Scilly Pelagics Part 1

When Rob floated the idea of going down to the Scillies for the annual late summer birders pelagics I was in two minds. My only prior experience of a true pelagic trip was (I think) the last ever pelagic trip the Scillonian III did. It never featured here as it was in August 2008, before this blog existed. I remember being violently ill for most of the day in a force 7 gale, sleeping quite a lot, and not being able to get on the one and only Wilson’s Storm-Petrel that appeared in the slick briefly. Not that great! Wilson’s Storm-Petrel has remained a gap on my list ever since. They are seen from land more these days, a function of more birds in our region, but my days of driving down to Porthgwarra on the strength of a good forecast are long behind me. So when Rob mentioned he was thinking about it I really wanted to go and really didn’t want to go. As you will have guessed by now hope triumphed over experience.

I booked the tickets, £350 for four trips on consecutive days. Two full days and two half days. Expensive as a single outlay, but also on a per hour basis pretty decent. That of course was before I’d added on petrol to Cornwall and back, a night in the Premier Inn at Bodmin ahead of the crossing, the Scillonian to get over there (a foot passenger return was £240 or thereabouts!!), and four nights on St Mary’s. This latter expense is even more ludicrous than the ferry, so egregious that the only option that felt even remotely realistic was camping on the Garrison. I suppose people must pay it, but self-catering accommodation or bed and breakfast on the Scillies is simply outrageous. It shouldn’t be allowed, no wonder people eschew holidays in the UK. I didn’t really notice it adding up as it was a series of disparate expenses paid at different times, but later it dawned on me that I’d spent £1000 before even a sip of beer at The Atlantic had passed my lips. And this was camping! Jeez.

However I cannot deny that it was very pleasant, a simply lovely place, magical even. Then again think what else you could do with a grand, where you could go (pretty much anywhere), and that is what for me puts it into perspective. Anyway it is done now, a sunk cost, water under the Sapphire's hull. But that Wilson’s Petrel is by far and away my most expensive tick ever.

Porthgwarra from the Scillonian

We left on a Thursday night after work, Rob patiently waiting for me to finish when he could have left much earlier. We broke the journey in Bristol in order to do a bit of colouring-in and arrived in Bodmin close to midnight, the last guests to check-in to what was a completely full hotel. Clearly not everyone is that sensitive to price. Or maybe it’s that there are no options and you have to suck it up? I slept for what felt like a millisecond and was up early for the short hop down to Penzance, enough time to pop into the Hayle to get the trip list off to a start. Then to the park and ride to dump the car before getting down to the harbour. And there she was, the Scillonian III, an old rust bucket in her last season before she retires and the Vietnamese-built Scillonian IV takes her place. The new boat will shaves an hour off the crossing apparently – not sure this fully appeals to birders who view the trip as integral part of the experience.

The Scillonian III docked at St Mary's

Hugh Town Bay

We left our luggage near the Garrison crate; we would not need to pick it up, it would get taken straight to the camp site. An excellent service but remember you can fly to anywhere in Europe for less! It was a lovely day, and although we had both taken our motion sickness pills they were probably not going to be needed. All in the mind anyway. Picking a spot on deck we settled down to what we hoped would be a legendary crossing in terms of rarities. Ha! As if. Nothing of note, too calm, too sunny, a few rafts of Manx Shearwater and some point and some Med Gulls near Penzance. Indeed this was the forecast for the entire weekend. Hopefully Bob Flood and the crew of the Sapphire would be able to pull something out of the bag despite these conditions, especially, I hoped, small Petrels with dangly legs. Mega seabirds from southern oceans were probably off the cards but you don’t know until you try!

We arrived on St Mary’s at the ideal time for lunch. The Mermaid is closed, possibly permanently, after a winter storm earlier this year flooded it so instead we went to the Atlantic. I don’t know if Stugeron is supposed to be taken with Proper Job but I tried it anyway as the water looked like a mill pond. The pub was doing a roaring trade but there was plenty of room. After a nice little lunch we did some shopping for provisions at the Co-Op and then walked up the Garrison. We had booked a pre-pitched tent will full amenities rather than taking our own. This was double the price, but still a fraction of bricks and mortar accommodation. An enormous tent with three sleeping “rooms” with inflatable mattresses, a big “living room”, and a porch which contained a stove. We also had a table, chairs, a picnic bench, a cool box that we could replenish with icepack from the freezer at reception, and our own Song Thrush. Into this went the four bottles of wine I had judiciously brought with me. Meursault, Cote-Rotie, Bourgogne Rouge and a Macon. I also brought two proper wine glasses, there is nothing worse than drinking wine out of a plastic beaker. If we were going to camp we were going to do it in style.

At about four-ish on Friday afternoon we sauntered down to the harbour. The MV Sapphire was waiting at the side, and a few birders were assembled, one in camo which I thought was quite endearing. Turns out this guy was Richard Stonier, a quasi-member of the team these days. Somehow stayed upright the whole trip with bins glued to his face with one hand and calling out birds, whilst methodically chucking chunks of bread into the wake with the other. His third hand dealt with a slow drip of some vile chemical that was essentially dynamite for tube-noses. Just as we were required to hand over our tickets Rob amusingly dropped his in the harbour. I took a photo of it as it floated away just in case this would mean the difference between Rob getting on the boat or sitting despondent on the quay as I sailed off, but luckily this was not strictly necessary as they had our names.

We headed out of the harbour and sailed around St Mary's to the waters to the east of the island. Once in position the skipper, Joe Pender, cut the engine and dumped a horrible basket of decomposed fish overboard. We then drifted away from the slick this created and watched the birds come in. Occasionally the engine was restarted to take us back up the now lengthy slick and closer to the birds. It took no time at all for a Wilson's Petrel to come in, it might even have been the first bird to do so. The oil forms a much calmer patch of water with barely a ripple, and the Storm-Petrels linger above it, skitting back and forth, up and down, dipping constantly as some disgusting morsel presents itself. Obviously it's helpful having one of the world's foremost seabird experts in the form of Bob Flood standing at the wheelhouse calling the birds as they come in, but the Wilson's are actually easy once you get your eye in. I think we had five of these and only two European Storm-Petrels on this particular outing, but the views were incredibly good as the birds passed the boat at close range. Photography was extremely hard - the autofocus on my little Sony box of tricks is impressive but wasn't fully up to the task. Or maybe that was me. Certainly Joe had no issues stood on the prow with a huge prime papping away - my issue was that if I let go of the side I tended to lurch somewhat - the sea was incredibly calm but a small boat sideways to the current nonetheless bounces around quite a bit. I did OK I felt, but having now had a play with my new A9ii how I wish I had purchased it earlier in the summer as I suspect my hit rate would have been significantly higher. No matter though, I was there to see the birds, and so nearly 18 years after I'd missed my one and only chance of Wilson's Petrel, I finally added it to my UK (and World as it happens) list, #462. Back in 2008 European Storm-Petrel had been #258. I've done a lot of birding between then and now, but this bird has always held a special place in my list of misses - it gets commoner every year seemingly yet I'd never really bothered with it, I guess I wasn't especially attracted by seeing a small distant speck from Pendeen or wherever. And I'm glad I hadn't, this was the way to see this bird. We also saw a Fin Whale on this trip and plenty of Short-beaked Common Dolphin. We returned to St Mary's elated, and at nearly 10pm returned to the Garrison to cook up a feast and demolish a bottle of Burgundy.

Manx Shearwater

Manx Shearwater

Wilson's Storm-Petrel

Wilson's Storm-Petrel

Wilson's Storm-Petrel

Fulmar

Wilson's Storm-Petrel

The next morning, Saturday, we were up early as always happens when camping. I am not a natural camper, but this had been reasonably comfortable and easy, as frankly it needed to be for £40 a night each! We noted a few birds around the tent including our remarkably friendly Song Thrush and a Blackbird that was only a little more reticent. Then it was down to the harbour again for our second pelagic, this time an all day affair. Joining the crew as before was Lily the Spaniel, on a constant circuit for food, or for Dolphins to make friends with. And also Higgo, that stalwart of all things Scilly. He had been on the Scillonian III pelagic in 2008, right at the back shovelling the chum with a huge grin on his face and he didn't seem to have changed very much at all. This time we headed south, once again in flat calm conditions, conditions in which seabirds that rely on wind to majestically transit the oceans simply sit on it instead. Yay! 

Collared Dove

There isn't much to tell, nearly seven hours at sea to the area known as Pol Bank picked up all the expected birds but numbers were very low - two Great Shearwater, two Cory's Shearwater - both sitting on the sea in rafts of Manx Shearwaters. There were five Sooty Shearwater along the way, and this time we had eight Wilson's and five Euro Stormies. I know that some reading this may think this sounds like a monster haul, five UK ticks in the space of a few hours perhaps, but given the counts I had seen from prior Sapphire trips this was actually slim pickings. Sorry if that sounds like ungrateful moaning! However it was also just a very nice day out. Many of these birds I had never had such good views of and it was great to be in out on the water in shirt sleeves. Sooty Shearwater in particular I find remarkable, the distances it travels versus where it breeds, it is incredible that we see it here. I suppose you can say the same about Arctic Tern. When you see a bird like this Canary Wharf feels very far away. Back on land Rob and I did a circuit of Lower Moors to try and build up the list a little bit, and ended up at Porth Hellick for an obliging Wood Sandpiper. The last bird I had seen at Lower Moors was a Black-and-White Warbler, back in 2011...

Shag

Lesser Black-backed Gull

Cory's Shearwater - the only pic I got

Great Shearwater

Sooty Shearwater

Lower Moors

Wood Sandpiper, Porth Hellick Pool

Continues in Part 2...

Fingers vs brain

Here’s another thing I have noticed about writing. My fingers can’t keep up with my brain. I touch type, kind of. I’ve never been taught to type but over the years I’ve developed a method that works. I suspect many people have. I’ve never really thought about it until now, as I type this. It seems my right hand – well, the thumb and the first two fingers – cover the entire keyboard right of the letter “T”, whereas the left hand is only responsible for letters to the left of the “T”, and really only involves the first two fingers. The only thing my right thumb seems to do is the space bar, the third finger of my left hand seems to be responsible for the shift key to get a capital letter, the fourth finger of my right hand seems to do nothing at all, I hold it curled in, and neither pinky finger does anything either. Backspace is covered by the third finger on my right hand, which being the longest can stretch that little bit further. Effectively I’m using four fingers and one thumb all the time, and occasionally another finger gets a look in. But sometimes, when my right hand is more concentrated on letters towards the right, “P” and “O” for instance, then I’ve noticed that the index finger of my left hand suddenly becomes responsible for the letter “T”. It is fascinating, there are probably studies and studies on it. I have never measured my speed and in any event, fascinating though it might well be, in my considered opinion this paragraph has now become incredibly boring. Wish I’d never started it. Plus it might be that I am squeezed into an airline seat and my elbows are in an unnatural position which might be altering how I type. I’ll let you know on that one later, once I’m sat at a desk.

This is not what I meant to write at all. What I meant to explore was that I regularly find that miss out words when I am typing. I do it at work in emails and I do it here too. Whenever I reread something I have written there is a better than even chance that I will discover that I have simply missed out a word. I hope I am not going senile. I like to think of it as my brain being simply too active and my fingers cannot keep up, which I why I went down a typing rabbit hole just then. But I also catch myself simply writing the wrong word. Generally these are words that sound like each other – write and right, think and thing, site and sight, things like that. Funnily enough it is rarely their vs there or ones like that, the classic ones that people get wrong simply because they don’t understand that there is actually a difference in the first place. His instead of he’s is one I see frequently, another example of the collision of phonetics and ignorance. I am not immune to it of course, nobody is. There was one in the last post which I spotted and corrected before I published it but I can’t now remember what is was other than it prompted me to write a note about it. It could have been work vs walk or something along those lines. All I know is that as I type I am speaking to myself in my head, composing a sentence slightly ahead of typing it, and I suppose I lose track. This whole speaking in your head constant inner monologue thing, when you actually stop and consider it, is incredibly strange whilst also being the most natural thing in the world. I would love to have some kind of implant that just formed the words on the screen as I thought them, or spoke them to myself. I suppose that dictation machines combined with modern technology do exactly that, I have not explored it. Maybe this laptop has such a function, where I speak and it “types”? It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, but I am not sure I would be able to use it as I am forever going back on myself, starting again, picking up somewhere in the middle and refining (ha!) a sentence. For what it is worth I never use spell checkers either, whatever I type that is what goes in. I generally pick up mistakes as I type them, but I am often surprised at what does get through when I reread a post. I am also not sure to what extent the software auto-corrects my mistakes, and if in fact I make a lot more than in fact get through. As I test I deliberately misspelled “make” in the last sentence and sure enough it got sorted out without any intervention on my part. “Sotred” instead of “sorted” was left uncorrected though, I have no idea why, but along with the missing words this is the kind of thing that I find whilst rereading recent posts and end up going back in and sorting out when time allows.   

I suppose what might be sensible is leaving all posts in draft and doing the rereading before hitting publish but where’s the fun in that. Everyone gets to see my dumb mistakes, at least for a short period before I rewrite history. Future generations will not realise how inept I was.

Post-it notes for life

I’m sitting here wondering what to write. Somewhere on my desk back in London is a small yellow post-it note with an ongoing list of ideas I’ve had. Fun things, boring things, things I felt I might be able to string together more than a paragraph about. If ever I find myself on a desert island I need an inexhaustible supply of post-it notes. I use them at work too. Many senior people walk around with big diary-style notebooks; I am not one of them. I carry a small stack of post-it notes and a pencil. These form ongoing to-do lists just as they do at home. On them I write things I have to do that arise in meetings, things that I am going to get other people to do, questions I am going to ask people when I get back to my desk. The beauty is the size. It encourages brevity, it limits the amount of take-aways. No, sorry, can’t take on any more work, my post-it note is full. See? The best bit is like any to-do list. The end. When all things on it are crossed off it can be peeled off, scrumpled up, and thrown in the bin. A pristine sheet awaits. Endless possibilities.

This dates from 2016. I am on the road currently and this is the only example of the many thousands of post-it notes I appear to have ever photographed and saved down. I have no idea why. Perhaps it has featured before?

Anyway, my random scribbles are in London and I am on a plane, wondering what to write. This is how I was going to pass the time on a four hour flight to the Aegean. It is half term and Mrs L are off on another little jaunt, this time to Santorini, a place neither of us have ever been. It looks spectacular, even if the weather forecast is looking decidedly dodgy. Our room is one of those that looks out on the caldera, facing west. The sunsets are said to be magnificent however at this point it is questionable whether we will see the sun at all, let alone it setting. And this is why I have my laptop with me, in case we get stuck in our hotel room while a storm rages outside. I felt I might as well make some progress towards my annual blog total which is limping towards a hundred. I may or may not have mentioned this before but I get a sense of satisfaction from getting to three figures every year. I missed one year, didn’t realise until it was too late. It has annoyed me ever since.

Brazil helped a great deal, I got 11 posts out of it. Nice. As regular reader will be aware I write in fits and starts, as the mood takes me. A post every 3-4 days isn’t sustainable, I find it much easier to do nothing for weeks and then be dragged back to the keyboard by something akin to guilt. Actually it isn’t even that really, I don’t know what it is. I discovered long ago that there was no point fighting a reluctance to write. Just leave it, do something else, it will come back. It always does. Just as it is guaranteed to disappear again. A cycle of sorts, but one without a discernible rhythm.

Anyhow, with “par” at 3.65 I find myself at the end of October sitting just above 4. Earlier in the summer it wasn’t looking too good, closer to 4.5, but some semblance of coherence returned and now, with two months to run, I feel it’s recoverable. Twenty something posts are all that is needed. Doesn’t sound very much does it? All I need is a vein of form and I’ll be there in no time. And you, the poor reader, well you’re along for the ride wherever that may lead. Today it is about post-it notes, or at least that is how it started. Would you have predicted that?

I am sometimes surprised that I don’t get suggestions. Then again this is not YouTube, where every video no matter how short seems to contain multiple entreaties to “let me know in the comments below, if you enjoyed this video leave a like, and remember to subscribe to the channel for more content on X Y Z”. What is amazing is that this actually happens, screens and screens of it sometimes. I suppose that these are generally far more targeted, channels on specific topics that people care passionately about and are hugely invested in. That's not the case here, too varied, too unpredictable even though it isn't really. This must be something like the twentieth rehash of the "urge to write/why can't I write?" theme. Maybe if I stuck to birds? Hey, what?! I was trying to find something I'd written the other day and used a web search  - Google is actually far better at finding something specific than the search function within Blogger. When I googled whatever it was the little AI summary you get first up these days described Wansteadbirder as a travel blog.... Maybe these bots are more discerning that we think? Anyway, maybe if the scope were narrower. Then again I still think the issue is the length. Takes too long. What, five minutes? Ugh, I don't have that sort of time!! People think they're too busy. Only they're not. We have all just been conditioned over the last decade or so to have the attenion span of gnats. And then there's the format. Words on a page. Jeez, how antiquated. With videos the watcher can be getting along with something else at the same time. Multi-tasking whilst only half paying attention, an advantage (well, a disadvantage really) that the written word does not have. 

All that said I would likely ignore suggestions; I am very stubborn. What do I think about such and such? Who cares?! No no, I will just write about my various niche hobbies, just I have largely done for over fifteen years. Makes me happy, scratches some inner itch that I can’t explain. Words pour out, just like today in 12F. Paragraphs and paragraphs, the search for brevity goes on. The antithesis of the post-it note in many ways.

Les Français arrivent

I have been much cheered lately as I have started hearing french being spoken in Wanstead and Leytonstone. I first picked up on it some months ago, I cannot remember if I mentioned it, but I was on my way to work and a young mum pushing a pram with two older people I took to be her parents passed me going the other way on an early morning walk. They were speaking french.

About a month ago, again on the walk to work, I passed an open front door with goodbyes occuring on the front step. In french. On my street, in fact on the same side and just a few doors down. 

Earlier this week a couple passed me on bicycles, toddler in a bike seat, heading into Leytonstone. They too were speaking french as they pedalled along. I suppose that there is a chance that all three of these sightings could relate to just a single family as I have not been paying any attention to who these people actually are, my ears just prick up when I hear the language being spoken. But somehow I don't think so. Or I'd like not to think so. I would like to think that the French are moving in.

I spend a fair amount of time in North London and in Marylebone. They are not haunts per se, but other than Canary Wharf they're where I most often find myself when not in Wanstead. In these places French is de rigeur. See what I did there? What is notable about these places however is how nice they are. How nice the restaurants are, how posh the shops are, how beautifully people tend to be dressed. This is the French influence and I am a firm believer in Wanstead and Leytonstone needing some of this. 

The area has changed since I moved in. People are younger for instance, albeit that I am older. Maybe they're the same age as I was. But what I really mean is that it is becoming more upmarket, Wanstead particularly so. Houses are looking smarter, cars seem more expensive (particularly the Aston Martin on my street), posh coffee shops are appearing, everyone has a cargo bike and there are two M&S food halls. Were any more proof needed one of these replaced Matalan. There is a Gail's on Wanstead High Street of course, it replaced a bank I think, whether or not there was an anti-Gail's campaign I have no idea - we make our own sourdough (don't you know) so I have no skin in the game. And there is a Ginger Pig, where for stupendous amounts of money you can get pretty high quality meat and even a few bits of cheese. There's a bistro that's pretty decent, a posh deli too, an even posher greengrocer, and an independent chemist. On the other side of the coin there are a thousand betting shops, charity shops, a Pie & Mash shop of the kind that barely exists any longer, a vape shop, a couple of chippies, Boots, Sainsbury's, Tesco, Argos, Superdrug, Poundland, Iceland, and an unfathomable number of fried chicken establishments. 

Marylebone it is not, or at least not yet. But the entry of the French must surely mean that it is coming. French people can't survive without nice restaurants, bijou shops, bakeries and delis, whereas they can happily get by without fried chicken and shops specialising in frozen chips. Why are they here? I am guessing it is economics, that the people I am hearing have been priced out of north and west London. That or they heard that the birding was really good, though they wouldn't have heard that here of course. But whatever it is change is coming, I can feel it, and an upsurge in french accents is merely one small indicator. 

Frankly I am delighted. I really enjoy Marylebone and Islington, more than I enjoy Leytonstone and Wanstead. If where I live can move more in that direction I am all for it. There are those who will say that local people are being priced out, can't afford to live where they were born and raised. They are right I'm afraid, and my kids are in that same boat. The east end is being pushed east. It was ever thus I suspect, or at least that has been very much the case in recent times. Nothing you or I can do, gentrification is unstoppable. 

Wanstead 2030

There are some things of course that I don't enjoy about Marylebone. French people. Or more accurately, Parisiens. Ugh, they strut around like they own the place, all oppulence, £800 pairs of jeans, cashmere sweaters casually draped over their shoulders, living the high life, extraordinarily arrogant. More arrogant than me? Well.... Well probably actually. Mrs L and I encountered some of these people at the Bouchon Josephine last weekend. Two families with children in tow. Feral children. What was amazing was that for the entirety of the meal the children were completely ignored. When not glued to their phones they ran around the restaurant, they cried, they shouted, they whined, they moaned. Occasionally an adult would implore them to eat something - "Mais Hubert tu mange!" but by and large they were not paid the slightest attention. Meanwhile the adults conversed happily, glugged down carafes of wine and authentic bistro food, not the slightest bit concerned that at the other end of the table wars were breaking out. We wondered if they ever actually looked after their own children, and that maybe Sunday was the nanny's day off and hence they were stuck with them. This wouldn't happen in Italy. Ahh, Italy....

New Camera

Attention: nerdy gear post.

For the past two years I have existed in a state of heavy photographic compromise. Before I finally ditched my magnificent and very heavy Canon DSLR gear I had purchased the tiniest and most incredible high tech (or so it seemed to me at least, given the age of what I had been using) APS-C camera from Sony, the A6600. This packed a 24mp sensor and some 425 focus points into a ridiculously small body. Paired with a 16-70 f4 lens this became my travel kit of choice, it packed the same punch as the Canon 5D3 and the 24-105mm lens that had previously occupied this spot but this weighed exactly half (810g vs 1.62kg) and it could fit in my pocket. The autofocus seemed to be streets ahead of the venerable 1DX, and what's more it paired with my phone and I could edit images on the fly. I very quickly became a mirrorless convert.

My first mirrorless camera, the Sony A6600 with 16-70mm lens. It looks like a toy, it fact it is extrememly capable.

When I eventually dumped the Canon after a difficult trip to Mexico where for at least half of the time I could not face lugging it around in the heat I formed half a plan, and that plan was Sony's 200-600mm f5.6-f6.3 zoom. For the money this is an amazing piece of kit. It weighed a full kilogram less than the Canon 500 f4 lens with the 1.4x teleconverter attached and with the A6600 gave me 200mm more reach at the cost of 1/3rd a stop. Given a new RF Canon 600mm f4 (they seem not to produce a 500mm yet) costs upwards of £12,000 and the Sony is a shade over £1,500 it was an easy choice, especially as my engagement with bird photography has diminished in recent years. I still needed something but no way do I deserve  or need the best that money can buy, it would be wasted on me at the moment. Naturally I got rinsed selling my old gear, it was ever thus. I think I got back just 25% of what I paid but then again I used/abused that Canon 500mm for 13 years and I had got a huge amount out of it. It had travelled the globe with me, been through all kinds of weather, seen extreme heat, extreme cold, sand, snow, mud, salt spray, been soaked time and again, bashed, dropped, and generally treated extremely badly. As it was designed to be I might add. Then again the Sony stuff was so comparatively cheap that I may even have come out on top. I took the plunge on a decent second hand copy and so for the past two years I have been using a highly portable 300-900mm mirrorless set-up that cost less than two grand.

This is what I used to carry. Things have moved on! I have moved on! I reckon my scope could do with a downsize as well though.

I did not however buy a new camera at the same time, I figured I would stick with the A6600 and multipurpose. Anything I have posted over the last two years has been taken with this tiny camera; bird, person, city or landscape. It has outperformed my expectations several times over but it has also been highly frustrating, and deep down I know it is not as good as the Canon it replaced (and neither should it be really). I have got by but it has been a struggle at times. Principally this is because the camera is physically too small. This manifests itself in two ways. One, it is so miniscule that hand contortion is needed to operate it. Two, the footprint is such that it cannot fit all of the buttons and dials that it would ideally have, and as such many things are menu based, and as many of the buttons are dual purposed it becomes very easy to change the settings unintentionally. This is where it continually let me down. I would find that I had set bracketing accidentally, or that I had moved from continuous focus to single shot without actually doing anything. Or put it into a different mode, turned off AF or whatever. It also had no dial under my forefinger which every camera I have ever used has had. Coming to this camera with 20 years of Canon muscle memory has been very difficult even though I set it up to operate as much like the Canon as I could. The central dial was the real key. I set this up to manage exposure compensation, but it also - and unavoidably - had four other functions, and so any slight mis-press resulted in all sorts of things happening. I could operate my Canon 1DX and all of its predecessors in the dark without even looking at it; the Sony is far more complicated. And now that I need glasses to read the screen...

Recently I started looking at alternative bodies, of which Sony make many, as well as a fair few older interations. The A7iii was once high on my list, but the latest one is now the A7v, and there is also an A7R line too. All of these full frame ones seemed to address my main gripes by having separate controls dials for all of the things that I been accidentally changing. Two sub-lines stood out, the A1 and the A9 - the former is the all-singing all-dancing 50mp king of the hill. The most recent one is the A1ii, a mere £6k. Even the camera it replaced remains well over £2,000. No, I needed something more modest but that would still pack a punch. I've been deliberating for about two years, a serial waiter. In the time that I have been thinking about it the original A9 - marketed as their sports body - has halved in price. The latest one is now the A9iii but this is also rather unaffordable. Sitting in the middle of this, in all honestly closer to the original A9 than the latest one, is the A9ii. When I first started looking this was around £2,500. I remember thinking this was poor value as it didn't offer much over and above the A9. In the time that has elapsed though the prices have plummeted, and a recent search showed a few bodies on sale that were now cheaper than the A9s I had been considering in late 2024. 

Sony A9ii

A couple of weeks ago one popped up at what seemed to be new low and in excellent condition. I waited perhaps one day, contemplating, and then pulled the trigger. It arrived a few weeks ago and oh my goodness. I feel like I am back in the game. It is a 24mp, 20fps, 700 focus points beast. It has no mirrorless blackout and the autofocus system is powered by black magic. It weighs under half what my pro Canon bodies weighed. I can scarcely believe it. Other than the sensor which would be considered low resultion in 2026 this camera has zero compromises. To me this means nothing, I don't make prints and I don't sell images. Back in the day I took many photographs using an 8.2mp 1Dmk2n and they remain some of the best I have ever taken. In 2012, what I consider my peak, I was using a 1Dmk3 which had a 10mp sensor. Later the 1Dmk4, possibly my favourite camera ever (I still own it) had a 16mp sensor. They pale in comparison to modern day equipment but the images stand the test of time. 

Of course the true test is whether I can take a decent photo with it today, something I am yet to do. I'm backing myself but I need the right opportunity, something that is unlikely in Wanstead. I took it out maybe a month ago and didn't take a single shot, but I did test out tracking mode on a distant Swallow in flight. I made a deliberate effort not to precisely follow the bird, the AF however kept a focal point exactly on the bird as it moved around the frame. I have never seen anything like this. How I wish I had had this camera for the Storm Petrels on the Scilly pelagics, it would have made things so much easier. Anyhow, I feel enthused again, and will start taking the camera with me on walks and so on, or at least I hope I do. I expect it will only really be put through its paces abroad but you'll not be surprised to hear that there are a few trips on the horizon. 

All change

It's that time of year, for me the one where I get the most vivid sense of seasonal change. It was a glorious summer in many ways, waking up to wall to wall sunshine, days upon days of eating outside in the garden, grilled food and chilled wine, this is what life is about - even if you are tied to London. Hard on wildlife of course, hard on my plants, and absurd on what passes for grass in these parts, but I'll take it over the chilly and miserable washout that was 2024. The various heatwaves were at times unpleasant I'll admit, especially after we were on the fourth or fifth one and the novelty had rather worn off, but we survived. I'd rather be warm than cold.

But I was also in need of a change and late last week it finally arrived. A bit of a chill in the air, a bit of a breeze, some bite to the weather. I am prepared. Ready. I was able to delay the big plant redistribution for several weeks later than normal, but over the course of several stints these past two weekends I've mostly done what was needed. The usual, a big tidy up in the conservatory followed by bringing in a few of the more sensitive plants from the garden and the greenhouse. It's still not genuinely cold in any way so I reckon I can safely wait to put the outdoor succulents in the greenhouse for another couple of weeks based on the forecast. In any event it is really only cold snaps in January and February that really present any risk. I view it as a huge drag when the task is looming, but once I engage and get going I secretly really enjoy the work, deciding what goes where, what order to do things in, a multi-stage to-do list that is deeply satisfying. When I break the back of it is the sweet spot, looking at the changes I've made, the results of the work I've done, autumnal order replacing summer chaos.

My wardrobe changes too. Clothes I'd essentially forgotten I owned get rediscovered, sometimes with moths. Sometimes they still fit! I've broken out my brown wax jacket again, and pulled out a scarf I've yet to really require. It feels good. Woolly jumpers have not yet been needed, but I am looking forward to those too, like getting reacquainted with a long lost friend. I might even start wearing my hat, difficult though that is.

Our diet changes too. Salads and grilled food have started to be replaced with risottos and pasta dishes. Soup starts to feature again, a couple of weeks ago we had a fennel soup that was elevated to greatness by the addition of a glass of Jura chardonnay. We tried a new recipe from Tuscany, ribollita, essentially minestrone enhanced by stale bread - amazing! Last week we had Lapin a la moutarde, and this evening Woodpigeon. And as you can likely forsee the wine changes too. White Burgundy has taken a back seat, Rosé has vanished. Instead we are onto Piedmont reds and pinot noir from Burgundy. This evening I opened a moderately old Gevrey-Chambertin to go with the Woodpigeon salad and it was out of this world. The cork fell into a thousand crumbs, a nervous few minutes ensued, but the wine was divine and remained so all evening. I am excited by what is to come, what bottles I can now find excuses to open. And then of course the transition to winter that will require heartier fare, more robust wine. 

The birding is changing too. September was poor, the patch a dry, scorched shell. Birds didn't stop in any numbers, and various things I had been hoping for I never saw. A blank year for Tree Pipit and a few other things, I am going to be lucky to break 100 but I am fairly sanguine about it. We had a good morning last Saturday with over 1000 Redwings headed west. My first Fieldfare of the year too, having missed them in the eary part of the year. Brambling was a year tick too, small numbers amongst larger counts of Chaffinch and Linnet. Of rarities there have been none, I've been too busy to really go anywhere, and when diesel is close to £2 a litre you find excuses to stay at home and instead open a bottle of wine you paid for long ago. Scilly has looked extremely tasty, with two Sora, Wilson's Snipe and various other goodies, but it's too far and far too expensive. My trip there this summer for the Sapphire Pelagics has rather put me off UK holidays,  pleasant though it undoubtedly was my money can go a lot futher elsewhere. I still want to take Mrs L there, I think she would really like it. When we're retired and loaded perhaps? Oh wait...

European Storm Petrel, Scilly

So, all change. I needed it, my garden needed it, my bird list needed it. Lovely though it was I felt like I was in a rut, on a train I couldn't get off. By deliberately making myself busier outside of my professional life I feel re-energised in both when by all rights I should be exhausted. Now it seems as if there are far more possibilities, more options, more choices to be made. I like the thought of that.

Nearly caught up

I've nearly caught up. The Brazil trip was in the summer, I think I arrived back on 5th July. The report itself wasn't started until late September, and even with the helping hand of AI which I used to save me typing out bird and place names and put a togther summary paragraphs of eBird checklists in chronological order it has still taken me nearly a month to get it done. Of course I've had other things to do as well, an office job for instance, so it isn't as if I have been chained to my laptop, but still. Far longer than I would have thought.

Alternative header #1

I mentioned AI but in fact the process is much the same as it always was. Blogger on the right hand side of the screen, eBird on the left. Except this time I had a starting point. I downloaded my full eBird history as a csv file and then extracted the records pertaining to the Brazil dates. This results in one row per species; a checklist with 50 species will result in 50 rows. There were 56 checklists over the week and the resulting file had 1047 rows. Where each row sits is governed by a unique checklist ID, and one of the colums has a location, another a date, and another a time stamp. There is a load of other stuff but you can delete it all to make the file size much smaller. Then it is simply a question of prompting AI software, in my case CoPilot and whichever LLM sits behind that, to take this list and generate a series of paragraphs saying where I saw what. I told it to do it in time stamp order, separate out the days, put all bird species names in bold, if counts were notable to add these, and then rather than simply generate a list to put some basic text in to allow it to flow. So it adds things like "in the tall trees", or "in the Varzea scrub" and so on, or "Early in the morning we arrived at such and such a site". Some of this I retained, a huge amount of it I deleted. It created a fictional pond because a checklist contained ducks for instance, so that had to go, and largely my memory filled in exactly where a bird was, if it was in a tree, if it was in a bush and so on. The thing I found hardest to deal with is that it did not know what order birds were seen in and some of the checklists were five hours long. This meant there was a lot of reordering of the paragaraphs to do. What I eventually ended up doing was typing as I normally would but just above the AI text in question. I could then lift bird names or sequences of bird names from the AI-generated paragraphs to drop into my own narrative. Then I would delete these from the lower text and see what was left. I am convinced this saved me ages. All the while the real eBird checklist was on the other side of the screen so I could check everything was accurate - and this time it was. I had been very specific about telling it to only use the csv file and nothing else having caught it adding random birds during my first attempts at doing this a number of months ago. 

The piece de restistance was the trip list on the final post. I used my last Brazil 2025 one as the template, gave it the trimmed list of species - this time all I needed was the name and the date - and said "copy that". It worked out how I had grouped bird families and which taxonomy I had used, and then did exactly the same with a nice even split between the two columns. It decided to go a little off-piste with its own formatting, but with a little bit of reprompting I was able to get it back to how the original looked. What you learn when doing this is how iterative a process it can be but I've saved the various steps and next time I expect it to get to the end point in one hit. After I had the basic structure of the list a further prompt asked it to assign checkmarks to show which species had been seen on which day. This used to take me forever; CoPilot did it in 30 seconds for all 367 species across 9 days. Humanity's entire future may be in doubt but boy can this thing make a list.

Once I had the text then the blog side of my screen was replaced with the gallery of downloaded photos from the day. I would select the ones that I wanted, process them in Photoshop, add the watermark and then upload them to Google. I'd do the same with any photos from my phone, forest-scapes, people, the rivers and so, and then size them to either 1000px or 850px and upload them too. Then back to blogger to insert them between paragraphs, a final read through to check for missing words, stupdi spellnig mistakes and so on, and then publish. I lost count of the number of hours spent, suffice to say it was a lot. But not as many as it might have been. The net result was 13,378 words and 156 images.

Alternative header #2

To date, and acknowledging that I have only just finished, this marathon effort has garnered two interactions. Two, and one had nothing whatsoever to do with Brazil - you know who you are! I realise this is very much par for the course when it comes to my foreign adventures but the comment that did in fact relate to Brazil made me laugh out loud - it was to point out a mistake I'd made labelling a photo. It is lucky I have a sense of humour. I appreciate it of course, it meant I was able to correct it. But honestly.

Nevermind. It was still worth it to relive the experience and, in future years, something to look back on. I was also able to embellish my eBird checklists with some of the photos I took. Unfortunately all three of us seem to have taken the exact same photos of the exact same species. Bob or Richard would notice me lift my camera and do the same, or vice versa, if any bird actually came close enough. So if you go to the website you will see lists of 50 species with 48 of them unillustrated. But those lucky two will have multiple images from all three of us! 

So I'm done. Finished! There is nothing quite like the relief of pressing publish on that final post, which in my case is always the aforementioned trip list, ideally accompanied by a photo of a small panther in habitat if I remembered to take one. If I remembered, as if.... I have one more short trip to write up, a long weekend on the Scilly Islands for the birders pelagics, but the weather was so calm and sunny that there is virtually nothing to write about so this will be very quick!