Waxwing Statistics

A post title which I think both immediately attracts, and immediately disgusts. If you've just read that sentence though, clearly the lure of Waxwings is greater than the potential boredom of bird-related stats. As you know, I'm a big fan of patch stats, anything vaguely listy, and you can count me in. So, the 19 Waxwings that I bumped into at the end of my street this morning, less than a minute after leaving my house, represent my seventh patch sighting of Waxwing. Of those seven sightings, two have actually been from the house, and the birds this morning did the decent thing by flying back down my street and over my house to get themselves on the house list for a third time. So in addition to three house list sightings, one of the sightings was on an adjacent street as I was on the school run, so almost counts for the house list. A further sighting was actually at the school as I left one morning, and the sixth and seventh were two twitches in quick succession to a berried-up housing estate near Wanstead Park in 2011. In total, I've seen 94 Waxwings in Wanstead, so the 19 this morning represent a fairly significant percentage at exactly one fifth. Stop me when I'm boring you....

So there I was, trudging towards the bus stop. Er, I mean striding briskly towards the bus stop, eagerly looking forward to my day at the mines. Mug of tea in hand - this is not normal, I was running slightly later than planned - I had nearly reached the bus stop when my razor senses picked up trilling. Sure enough, a flock of Waxwings circled overhead and chose to alight in the tree opposite me. Quick as a flash I gently placed my mug of tea on a convenient wall, took my bag off my back and extracted my camera (I am beginning to carry my camera everywhere - blame a certain Black-headed Gull in Canary Wharf.....). Lens cap off, ISO up, exposure comp up a bit and bingo, they were mine for all eternity. I even managed to get a signpost saying Wanstead in the frame. Then they flew off. I had just enough time to confirm that they had gone over the ever-expanding cone of house airspace, and then the bus came and I had grab my tea and leg it. Suprisingly the day went downhill from exactly this point.

Grotty

Typical. My one morning out on the patch and it's raining. Raining quite hard in fact. Yep, though it pains me to admit it, I am a fair-weather birder. Especially in mid-November when there is little chance of seeing anything new, and little chance of getting a photograph that will please me. I woke up fairly early with thoughts of noble patch-working in mind, and padded softly to the window to peer out. My eyes take at least two minutes to actually work first thing, presumably another sign of ageing, and so I struggled at first to see what was going on. Was that a puddle I could discern on the other side of the road? Yes, I think so. Hmm, but was the surface of that puddle still..... some rubbing, some squinting, and yes, there were raindrops. Dammit! Still, every cloud..... I padded softly back the way I had come, and into the still-warm dent (crevasse!) in the mattress.

This is a great shame, especially as I was hoping to snaffle a Waxwing on the patch today and thus advance up the Patch List Challenge leaderboard, despite the devasting news of the loss of the main prize. Flocks up north are numbering into three figures now, and gradually a few are coming down south. London has had a handful, and surely will get more, so I need not worry unduly. It isn't all about patch ticks of course, it's about being at one with the birds joggers, dog-walkers, footballers, drunks, litter.....

Wanstead managed a flock of around 40 birds last year, and, most spectacularly of all, a small flock flew over my garden one morning while I was sky-watching - I couldn't stop grinning for days. But as everyone knows, it's all about taking photos of them as they are lovely and bright, and generally fearless. The best opportunity last year was at Lakeside Shopping Centre, somewhere I would never normally willingly go. I counted 225 there in January last year, and the carpark hedges were teeming with them just at car-window height. Perfect.

So what have you been eating then? 

I'd a Problem Resisting

Errrm, how best to couch this moment of weakness? Weeeeeell, you see, it was like this, guv'nor. I had to wait in all day because BT were coming to 'fix' my broadband which is currently extremely slow. I had one of these all-day appointment slots whereby you put your entire life on hold and they turn up whenever the hell they choose. This is called 'customer service' by businesses, and a 'bloody cheek' by customers. As it happened I could have spent the entire morning on the patch, but by the time BT had been and gone, I had about an hour and a bit before I needed to go and do the school run. So rather than rush round Wanstead and not do it justice, I went and had a look at someone else's patch. Walthamstow to be precise. Oh yes, and I needed petrol, which is why I went in the car. Aaaanyway, I ended up on Coppermill Lane with my nose pressed up against the fence that borders number 5 Reservoir, and there was an Eider there, and I saw it. I don't need Eider for London, having seen seven last year, and I don't keep a list for Walthamstow either. Frankly I can get better views of an Eider just about any time I choose up in Fife, so why I went remains a complete mystery. I could think of nothing better to do in the hour or so of freedom that remained, so I just did, OK?

Anyway, the BT guy came, pottered about a bit, made a couple of phone calls, and then left again. He said it would be better in two hours, and went off to his next cup of tea. About two hours after he had left, a nice lady in India called and said that they had fixed the problem but that I now needed to wait between 24 and 48 hours for the line to get back to normal. To stabilise, she said. I pointed out that my line was already nice and stable, at 0.35 Mb/s, roughly 1/25th of the speed I should be getting, and that if there was a choice between really really slow stabililty and really really quick instability, I'd prefer the latter. She said she would call back in 24 hours. In the meantime I am sitting here wondering what a 'ping' is, and why for £20 a month I might as well be using a couple of plastic cups and some string? Cruel irony as far as you readers are concerned is that my upload speed is somehow much faster than my download speed, so I am able to pollute the webosphere with my ramblings almost unimpeded.

Waxwing, anyone?

Lazy Days

I said at the start of this year that I wanted to adopt a more relaxed approach to birding, and I really think I'm getting somewhere. Today, rather than thrash the patch, I elected to lie in until about half nine. Then I toddled downstairs and ate pancakes for a bit, and then I went back to bed until lunchtime. That's the spirit! My year list is barely over a hundred, and I've left London once. Top drawer dedication to enjoyable birding!

That said, I've been somewhat too relaxed for my own good this weekend, with only three hours proper birding yesterday, during which I saw very little. Couldn't even find a Siskin. Today was little better, a family walk in the Park netted Coal Tit, the first away from the garden, but little else. Other Wanstead birders didn't fare much better, so I feel justified in having stayed in bed for most of the day. I thought about going for the Eider at Walthamstow, but having seen quite a few at the end of last year I realised it was unnecessary, and had a spot of lunch instead.

January is often like this on the patch. You go ballistic for the first few days and see almost everything, and then spend the rest of the month tramping around in the doldrums wondering why you're seeing nothing new. But that is listing talking again, the desire to add things up, to write something in a little book. Seeing as that was proving impossible, yesterday I spent some time watching Goldcrests. There were three by the bridge at the Dell working themselves into a frenzy of excitement, crests raised. A male and two females by the looks of it, chasing each other round the holly and yew, calling constantly. I hadn't brought my camera due to the drizzle - mistake, they were incredibly close and I might have got some decent shots. Superb little birds. I held one once, up at Holme NNR in Norfolk. I was helping the ringers bring the bagged birds back to the hut, and whilst they were processing them, I was allowed to hold and release one, using the classic ringer grip. It weighed nothing, absolutely nothing. Tiny, perfectly still, yet warm and alert. I released it though a kind of slot in the side of the hut, and it flew off, no doubt wondering what had just happened, but none the worse for the experience.

On a completely unrelated but entirely expected note, have a Waxwing. I've entitled this photo "Waxwing #2". They don't do a great deal of chewing do they?

Waxwings!

Dave D-L reported 86 Waxwings at Lakeside shopping centre this morning. Waxwings have been cropping up in metropolitan Essex for ages now, and thus far I have resisted the urge to go and see them. Not this morning - I drove straight there after the school run, armed with camera. As soon as I got there it was clear that Dave's birds had been joined by some more, a lot more. Counting them whilst there proved impossible, so I did a twenty second pan of all occupied trees and bushes that I could see and counted them later on the screen - a whopping 225 birds, and it's perfectly possible that I missed some. The air was full of the sound of trilling, and there were so many birds that there was a near constant stream of them coming down to feed in the berry-laden hedges of the parking lot, before wheeling back up to the trees again, perhaps via a puddle for a refreshing drink. Even Pudding was silenced, a sure sign of being over-awed.

The burning question is of course how many Waxwing photos is too many Waxwing photos? I took 472 in the space of about an hour and a half, of which I kept 77. Ideally I'd like to post all 77, but even I realise that that might be overkill. Perhaps if I started with five, and then added a few random ones in the coming posts? Would that be OK?













For anyone interested in the techy stuff, all of these were taken out of the car window at either 500mm or 700mm, with a heavy-duty beanbag for support, and the engine switched off. A car is by far and away the best mobile hide out there, and I was able to get so close that most of these photos are uncropped. I would have preferred to be out of the car using a tripod, but the birds would have flown off, as they did when the car-park litter cleaner deliberately spent five minutes picking up every tiny scrap right where the birds were feeding in a deliberate effort to piss me right off. He did, but I remained calm, and he was forced to wander off somewhere else. So, from within the car, most of these are full frame at about 15 feet. You can probably guess that I had a great time.