Electric Mayhem

I have been seduced by advertising. I blame work, or at least the need to travel to work. I sit on the tube for I don't know how many hours per week. Sometimes I get a seat, sometimes I don't - I need one of those "baby on board" badges; were it not for my obvious masculinity I could probably get away with it, but I digress. Inevitably I glance up at the adverts above the seats. Normally I am immune to advertising, as in completely immovable. But something about the Phillips Sonicare toothbrush caught my eye.....

Like many birders, dental hygiene has never been a strong suit. I mean I don't have orange teeth like a rabid hamster or anything, but let's just say that genetics have not been kind to me. I blame my father, as my mother is from California and thus has beautiful teeth of the kind that are used to advertise electric toothbrushes..... To cut a long story short, I found the thing on Amazon for much less than I thought I would, and was unable to resist pressing "buy it now" or whatever the particular button is. It promised* lovely white teeth. Teeth that there is no real need for me to have at my stage in life, but what the hell, I am a metrosexual man, just a bit slobby of late.

It duly arrived looking duly space age. Impressive. Two brush bits (much like my vacuum cleaner in that respect) and a crappy travel case. Naturally it is gleaming white - can you imagine an off-yellow version? I gave it a quick press, confirmed it buzzes superlatively and expensively, and put it to one side in eager anticipation of the coming evening's brushing ritual. The moment soon came.

A quick wet of the brush head, a quick dollop of Colgate, and away we go.

Bzzzzzzz. Splat.

The toothpaste is gone. As in completely vanished, nowhere to be seen. But wait, what is this red, white and blue streak on the wall? Modern art? Has Mrs L bought a Matisse? I tried again with the same result. Bzzzzzz, and gone. Eh? This time it hit the mirror, and with spectacular results. Ah. I am a quick learner though, and so third time lucky, I did not press go until the brush was in my mouth with my lips firmly closed.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sweet Baby Moses!!!! This thing is like a bucking bronco! Less Phillips, more Black and Decker. It should be illegal it's so powerful! My poor gums had nowhere to hide. The default mode of this thing is that it buzzes for 30 seconds, a slight pause, and then another 30 seconds, the theory being that you concentrate on one quarter of your mouth until the pause, and then move on the other side. But here's the rub. If you left it in one spot in your mouth for the entire 30 seconds it would in fact go straight through your gum and into your brain. So effectively you have to spin it round in circles so that it spends only a nanosecond in any one place, else risk death, or at the very least severe cranial injury. The worst bit is yet to come though. After four periods it moves on to "shine" mode, and you have to use it on the front of your teeth. The bit you smile with, or in my case, grimace with. Except that it now has the force of a hurricane, and will file your teeth back to the bare nerves in about three seconds.. White yes, but very very thin..............I may just have to accept that my 'smile' is best described as "enigmatic" and, er "yellow-ish".......

* I can't believe I am so stupid

BirdTrack. Scientifical enlightenment for the bored birder.

As you may know, I have recently been beavering away on a taxonomic section of the 2008 London Bird Report. I was asked to contribute to the 2007 report, had the time, so said yes. I thought it would be a way give something back to the London birding community from whom I have learned a great deal over the past few years. Having spent many hours going through about seventy LBRs looking for historic records from Wanstead, I can appreciate the extraordinary amount of work that a small number of people put into this publication.

It took hours, far more work than I was expecting. No sooner had I submitted my section for 2007, 2008 appeared in my inbox. I procrastinated for ages, ignored it for longer, and finally started about a day before the deadline. It too took ages, several evenings of work, and then a day-long slog to break the back of it. I finally finished last week. No pressing of "send" has ever felt better. I have a dreadful feeling that 2009 is 'in the post', but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Being totally open and honest about it, it was not in any way enjoyable. In fact it was downright dull - it felt like I was back at work. I had a monster spreadsheet with thousands of records, and I had to write them up extrememly formulaicly, with little or no scope for individual expression. That which I managed to sneak in was ruthlessly edited out once I had sent it in; my contribution was as a number-cruncher and touch-typist. I am being extremely selfish I suppose, but it wasn't my kind of bird-related fun.

Nonetheless I did it. It would have been churlish to return the email marked "Sorry, too boring", and a slap in the face for the many hours spent submitting records by what I have to say is a very small number of extremely dedicated birders. My section has been Crests to Treecreeper. This includes Blue Tits.

Reader(s), do you count Blue Tits as you walk round your patch? I don't, or do so very rarely. Yet there are people who do, and do so religiously. As I worked through the data, I marvelled at the effort it must have taken, after every patch visit, to go online and submit counts. Real counts, counts of 13 singing males, or a pair with three fledged young. My kind of counts are "One, two, three, ten, 15, ah call it 40". Or, "'Cor, that looks like a lot. Er, 80 I reckon". These people have made much more effort.

I go birding on the patch most days of the week - except in June, and more recently, May - and I record my sightings on my own home-made spreadsheet that has now been going years and is extremely unwieldy. I also used to dutifully record the more interesting birds (ie not Blue Tits) on a web page of London Sightings. Were these somehow taken off for the LBR? A quick search of the data I had in front of me suggested not, so I got in touch with my local recorder to ask how it was done. The upshot of this was that I went through my spreadsheet for 2008 and 2009 cherry-picking interesting sightings, and sent them to him in the desired format. When I got my hands on the 2008 data Crests to Treecreeper, the first thing I did was to look for my name - obviously. Four records. Four lonely records, though these did include my gem of a Pied Flycatcher from near Alexandra Lake on a morning that will remain in my memory just about for ever. Still, four records is Pitiful, and with a capital P. I resolved to do something about it.

Enter Birdtrack. The patch workers who make up the bulk of the contributions for the LBR use Birdtrack. After each visit, they conscientiously log the details of their entire visit, and that data feeds not only the BTO's national database for the purposes of proper scientific stuff, but also the local recorders. It turned out I already had a user name and password from the BTO Altas tetrad stuff, so I put that in and off I went, starting from January 1st 2010. I'm on March now, and boy is it dull. Duller even than writing the LBR, and that is saying something. Were I starting from the present day, it would be easy though, a synch. The format is very straightforward, it would take five minutes a day if that. But I have over 150 site visits to enter, plus all my garden skywatching sessions. A quick calculation reveals that I have about sixteen hours of solid data entry ahead of me. Whoopee. I started yesterday, and am now on about mid-March for Wanstead Flats in 2010. It is a long road ahead...

Am I selling it to you? I doubt it. But look, forget about your past records, I am just being bloody-minded. If you start from today it will be easy, a piece of cake. As I was doing a few errands in Wanstead Village yesterday morning, I casually noted a recently fledged Pied Wagtail with an adult. It was the work of moments when I got home to enter it into Birdtrack. Confirmed Breeding! And very satisfying. And so Sean H, who may or may not still be writing Larks to Waxwing in 2011, will now get an additional line in his spreadsheet that I expect he will simply gloss over, as the smallest number of Pied Wagtails from the Essex sector that got a mention in 2007 was 46, and I am 44 short.... But I will have contributed to our national knowledge of Pied Wagtails in urban environments, and I am immensely proud of that. J Lethbridge, OBE, for services to science and stuff.  But if I can replicate that consistently going forward, then my contribution will keep growing and growing, and all the hours I put into patch-working will not just sit on my computer, but hopefully be of use to the wider birding community. So go on, give it a try. Come on, it's June, what else were you going to be doing?! I promise that it's really really easy. Athough you do have to actually count the Blue Tits first....

This juvenile Starling, the first I've seen this year, is now a scientific record.

Glossy Ibis over Wanstead!

Happy Wanstead birders were yesterday able to add Glossy Ibis to their Greater Wanstead Lists. Gary J picked up a flock of eight flying west over Leytonstone, and using the theory of Reverse Migrancy Trajectory Prediction (Whiteman, 2011), we can confidently say that they graced Wanstead airspace, despite no birders seeing them do so.

Professor Whiteman is regarded by many as one of the last true pioneers in the study of avian listing science, and has a devoted following amongst patch-workers everywhere. His most recent work with Red Kites in north-east London has come to be regarded as seminal in the study of 'where birds might perhaps have been', and has gained him many new admirers, not least those of us in Wanstead who have been fortunate enough to encounter the Professor conducting experiments in the field, or not, as the case may be.

What started off as a simple back-calculation of a bird's trajectory, whereby a conical shape of indefinite length, but having a distal radial circumferance of strictly no more than 180 degrees, can be expanded outwards from the last known location of a bird, and in any event can be angled towards whatever patch is lacking that species from its yearlist (see figure 1), has in fact now spawned a whole new branch of scientific study.

In its rawest form, Reverse Migrancy Trajectory Prediction Theory takes the form of a thought experiment, and such is its breath-taking simplicity, is already known in some circles as 'Schrodinger's Kite'. Although this accolade is unofficial, it shows the high regard in which Professor Whiteman's work is held by listers everywhere. In a nutshell, you need not waste valuable time birding any more. Instead you can simply stay indoors and add the entire BOU List to your patch list whilst getting on with the housework.

Jokerman dance to the Nightingale tune

Took this tonight, at extreme focal length and on a timer etc. Being techy (as in technologically-minded, dull and boring, as opposed to mildly irritated) for a moment, I used a neat function called Live View, where the mirror assembly flips up and the screen shows the light path. You can zoom in to 10x to aid in manually tweaking the focus, so the screen showed the equivalent of 10,000mm of focal length. At this extreme magnification, the slightest wobble threw it out. More interesting though was that you could see the moon moving, literally tracking across the screen. Or maybe we're moving, not too hot on the whole science thing, but it is amazing nonetheless. The tripod wasn't moving, or at least not independently of Planet Earth anyway, but the Moon was. Maybe. Even more interesting than that, though a hard act to follow, was that every now and again a Passerine could be seen flying across the face of the Moon. If you ever wanted to see nocturnal migration in action, tonight is the night. I had Bluethroat, Red-backed Shrike, Thrush Nightingale, Wheatear (finally), Short-toed Lark......

Bird fly high by the light of the moon