatingly, but eventually after about 5 minutes it lifts its leg just high enough over the stubble. It isn’t pink, it’s fluorescent orange and it’s at retina busting range and giving me a headache and making me sneeze and I’m needed as a human tripod for 5 minutes so my ever-patient dad can see it.

Views were enough to identify it certainly. But were they enough to race it? Forget the amount of orange on the bill, which just overcomplicates things and have a look at this picture. See, easy.

Or so I thought.

It turns out things may not be so easy with regards to the identification of ssp. ‘rossicus’ Bean Geese. Due to a pioneering nature documentary from 1969 that was ahead of its time, and like most pioneers has subsequently slipped into obscurity. That documentary, Ring of Bright Water, shows the first example known to science of species shifting geese.
See these Greylags?

They magically morph into Beans!

Before they turn back into Greylags again.

Amazing.

More research is clearly needed into this startling phenomenon. Until then I suggest a hiatus on Bean Geese reports and ticking. Thank you.

Seaside Snow and The Short-eared Owl

2010-02-15T15:59:00.008Z

As the life cycle of a rat scurries to its inevitable conclusion in the cold talons of a Short-eared Owl, does it stop to consider the fluorescent eyes gazing down on it?
I’m 25 metres from the bird and viewing it with standing water on the lens. Mechanically it turns its head from the floor and fixes its gaze right through my objective lens. Yet even through the water, the dreich conditions, the brisk wind wobbling the barely-fit-for-purpose tripod and the antique Japanese engineering of the scope, the eyes glow with a murderous intensity as it fixes its stare on me. They’re inscrutable, enigmatic, its inky black pupils staring straight back at mine from their sun like sea of intense yellow. The bird watching the birdwatchers. Too soon it flies again, revealing that perfectly compact shape, the silent flight on soft yet powerful wing beats and the all-important primary pattern. And it’s the second owl species of the morning…

North Warren, on the Suffolk coast is a friendly slice of RSPB standard grazing marsh, lots of birds, but no sense of adventure. The north Norfolk coast is meant to be wild and windswept, but you’re never more than an hour from a visitor centre. East Norfolk is where the bleakness is and Chedgrave is hardcore. This wedge of land, sticking tongue like into the confluence of the river Yare and the Waveney, is the ultimate of all the ‘anti-postcard’ landscapes, flat, bleak, rainy and littered with the fingerprints of man. Pylons march across it like artificial strand of trees whilst fences act out arbitrary boundaries, instead of hedgerows. Flanked to the south by the busy A143, to the east by a boat yard and to the west by a railway line, it is as close to Rainham marshes as you’ll find outside of the Thames estuary. There is a key difference though.
Chedgrave has 3 Rough-legged Buzzards.
Two of which I was scoping at an extraordinary distance before I was so rudely interrupted by the quasiperiodic sight of a Short-eared Owl. It’s almost immoral not to be excited by the Rough-legs, but distance and lack of light make them just slightly underwhelming.

Buoyed by success the walk back has gone from gruelling slog to pleasant stroll, the wind and rain even ease for a short while. Bearded Tits filter unseen through the reeded banks of the Waveney, only calling to reveal their presence. I scope a quartering Marsh Harrier, it dips below the reed-line and re-appears, suddenly lither and meaner, the graceful gliding on V shaped wings replaced with fast purposeful intent, a white rump and warm chestnut underparts. Sneaky little Hen Harrier…

We threaded our way south through northeast Suffolk to get to Kessingland, a small seaside town that apparently only functions to rip off tourists in summer. In winter it enters hibernation, leaving the wide stretch of marram fixed shingle free from disturbance.
Perfect for Snow Buntings.
As soon as we reached the beach we got caught up in a flurry. A blizzard even, of white wings, flashing translucent as they flicked overhead and in front of us. They landed on the shingle ridge just a short distance away, lined up like a rogues gallery against the sky. Snow Buntings are amazing. Really. No other words for it. Here’s a really rubbish phonescoped one. They’re too amazing to describe. Seriously.

The day finished with Little and Barn Owls in the hinterland of east Suffolk. Rather disconcertingly there were also large numbers of ‘SAY NO TO SEA EAGLE’ signs, from everyone’s favourite community of people scared of change, wildlife, foreigners and anything that happened after the 1960s. They might be acting out of genuine concern, or is it just a thinly veiled return to the anti-raptor sentiment that I thought was a relic of northern grouse moors? I thought I lived in an enlightened county. Anyway, with the success of Airbrushed for Change, somebody must be able to photoshop an amusing pro-eagle stance?

Ornitho-Logical

2010-02-12T19:49:00.007Z

Recently, real life almost threatened to find another use for my weekends. You see Media Studies coursework, either a 5 minute extract from a documentary or short film, requires actual effort and is ever so slightly more important then continuing my run of dipping not particularly rare or interesting birds. With the filming scheduled for autumn and early winter, I was on the verge of consigning the autumn to the 'abandoned in the name of education' scrapheap, right next to the month of May.
Which was when I had an unusually clever brainwave. I spend all my time birding. Every week the real media run roughshod over the fine semantics of birding terminology. None of my friends appreciate what birding actually is. Not everybody looks or sounds like Bill Oddie... And so 4 months later, this was the result.

Editing is the strange black magic of the media and a lot harder than you think it is. But even that doesn't excuse why there is a blast of Nightingale over the start of my presenting. Or my bouncing gait when I start speaking, I look like a Jack Snipe...
Due to the need to have a target audience it is a bit dumbed down in the middle, but I quite like the end.
Thanks to Gi Grieco for his starring role.

Universally Dipping (31st Jan-1st of Feb)

2010-02-08T19:40:00.006Z

If you like largish seaside towns, Penzance is quite nice as they go. Personally I don't, but it does have a roundabout called ‘Mount Misery’and there is nothing I enjoy more than indulging in my own misery. Dad and I had been through a night* in a Travelodge, iced roads, blizzards, torrential rain, horrendous hail, frozen pools and bleak reservoirs and dipping two American ducks (Lesser Scaup and Ring-necked) to get here. Morale was low and all hopes were pinned on West Penwith saving the day. Redwings and Fieldfares littered the roadside verges, like sentient fresh autumn leaves, whilst roads get tighter and traffic progressively lighter. Buzzards, so far omnipresent on this trip, get wilder, swapping A-road lampposts for hawthorn hedges and gateposts, whilst one just outside of Sennen village pushes the trip count to over 30: a personal best for one day. **

(Try looking for a duck in this!)

Brew farm didn’t save the day; it only saved the days last kick in the teeth. For the second time in Cornwall, I locate the field of cattle, look over the hedge and see… no cows. Looking at the sheds reveals why. They’re being milked. No Cattle Egrets there. No egrets at all, anywhere nearby. No egrets, no surprises.

Mentally battered, a sledgehammer blow to the fledgling confidence brought upon by the Broadland success a fortnight ago, dad and I retreated to Sennen cove, for a quick scan of the bay and a brief landscape photography session. The light was dull and the dog walkers were out in force, indulging in walking through my composed shots.

From Sennen cove car park, you are wedged between the beach and the cliff, which a Peregrine Falcon was exploiting for thermals. It lazily circled overhead, barely moving a feather until a Raven had the temerity to invade its air space. With a brief flick of its wing tips it made a thrilling pass at the Raven’s underside before drifting off north, leaving the Raven flapping ungainly and comprehensively aerially outclassed.

As the sunset a brief look over Marazion and St Michael’s mount revealed a monster flock of Snipe and a Great-northern Diver, whilst the Buzzard count ended up on 34.

Monday was spent relaxing around Falmouth town, before going for an interview at Falmouth uni. This didn’t preclude a the cursory look around Swanpool (which was devoid of interest) and a Black Redstart in my great uncles front garden. A hyperactive bird, this was the only time it stood still and I still had the camera set on landscape settings...

It was rather typical that as we passed Bodmin moor in the dark, on the long journey home that I received a text about the Lesser Scaup, that had been relocated on the now unfrozen Colliford res. Gutting.

Footnotes
A potted history of Cattle Egrets and I.
July 2007: Single at North Warren, turned up the day before I went on holiday. Wasn’t there when I got back.
Winter 07/08 and 08/09: big influxes into the southwest of England, resulting in them breeding for the first time in Somerset. Irregularly birds turn up in the east midlands and random Cambridgeshire fens but don’t stay long enough to twitch.
August 2008: Midweek bird at Blakeney.
February 2009: Success at last! Ish, 3 birds several miles away in a roadside field in Devon. Views were tickable but highly unsatisfactory. Later on in that holiday I dip a flock in Cornwall, due to the cows being in their sheds.
March 2009: Single at Bures, a random field on the southwest Suffolk/Essex border. The same bird that had been kicking around 2 sites in Norfolk, all 3 times I couldn’t go for it.
January 2010: A single reported flying over the A14, about 10 minutes from my house. Not relocated.

*I say a ‘night’, what I actually mean is that a stay in a Travelodge is the most expensive, yet socially acceptable form of becoming an insomniac. Maybe it’s the cardboard mattress that happens to be 1’ shorter than me? Maybe we’ll blame the boy racers on the A303?
**At 9am in Somerset we were averaging 1 every 5 minutes. This set us a target of 70 in a day. Maybe next time. Surprisingly Dartmoor was poor for Buzzards, thus making it either Rabbit nirvana or home to a relict population of nefarious gamekeepers. Could’ve been the blizzards though…

Wicken Relief

2010-01-23T21:22:00.005Z

I remember the Christmas holidays, a fortnight free from work and any form of mental activity. Which makes the kick in the face that is the January exam season, a whole lot harder to handle. With stress levels rocketing and mock grades tumbling, the weekend brings relief in the form of an afternoon Wicken Fen.

The light never got better than gloomy and the ground under foot varied from boggy to pretty much impassable. A single flushed Snipe was the only bird between the visitor centre and tower hide. It was that bad.

The famed raptor roost offered up only two birds. A female Marsh Harrier and this male Hen Harrier.

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See the barred tail? That makes it a 3cy.

Racing The Light: a broadland epic

2010-01-22T22:40:00.003Z

“It’ll only take an hour,” dad promised. 30 minutes later it seemed like a wasted diversion. Whitlingham broad country park, the homogenised, accessible, shiny and fake* face of the Norfolk broads was swarming with Norwich urbanites, dog walkers, joggers and noisy children. The tripod only had two working legs; all the birdlife had decamped to the furthest shore, whilst a dog splashed into the water in pursuit of a stick, looking as incongruous as I felt. I don’t know how people patch it- 5 minutes here is enough to drag out the semi-suppressed misanthrope inside me.

With the scope precariously balanced on two legs and my nose, the first ducks of the big flock were two female Smew. Result? No, call me a churlish twitcher, but for this amount of pain, all I wanted was to get the Red-necked Grebe and get straight out of here. The Great-northern Diver, bobbing and diving next to an ice floe was painfully brushed aside in favour of scanning the massed ranks of Aythya ducks and the armada of Great-crested Grebes.

Time slipped away to be gradually replaced by stress. Then out of nowhere up popped a grebe. Structurally stockier and duskier in the face, it could only have been the Red-necked Grebe but cruelly the distance and shake from a two-legged tripod defy clinching the identification. Dad and I rush down to the other end of the lake. I set up the two-legged tripod again and start scanning whist dad picks up some tools from the car and gets to work trying to fix it. Farcically I was still scanning through the scope when he manages to release the third leg and the resulting backwards motion smashes the eyepiece in my eye. I didn’t see it coming, but it was classic slapstick. Clearly the grebe has a sense of humour because it reappears again, in a small bay near the water sports end of the broad. The end liberally coated in ‘parklife’ assorted wildfowl and the opposite side to the ‘nature reserve’. The grebe is showing extremely well by scarce grebe standards, allows grilling (1st winter) and the sun even politely came out. And then it did what no other scarce bird does. It swam towards me. Quickly grappling with the camera I fired off a few shots before it dives. I sneaked up to the waters edge, hid behind a tuft of vegetation and prepared for it to reappear. It did. But I wasn’t expecting it to be less then 5 metres away. Panic, instant refocus, fire!

Elation

There were two trails of thought after this. Either consider the enormous amount of random coincidences that just occurred (me seeing the bird at the right time, being in the right place when I could’ve given up at 3 prior moments, the light coming out, me having taken the camera and it being on the right settings at the right time and the bird posing nicely) or wondering how to navigate through Norwich city centre with a dearth of maps to get back to the original destination- Barton broad.

Crystallise in your mind, if you will, Whitlingham broad. Gloss over its unnatural history and imagine time acting in reverse, flooding neighbouring field and replanting flooded Carr along its banks, forgetting urbanite dog walkers, visitor centres and all signs of the hand of man. Remove Norwich and the omnipresent buzz of vehicles. Add in a boardwalk through the Carr (got to view the broad to birdwatch somehow…) a couple of tern rafts and you almost have Barton broad. Almost- run off from the surrounding farmers fields have caused problems with water quality, spoiling what would otherwise be an isolated pocket of ornithological utopia…

Boardwalks are good. They appeal to the boyish sense of adventure still in me. Carr is also good, and in the low light of the afternoon reduces the scenery to a series of abstract light and dark shapes, through which the boardwalk slowly winds its way before reaching the bank of the broad.

Out on the water there is only a small flock of ducks. Mixed, but mostly comprising of Aythya species, with the addition of three pristine drake Smew. It’s impossible to capture the beauty of a drake Smew in words and I was looking at three, a flock of more drakes then I’d seen in my life. This small flock of ducks also held a cherry red Ferruginous Duck, amazingly the third I’ve seen in 6 months. The last time I saw one, I was pretty sure that they were the best species of duck in the world, but drake Smew runs it mightily close. It wasn’t all perfection, the boardwalk was pretty full of would be Otter watchers.
We would’ve liked to have stayed, but Hickling broad was calling us…

At this point, my expectations have been bloated beyond all reason. This leads to hype, which is a terrible thing, but as we raced the setting sun through small east Norfolk villages I couldn’t help but picture the flocks of Cranes gently drifting in to roost, whilst assorted harriers and falcons re-enacted Batumi and owls awoke to a night of small mammal massacring.
And this was never going to happen. In my defence I’d never actually been to Hickling broad before, and so I’d assumed that it would be somewhat like Wicken Fen. I was wrong, unsurprisingly…

We left it a bit late; the air was thick with the last golden rays of sunset as we made our way down the entrance track to Stubb mill, scattering flocks of Redwings from the hawthorn thickets lining the path.
We were half way down when a call stopped us in our tracks, an elegant, evocative trumpeting call. We scan the skies with increasing desperation, but remain Craneless. Then a grey shape materialised in the golden glow behind the hawthorns on the far side of the field. Bins up, Crane! Hiding through several hedgerows, the views are definitely disappointing but it’s definitely a species worth coming back for, if only because they’re improbably elegant and should be extinct, like all the other birds symbolic of wilderness**.

Confidence was coursing through my veins as we approached the crowd of 40 other birders lined up at the viewpoint. It was of course, a slight let down. 9 more Cranes, 2 flocks of 4 and 5 birds respectively dropped low into roost over towards Horsey (extremely distantly), whilst a Merlin went to roost on a hawthorn, amongst a huge gathering of Marsh Harriers and a five figure flock of Pink-feet flew over. Just before the light was about to disappear a brown ‘falcon’ comes dashing low and towards the viewpoint. I even call it out as such (on which I blame this new found thing called confidence) when its trajectory carries it up above the tree line and in front of us, with a dark banded brown potbelly and snipe like bill just visible in the semi-light of dusk. Oh well, a Woodcock is an excellent bird to see and a fitting finale to possibly the best afternoon of birding I’ve ever had.

Ever.

And now for some footnotes…

* The broads look, feel and smell like a natural landscape. Only they’re actually the flooded remains of medieval peat mines. Whitlingham however is a whole new modern take on this, being a flooded 90s gravel pit. Like Hollywood reviving a classic for a money grabbing mediocre sequel, Whitlingham just isn’t comparable to the original broads.

**And if you wanted historical proof that wholesale habitat destruction is a bad thing, the draining of the fens and hunting drove the Crane to extinction in Britain sometime in the 16th century. But with a marvellous two fingers up to the current fad for re-introductions, 4 birds wintered around the Horsey region in 1979, with two hanging around until 1982, when they became the first breeding Cranes in Britain for over 400 hundred years. This and the Chough are thought provoking examples, is habitat creation and patience a more sustainable way to creating successful bird populations, instead of re-introductions? I’m not an ecologist/biologist/scientific conservationist, but it’s worth a thought. After all the Great Crane Project was magnificently upstaged by the arrival of a pair at Lakenheath…

Snow Chance...

2010-01-07T15:01:00.005Z

...of making a Woodpigeon look interesting.
Taking these is actually harder then it looks. They're from my bedroom window, at a tree slightly too far away and with too many twigs to get a clear shot, at the birds that always perch at the back of the tree. And then there's bad light, trying to focus with gloves and the birds are always far too wary.

Edit: Day 2 of the subarctic conditions, so have some more over-cropped photos of small birds, struggling to survive in the hardest winter for 30 years...

(Its head was annoyingly in shadow)

It's worth repeating these links
Waterbirds and cold weather (BTO) http://www.bto.org/home/cold_weather_and_waterbirds.html
Emergency action to help threatened birds http://www.birdguides.com/webzine/article.asp?a=1899
What to feed birds (RSPB) http://www.rspb.org.uk/advice/helpingbirds/feeding/whatfood/index.aspx

Wildfowled Parts 1 and 2

2010-01-03T22:01:00.009Z

01/01/10
New years day- full of fresh starts, new hope and broken resolutions. Emerging bleary eyed at somewhere near 11 to a surprisingly fresh coverage of snow, I decided to start the year off with an underwhelming walk around Lackford- nothing too troubling…

Typically it was very quiet; the partially frozen sailing lake has been invaded by Common Gulls, the Slough had plenty of Teal and tufties and all the boggy Jack Snipe attracting bits were frozen over and birdless.

The stream running through the Carr was patrolled by a Water Rail. Theoretically this should’ve been easy to photograph- the bird is both close, in light and does show well. But in practice getting a clear shot away is hard, with twigs obscuring the foreground, the bird is a hyperactive mover and as soon as it is away from cover it is back in it before you’ve had the time to focus. I only managed the one semi-in focus but not sharp photo…

By one of the path side pools a drake Goldeneye is relatively close in. Until the camera is switched on, when it rapidly tries to put as much water between itself and me as possible. A Robin- the most obliging since Titchwell car park, makes up for it...

Bess’s hide isn’t one I visit that regularly. The pit never seems to hold much in the way of ducks and never especially close to the hide. However in the surprisingly strong sunshine, the wooded bank was glowing orange and thus the water took on a molten orange look. A pair of Goldeneye drifting in front of the hide, at a fair distance but I take about 5 shots anyway, beautiful birds in landscape. I did notice at the time that the female had a very orange bill. I even thought about saying out loud, ‘how much orange does it need to be Barrow’s?’ Seems funny now…

…A couple of emails later and it seems further images are required.

The sun went in at Steggal’s and a flurry of snow came down, whilst pretty much nothing was on show. Back at the visitor centre 4 Redpolls on the feeders were thankfully as obviously lesser as it is possible to be, whilst a Sparrowhawk came in low, hard and failed to catch anything at all.

02/01/10
Another late start saw dad and I arriving at Welney for mid-day. Just in time to see the swan feed, where wildfowl loose their dignity in the melee for free food. The light was atrocious and Welney was subarctic, with a frozen wind blowing straight through the hide. I had lost my gloves and was experiencing something akin to frost bite whilst operating the camera…

…the rest of the reserve was flooded and frozen. With several hours of daylight left, we tried for the Coveney Rough-leg. On the way was this flock of wild swans by Pymoor, containing both Whooper and Bewick’s. The presence of two hunters meant they were skittish and as soon as they entered the field the birds were off.

To anyone raised on a diet of parklife-Mute Swans, Whoopers, Bewick's/Arctic/Wild Swans are truly special birds.
At Coveney a distant flock of swans were heard, whilst a Common Buzzard at several miles stretched the combined abilities of my eye, 60X scope zoom and lack of light. We had to leave before the bird showed again; a Barn Owl was scant compensation.

1 Day in...

2010-01-02T18:57:00.004Z

...and already I'm kicking off with the weird looking ducks. This one from Bess's hide at Lackford Lakes...

...more on this later. Perhaps.
Edit: Or just have a read of this http://www.birdskorea.org/Birds/Identification/ID_Notes/BK-ID-Barrows-Goldeneye.shtml
Key quote "orange billed Common Goldeneye are not uncommon in captive collections" a bit like Canvasback's with Pochard genes in them aren't irregular in captivity. Will the person with the aviary of dodgy ducks in west Suffolk, please invest in a new padlock, a set of rings and wing pinions?

2K9: A Lament

2009-12-30T10:26:00.011Z

Italics= national
Non-italics= personal

The great thing about being young is that the past two decades have flashed past in an inconsequential blur, allowing me to retrospectively cherry-pick the highlights from its cultural scrapheap. What I can take from 2009 is that the world’s governments failed us in Copenhagen, the world’s banks were still failing us economically and Andy Murray has failed to win anything. At all. Again. So in a year of unrelenting failure, has any of it been worth the effort? After all, nostalgia only remembers the rare…

Well no. Not really- “a vintage year for the hardcore rare perhaps, with Eastern Crowned Warbler, Tufted Puffin and a probable Black-bellied Storm Petrel in Britain whilst Cedar Waxwing, Red-billed Tropicbird and Northern Rough-winged Swallow graced Irish shores. All but the Eastern Crowned Warbler evaded the crowds, whilst only the quickest twitchers managed to unblock Blue-cheeked Bee-eater, Eye-browed Thrush, Eastern Bonelli’s Warbler and Oriental Pratincole…”

Personally the year has been a tad bit disappointing. Characterised, but by no means defined by birdless autumnal days on the Suffolk coast in good winds, everything has felt at a premium, with only 2 Pied Flies, 1 Common Redstart, 1 Firecrest and a handful of Whinchats. This is the second autumn on the trot that I’ve felt short-changed by, although 2008 had inclement weather for its excuse…

“The year kicked off well for gulls with the first available Glaucous-winged Gull for the masses at the newly opened RSPB reserve at Saltholme and a brief adult Ivory Gull on North Uist. Carrying on the Larid theme into February was an American Herring Gull turning up in east Devon and Ivory Gulls in France and County Cork in early March whilst a Pacific Diver moulting into summer plumage was reported from the Llys-y-fran reservoir in Wales, where one had wintered for the previous two years. Not only did things go from cold to lukewarm in March, they briefly became white hot when a Siberian Thrush was taken into care at Glandford in North Norfolk, released and not seen subsequently. Consequently the Internet rumour mill span into hyperactive action with all sorts of conspiracy theories involving damage to the primaries and an escaped bird in Kettering that had had its ring cut off. Personally I believe it could well have be a wild bird…”

Freed from the shackles of year-listing January passed relatively free from the constant, ‘have I seen a Treecreeper’ induced worrying/paranoia. This paranoia was slightly strange, in that it was entirely self-inflicted- only I could see the Excel spreadsheet of shame that was my year list and laugh at myself. So with the idea of a fresh start and my mental health at risk, I cut out the year list and chilled out over birds. Except for Barn Owls. I hadn’t stumbled into one after 17 days, so actively went driving around east Suffolk for one…
Rainham Marshes, that wasteland of East London, previously famous for chavs, burnt out cars and Water Pipits, is now under RSPB ownership and feels relatively safe- you can leave your Kevlar jackets at the visitor centre. Its fame is now for Penduline Tits and Serins, birds that were previously tricky to catch up with that have discovered an unusual penchant for this scrap of reeds and scrub in East London. So in the shadow of the industrialised Thames estuary (making the Humber seem pleasant by comparison) I unblocked the reddish backed, bandit masked tit of curious breeding biology. Rock and Water Pipits were some consolation for missing out on Serin: a bird I’d rather see in its warmer climes anyway…

There are two ways of looking at the rest of January: 30 follow up days of cold mediocrity or a successful scratching out of the rest of the scarce, which was quite scarce on the ground this winter. Smew, Twite, Bewick’s Swan and Purple Sandpiper were all successfully under the belt by the months end. But this would be to ignore dipping an Iceland Gull by a rat infested park lake in Lowestoft, Green-winged Teal at Minsmere and being several minutes too late to jam in on a flyover Great-white Egret.

Mid-February signifies the first of the birding doldrums. No new birds have arrived since November and the repetitive nature of winter birding can end up crushing spirit and enthusiasm wasting away… To this there is only one cure- Cornwall. County birding in England can be repetitive at the best of times, with little groundbreaking work left to be done, yet Cornwall is the heady mix of sea-birds, wintering rarities, passerines, migrants and wilderness. And it doesn’t get much better then a Snowy Owl, lazily perched on top of Amalveor Downs, a white dot shining in the winter sunshine. I never expected to see a Snowy Owl, let alone in England…
Iceland and Glaucous Gulls, Black Redstart, Siberian Chiffchaff, copious Gannets, alcids, divers and with Cirl Bunting and Cattle Egret in Devon on the way down it was 4 days of the most fun I’ve had birding since the Scottish highlands… It was also the only birding I managed to do in February, which is poor of me.

March is a month often stigmatized as the worst month for rare birds. Which is true, the coast lacks inbound migrants and wintering birds start to desert these shores. But then, the slumbering giant and second best kept secret of East Anglia- the Breckland explodes into a life of suppression and secrets. It isn’t selfish suppression, sites are very sensitive and the birds are rare and sparsely populated. Lesser-spotted Woodpeckers are particularly sensitive so I was quite disheartened to see a twitch style crowd at the now unfortunately well known site for them. Running after drumming birds is bad.
Goose and Red-tailed Hawks were also seen; I managed to record Crossbill on my phone and I failed at Golden Pheasant again. So in most respects a typical March, quality over quantity at the cost of a lot of effort. Except for the end. Everybody hates Aythya hybrids. I particularly dislike my contribution to the controversy in March. Self-found at Lackford...

The pale patch at the end of the bill is the very faint sign of hybridization and thus almost certain captive origin, despite being unringed and fully winged. It’s the same bird as seen last autumn at Nosterfield in Yorkshire, which was submitted to the BBRC and rejected as Canvasback. Of interest it turned up in the same week as a Ferruginous Duck and another Aythya hybrid turned up at Loompit lake in south-east Suffolk.

“April carried on the controversy with the unearthing of a suppressed White-throated Sparrow in Hampshire and a wary Wood Duck on Shetland, with arguably the best credentials of a wild bird so far. 2009 was marked by the strange and surreal and if the Siberian Thrush in Norfolk was the first clue, then the flock of 11 Whiskered Terns that turned up on a gravel pit in Derbyshire was downright confirmation. The month ended in style with two ‘mega’, Crested Lark at Dungeness and a 1st summer male Collared Flycatcher at Portland. On the 1st of May, the penultimate day of the Collared Fly’s stay, a Bonelli’s Warbler was also unearthed at Portland, photographed, sound-recorded and confirmed as an Eastern Bonelli’s Warbler-, the fifth record for Britain. A Savi’s Warbler took up residency in a Hertfordshire reed bed, whilst a Collared Pratincole turned up at Cley and a Black-winged Pratincole arrived in Kent. Pratincoles had been in short supply over the recent years, so a dodgy looking Collared Pratincole seen only in flight over Pagham Harbour aroused interest, was photographed and retrospectively identified as an Oriental! The bird was seen once more at Dungeness, and wasn’t relocated again, whereas the Black-winged Pratincole moved to Norfolk and the Collared Pratincole took in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. After a report of a Brown-headed Cowbird from Weybourne in Norfolk, one was found and stayed for 3 days on Fair Isle, whilst photographs were taken of birds in gardens in Northumberland and Pembrokeshire. An elusive Squacco Heron on the Suffolk coast relocated to Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire were it proved anything but elusive. A Black Duck in Cornwall was much less exciting then June’s other big rarities, a Little Bittern in Somerset, a Black-eared Wheatear that spent 2 days on Scilly and at the end of June, an Eastern Olivaceous Warbler turned up in a Fair Isle mistnet.”

Collared Flycatcher twitch- Portland ©Joe Ray

Picture the scene- you’ve just made the walk from Felixstowe station to Landguard point. It is hot, long and quite unpleasant, birders are scattered across the common, wandering aimlessly and not grilling a lovely Hoopoe cavorting at the end of their lenses. It hasn’t been seen since mid-morning, you’re jaded from the walk and heat and concentration slips and you drift back to sea-watching in south Dorset… A visual bang wrenches you back into reality. Up, just feet away, a flash of pink, black and white stripes materialises in front of you and then shoots off, just skimming the top of a bush. 3 second views allows the brain to fill in the gaps- Hoopoe, flushed, me, bush. A moments gawping, a minutes panic and over an hours nervous wait for it to reappear. It graces you with one more flypast, allowing 2 record shots before disappearing from British soil… And then try and imagine that as the only bird you see in April, a month that started off with a week on Portland (Manx Shearwater and the redpoll flock of nightmares) and ended up at Shingle Street (one of those dips that leaves you mentally broken, battered and bloody.) April played me for a fool and mostly it won.

Stung by the twitch from hell, I retreated to bleakness for the start of May. A bit of wilderness therapy, get away from crowds, stress and impending exams. So true to form, 2009’s defining moment of surrealism occurred here when a sub-adult Golden Eagle drifted over.

Life gets better; I’m informed but reluctant to believe. There is nothing so strange, incongruent and indescribably mental as the vagrancy of Aquila eagles to the lowlands of Europe (see the case of the Cat. A Spanish Imperial Eagle in Holland). Whether it started off life in a cage or not, this was the moment that made the year bearable and fully confirmed my inability at finding an unequivocal rare bird...
May is also my favourite month. Spring rarities are nicer looking and more likely to turn up inland. This also gives me the chance to go for them after school, like the Wicken Squacco Heron, or the patch White-winged Black Tern that was taken in during study leave.

May- a month bracketed, punctuated and filled with amazing birds, that relegated Spoonbill and Monties to the also rans…

“Summer saw an obvious decrease in the amount of rare and interesting birds, with a reeling River Warbler at Applecross in the Scottish Highlands and both American and Pacific-golden Plovers in Norfolk. The biggest rarity in July was the discovery of a Blue-cheeked Bee-eater in Kent, after suppressed individuals in Hampshire and one photographed by a non-birder in Devon. The bird stayed only a few hours, frustrating most attempted twitches. Interest in Scotland was a Stilt Sandpiper at Loch of Strathberg and a few Two-barred Crossbills on Shetland.
August was quiet with only a Great-spotted Cuckoo in north-Norfolk of interest, but an Arctic Warbler on the 1st of September at Landguard, Suffolk kicked off the autumn in style.”

Golden Oriole crowd- Ssssh... ©Joe Ray

What birding gives in one month is then cruelly snatched away in the next three. Buff-breasted Sandpiper and Fudge Duck were the only decent birds seen in the drought months between June and August, whilst birds not seen included Quail and Nightjar, whilst birds rather not seen included the small grey stint sp at Cley…
Butterflies, and more precisely Painted Ladies are great. Small and bright they are often the only things worth looking at in summer and make a great distraction from dipping Great-spotted Cuckoo’s, which just happens to be a dream bird and just happened to give itself up to the unblocking masses whilst I was on holiday in the Lake District…

“A near adult Pallid Harrier was found midweek in Cambridgeshire, whilst Glossy Ibises started to irrupt in big numbers. The first American mega of the autumn was an extremely early Blackburnian Warbler on St Kilda, keeping up the species record with short stays on inaccessible islands. A Red-billed Tropicbird off the Irish coast was the first sign of unusual sea-bird activity, whilst a Black-browed Albatross was amazingly twitched off the cost of Scilly. These signs that something was up with rare maritime birds provided no amount of forewarning for what happened on the 16th of September, when an adult summer Tufted Puffin, a pacific alcid materialised in the Swale Estuary from Oare Marshes. At the other end of Britain, a Sandhill Crane pitched up on Orkney and was both mass-twitched and tracked through the Scottish highlands, whilst both a Yellow-billed Cuckoo and an Eyebrowed Thrush on Orkney managed to avoid the crowds. An Upland Sandpiper was also found by returning Sandhill Crane twitchers in the Scottish highlands. Two Steppe Grey Shrikes turned up, one in Nottingham and the other on the Isles of Scilly. A long-staying Taiga Flycatcher was found on Shetland and provided reliable entertainment in between Veeries and Pechora Pipits, whilst a Zitting Cisticola* that had spent most of the year hiding in Kent, was finally pinned down at Pegwell Bay for a reasonable amount of time. Mid-October produced another Irish first, this time a Cedar Waxwing on the Inishbofin Island, county Galway. More unexpected was a Brown Shrike at Staines, Surrey, even less expected was its eventual 68 day stay…

Brown Shrike Twitch- Staines Moor ©Joe Ray
As Red-flanked Bluetails performed their now annual invasion on the east coast, it was inevitable that an eastern mega would arrive. Such as the Eastern Crowned Warbler that arrived in South Shields, also identified from photos. It stayed for two more days and was widely twitched.
3 Pied Wheatears turned up along the east coast, in Norfolk, Suffolk and Fife, whilst a Common Nighthawk was taken into care in County Kerry and released again and a Mourning Dove was seen briefly in county Cork. A Greenish Warbler on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall courted controversy as to its true ID, Green Warbler only being firmly ruled out on call.“

Citrine Wagtail(!)- Isles of Scilly ©Joe Ray
And inexorably the year arrives at autumn again. The season when birds go mad and fly several thousands of miles to spend two days in a bush on a bleak beach somewhere on the east coast. Except that didn’t happen this year, there were just no birds. It took a trip west, to Cornwall and Chew Valley Lake to produced Long-billed Dowitcher (dull), Fudge Duck (2nd of the year) and Woodchat Shrike (lifer, but an ugly juvenile) whilst Minsmere had the last laugh with my only east coast BB rare of the autumn- Red-flanked Bluetail. The Cambridgeshire Pallid Harrier turned up during the first full week of school, when the evenings were just too short to take the trip which was severely galling…
There is one postscript to the autumn though. The Eastern Crowned Warbler in South Shields turned up in the week that I had Swine flu. I’m glad it was in South Shields, if it happened to be any further south then Spurn, I would truly know the definition of sufferance…

“November saw the rush of autumn slow down, but didn’t see an end to the rarities as Pacific Diver once again turned up in West Cornwall as did a probable Taiga Flycatcher, whilst a Crested Lark went suppressed in Wiltshire of all the bizarre places for the second Crested Lark of the year to turn up at. Prior to this year there had been 19 records, with the last at Landguard in Suffolk, seen twice a week apart in October 1996.
November saw a wreck of Leach’s Petrels of biblical proportions with 600 reported one day from Portland harbour, bill and Chesil Beach. Such a wreck brought with it some tantalising other sea birds, such as a dark-rumped, probable Swinhoe’s Storm Petrel off St Ives and a fregatta petrel sp, probably Black-bellied off Severn Beach in Gloucestershire. And December petered out with no lingering or wintering rarities…

The year saw a change in guard out to sea, with nine claims of Yelkouan Shearwater and only seven of Little Shearwater, whilst an astonishing 10 Eleonora’s Falcon were reported- a run of 8 from various locations in Kent and Essex of a variety of ages and colour morphs. Much to the regret of many they were never pinned down or photographed and nothing more has been heard about them. The thing is though, the majority of those rarities have been mid-week and/or on islands and it’s the scarce and the migrants that keeps the year (and the lists) ticking over. Thus the year will perhaps be remembered as much for the total dearth of Pallas’s Warblers (24 this year as opposed to 67 in 2008 (admittedly a third less isn’t a dearth, but it’s what it felt like!)) and for the utterly bizarre Tufted Puffin on the Swale estuary. If it wasn’t for those three gripping pictures, who would’ve believe the observers?”

*Fan-tailed Warbler is both boring and scientifically inaccurate.
(*Numbers are taken by searching the BirdGuides sightings page*)

As winter rolled around again, it brought more snow (as common as Glossy ibis’s this year), Shorelarks (amazing birds) and some Great Northern Divers. A whimper not a bang and not what I’d hoped for, especially in a yea without a single mega for me.

2010 offers exams looming like icebergs. I know they’re A Levels, I know every year they get even more unfailable then the last, but icebergs sunk the titanic and I dipped the Brown Shrike, so nothing for me is impossible. All forms of listing are still off, and the year shall be taken gently, except for a concerted effort to unblock Wood Warbler. Perhaps. But then the chances of me doing an acceptable amount of revision instead of birding are quite low…

2K9: A Celebration

2009-12-30T10:14:00.003Z

Bird of the Year

An arctic enigma that took a wrong turn at Newfoundland and ended up in Cornwall, an eastern-European duck on a windblown pit in Cambridgeshire, a Siberian chat in a Suffolk hedge or a southern heron on a warm fenland evening? The list goes on, and in-between the unremitting misery of the autumn, I have actually seen some good birds. But one bird sticks out in the mind as being so totally unexpected. And it wasn’t the eagle…
Despite the lack of birds, you can grow to love your patch. Gently it tricks you into thinking that the Osprey you had here last autumn will be the best bird you’ll ever see here…
The circumstances were mundane. Study leave, with two exams the next day and the urge to revise is lacking. It took one sentence to pitch me into panic and re-arrange my afternoon. White-winged Black Tern at Livermere lake! I’d been enviously eyeing up the 2nd summer adult at Staines res and now another (but different) 2nd summer had pitched up on my patch! Both parents at work, I had to endure an hour’s nervous wait for my grandma to pick me up…

Black Terns were all I could pick up on at the lake and I was getting desperate. Then, over the far side, a monochromatic tern drifts in amongst the messy Black Terns, casually lifting its wing on the upstroke to reveal the diagnostic black underwing coverts…
Not the rarest bird of the year, but definitely the most svelte and stunning. And not every bird made me wait and kept me interested for 2 hours before indulging me in a close flypast. It wasn’t quite perfection- the light was horrendous. But that just gives me another reason to twitch the next spring adult…
For me no other bird this year has been such a surprise, so good looking and at a very friendly twitch too.

Location of the Year
Initially the result of this seems a foregone conclusion. But that would be to ignore the strengths of other sites. It’s tough, really though to choose the criteria for what makes a location amazing instead of good. It needs to combine both birding history and geography with a sense of wildness that makes birding their pleasurable regardless of the birds. Not an easy combination. I refined the shortlist down to Orford Ness, Spurn, Portland, Nanquidno, most of the rest of Cornwall and Lackford Lakes/Livermere combined. (N.B. Note the lack of sites from Norfolk (!)) Orford Ness would win if this were a contest for sheer bleakness; 16km of shingle is hard to beat. It has the birds too, but it’s just not accommodating enough- great potential but the site will leave you broken, bloodied, bruised and in the need of a hug before you get to see them.
A bracken covered moorland valley. The sound of the rough sea reverberates and is amplified, bouncing off the granite cliffs. Gannets stream off shore in their dozens, gulls getting apoplectic about a Basking Shark and a Woodchat Shrike pops out of a bush to the consternation of Chaffinches. Mainland Cornwall, early October. Nanquidno to be precise. Not even drizzle and a howling westerly gale can quite hide the fact that this is birding with epic potential. All the elements are there, amazing habitat, bounteous cover, sheltered and yet right next to the Atlantic Ocean and a track record for producing migrants and mega rarities. It sounds perfect, but so does the rest of the Cornish coast. And like the rest of the Cornish coast it can feel that every 5 minutes the wilderness will be disturbed by a pack of dog walkers dressed in yellow. Elevating Nanquidno over the rest would be like choosing only one Zoothera thrush species to save from extinction, and therefore it looses out, by no fault of its own.
Lackford and Livermere is the wild card entry. They’re my patches so therefore they’re rubbish. But I love them and they’ve done well this year. Canvard hybrid and aforementioned WWBT were the undoubted highlights, with the best Barn Owls in Suffolk, Jack Snipe and frequent Green and Common Sandpipers on quick evening visits. It can be great, but all too frequently it can be a crushing disappointment of only mundane birds in good conditions. Which makes the sweetness of the patch WWBT even nicer but would make spending whole days in a row there maddeningly dull. It fails to reach its full potential and always bizarrely lacks any wrecked sea birds or divers, even when everywhere else has them. Ultimately it lacks the rare breeding birds or the excitement of a migrant trap to win. Unfortunately.
To say Spurn is good is an understatement. Spurn is immense; Spurn is mind blowing, Spurn wrote the rulebook on mainland migrant traps and then broke it. But can I really only be present at a site for a few hours to call it location of the year? It was a tough decision, birding the very tip just felt like one huge adventure, a sense of which is lost in modern birding. Every twitch of branch, flash of tail, small brown bird flying deep into Sea Buckthorn should be a mega. It feels like a crime that every time they turned out to be just Robins, Dunnocks or Wrens. Hype is a terrible thing and the disappointment that it is “only a lesser ’throat” is criminal. It skews expectation just enough to come a close second.
Which leaves Portland. I was shocked the first time I saw it, through a car window in Weymouth. I hadn’t done my homework and I was expecting a small, flat and gentle island. I wasn’t expecting this geologically complex lump, stuck out into the English channel. And I definitely wasn’t expecting the numbers of Manx Shearwater progressively moving through Lyme Bay and the wintering Short-eared Owls that provided me with the best views I’ve ever had of them. Although the expectation of migrants is there and with its history of Hippolais warblers and other dizzyingly rare birds, there is less hype then there is at Spurn and it has less patches of dense cover which although it makes the birding less exciting, it means that it can be more enjoyable, less stressed and with less of an obligation that every bird must be a mega. It’s close to Radipole and Lodmoor reserves as well if the birding is quiet, and staying at the observatory is also a very friendly and social experience. And if the birding is really quiet then you can always delve into the history books and vicariously bird the famous falls of the past, or attempt to understand the geology of it.
Portland is the undisputed highlight of Dorset and not too far south west to require several days to get anywhere and is one of the best places that I’ve ever had the pleasure to go birding.

Portland Cliffs ©Joe Stockwell

Moment of the year
Have I mentioned this?

‘nuff said.

Dip of the year
The Brown Shrike is a very bitter memory, but the writing was on the wall with all the snow. No, for a dip of the year it needs to be more epic and stressful, preferably with the bird still to be present on site…
This narrows it down to two, the nightmare of the Purple Heron at Shingle Street or Quail. The fact that we saw a group of people all looking at the Purple Heron as we left was particularly painful, as was the massive walk. But at least there was a walk. No, the most epic dip of the year also involves a conundrum about listing. Do I tick heard only? No. Was I tempted to after spending 5 hours standing by a road, listening but never seeing three calling Quail in a field near Baldock? Yes.
I even have the sonograms as proof. The supporting cast was a tailless Corn Bunting, a few Yellow Wagtails and a Large Skipper. It is also the closest I’ve ever been to insanity.

You've Been Shriked

2009-12-23T15:54:00.005Z

One of my talents, if you can call it that, is an unparalleled ability of failing spectacularly in the face of easy success. Consider this then, as you read on…

It had stayed for 68 days.
I imagine most keen birders and all twitchers have a sob story about Brown Shrikes. Mid-week Flamborough bird? Scilly red-backed-brown-red-backed? Lizard probable? Shetland possible?
Well salvation can comes from the oddest of places.
Staines Moor for example. In sunniest Surrey, this thin slice of riparian habitat wedged between the M25, the fenced off King George VI reservoir and Heathrow airport, is not exactly a pleasant place to spend time. Unless you happen to be the only pinned down, fully identified and twitchable Brown Shrike of the year (out of a possible 3). A 1-2 day stay mid-week on Shetland is the standard. 68 days on a tiny bog by the side of the M25 is an anomaly. Even for the original anti-twitcher/unlister this was too much, I was cracking under the pressure and lack of other avian distractions. So a plan was hatched to sneak in a quick twitch before performing Christmas related duties to the cluster of relatives dotted around the M25…

In the mid-morning sunshine it was a balmy 2°. It wasn’t even that snowy. A flash of brown from a bramble bush is excitedly chased up- to reveal a red breast. Along the river Colne a walker flushed a Snipe, whilst a Parakeet flew past. 2 Stonechats forage along the far bank whilst a Wren periodically emerges from the reeded shallows with an explosion of tuneless calls.

But that was it. Everything brown, everything perched on an exposed branch, everything flitting into deep cover was chased up, to reveal a red breast. Nothing was remotely shrike like.

68 days and it moved on or died with the cold snap. I was a day, perhaps two too late and thus earn the distinction of being one of three people who dipped the longest staying Brown Shrike ever.

In conclusion then...
1- it clearly came from the same cage as the Wraysbury Red-backed Thrush which bearing in mind that Wraysbury is the other side of the M25 from Staines Moor…
2- Rare shrikes are no longer rare. An asinine slogan you may think, and I agree. It is. But let me explain, because I can’t think of a better way to put it. Shrikes are not regular in Britain, most birders lack thorough experience. I myself am guilty of not grilling juvenile Red-backed hard enough in the past. But the two birds in the autumn of 2008 and especially the high profile St Mary’s 1st winter Red-backed Shrike debacle, has crystallized the necessary ID features, allowing the probable and possible of this autumn to come to light. It’s not just Brown Shrike though, the same thing has happened with Steppe Grey Shrike- last autumns long staying individual leading to increased awareness of the ID features- contributing to the finding of two birds this autumn? One in Nottinghamshire as well, another bizarre inland location for a mega shrike to turn up at.
So clearly Loggerhead Shrike and Desert Grey are the ones to watch out for in 2010. You heard it here first.

Gratuitous Snow Pictures

2009-12-22T14:48:00.006Z

If Shackleton was alive and English he would’ve have rolled out of bed on Friday, had a look outside and thought, ‘Nah, I won’t send the kids to school today.’ The likelihood of this happening is equal to the likelihood of my school being cancelled. So whilst people were throwing snowballs, I was enduring school in fantastic weather for photography. Nevertheless I did manage to get a few landscapes…

(As it was coming down at 11pm)
>

And a few birds now it’s the holidays.

Border Birding

2009-12-22T14:16:00.002Z

Suffolk has pathetic rivers and massive estuaries. That’s quite easy to get your head around, what is slightly harder is the expanse of prime estuarine mud (a cubic metre of which, has the same calorific content as 14 mars bars, allegedly) and wide tidal river that goes apparently birdless for 10 months of the year, before exploding into action in December and January. The Stour estuary is a typical example, waking up from its hibernation to the realization of divers, sea-ducks, scarce grebe’s and other such birds that can be a bit tricky to see.

Ringing the changes, I choose Wrabness on the Essex side of the river, on the grounds of better light and less mud, congregating the waders (of which there are more) closer in.

The sky was heavy with the threat of impending rain. The mud reflected the sky in its chosen study of monochrome, whilst ribbon like flocks of Dunlin milled across it’s surface. Brent Geese and Widgeon, Grey, Golden and Ringed Plover comprised the majority of the birds feeding along the tide line whilst Oystercatchers and Redshanks were omnipresent and noisy with it. I look back across the seawall and see a large flock of Fieldfare come clattering into the hawthorn scrub of Wrabness nature reserve. Turning round was a lucky move as a Sparrowhawk shoots out of the scrub, flips low over the seawall and goes in- low, hard and fast. Skimming the top of the salt marsh it flushes Redshanks in every direction. A small male, blue back and fiery orange barring on the breast, it performs an extraordinary fly-past. Quick as lightening, flying merely inches from the estuarine mud floor and yet it fails to catch anything. With the speed it appeared, it disappears again in a flash over the horizon.

It starts to rain so we shuffle off the seawall and down to the estuarine mud and walk along to Copperas bay. What the Stour excels at is having an armada of Great-crested Grebes in which to loose more interesting looking sea-ducks. Scanning eventually manages to pull out a flock of 8 Red-breasted Mergansers, 3 drakes and 5 ducks. They only compete with the grebes for the award of ‘most pre-historic looking’. Today was turning out to be a classic morning of estuarine birding, a textbook brought to life. All that remained left was a diver. It’s not certain each year as to what species of diver will end up down a Suffolk estuary, but this year it was a given. Great Northern Divers are having a bumper season for inland birds, they seem to be present on every reservoir or estuary. A marina signalled the end of the walk so I give it one last grill for a diver. Swinging the scope around, between buoys and boats, a shape surfaces from the waves.
Diver.
Great-northern-hulking-beast.
Get dad on it.
He ably grills it through the scope, as it surfaces between two buoys. Having not fully learnt the wet mud and cool shoes lesson from earlier I sneak down to the shoreline and attempt a few record shots.

Mostly rubbish, unlike the bird.

We trudge back over the many varities of estuarine mud, where I learnt a valuable lesson. Black mud is not to be trusted. Look! It ruined my shoes…

But we were compensated in the form of this rainbow.

We finished the Afternoon up at Alton Water with only a self-found female Scaup of interest, although this fungus gave opportunity to test out the OS on my lens at 1/30th, with ISO 1000 at 135mm. If anybody knows their fungal ID, I would appreciate knowing what it is!