The internet speaks

Well well. Two weeks I wrote what I thought was quite an amusing take on what it is like to spend time in a bird hide in 2018. A bird hide with other people in it. I had spent quite a few hours in a hide not observing a Bittern, but I did see and hear many other things, and I am not talking about birds. I am talking about people. Five hours as a fly on the wall at a popular bird reserve in a well-populated area provided almost endless blog material. This was not a social experiment, I had genuinely wanted to see the Bittern and I still do. Staring at a birdless reed bed for hours on end however and you cannot help but pick up on the other things going on around you, and in that particular hide on that particular day the sideshow became the main attraction. I condensed it into one post centred around a number of the characters that were in there, left out all the boring bits about people sitting quietly observing birds (not many let me tell you!), and gleefully pressed 'Publish'.

To say the post generated some reaction is an understatement. I was not alone. Many people it seemed had experienced something similar and had the same frustrations. The “camotwat” in particular was a clearly defined person that people recognised from their own birding experiences. More generally poor behaviour – loud behaviour – in a place where it is expected and indeed beneficial to remain still and quiet, was something that struck a definite chord. My blog has no censorship, but the comments there – more numerous in response to anything I have previously written – indicated that people felt the same way and had enjoyed my rant. Well, I very much enjoyed writing it! I named nobody, posted no photos, indeed I did not even mention the location. It didn’t need any of that. Just a few present tense snippets of the odd few minutes here and there and it almost wrote itself.

But not everyone found it amusing. I suppose this is to be expected, we are a diverse lot. As I followed the spread of the post and its reaction on Twitter I chanced upon a separate thread with a completely opposing view. I was not amusing. Not in the slightest. In fact it was very sad that I had chosen to publicly criticise other people out enjoying nature, and of course Twitter being the echo-chamber that it is, many people agreed. At the time of writing this rejection of my point of view has nearly 1000 likes, far more than anything I posted about it! In the spirit of fairness I retweeted this thread and kept an eye on it. There were a few attempts from contributors to prop up one of my key points, which was that hides are supposed to be places from which to quietly watch birds, and that if you want to chat, discuss camera gear, listen to music etc there are probably more appropriate places, but overall I was firmly labelled an elitist snob. Hah! Better even than that though, one reader felt the need to declare me a sanctimonious pillock! This got a retweet from me as well, as a near perfect example of everything that is wrong with social media. With zero irony my judgemental stereotyping was used to blithely categorise me. Amazing.

There are varying levels of excellence on the internet, and although this Twitter user clearly wasn’t much of a fan, he has done very well. Personally I fail to see how anyone wouldn’t find my post amusing, but then I would say that wouldn’t I? I write it and read it as me, and my sense of humour is not necessarily easy to translate, especially not on a first read. Regular readers, a gratifying number of whom came out in support, knew exactly where I was coming from. Some - indeed most - have not met me, but having read my output for many years feel that they do, and they are probably more or less right. It would be difficult to read what somebody writes for close to ten years and still be in the dark as to the author’s general outlook. However this post has had around 2300 hits, which is roughly 10x the normal amount. A whole new set of people have happily been introduced to “WansteadBirder”, and whilst it is too early to say whether they are destined to become acolytes, evidently quite a number failed to read it as I intended and have taken offence.

Offence is of course very easily taken on the internet, and especially on social media platforms. It is almost de rigeur in many instances, and my experience is that people are very quick to jump on the bandwagon. Dare I say it but some revel in it.  It is just too easy to bash out an ill-considered and quick-fire response to whatever it may be, keyboards do funny things to people. Type first, engage brain later. Or perhaps not at all. I am a limited user of these places, but I try not to take any of it too seriously. I’d also encourage my blog readers, especially new ones, to take the same stance. I am sure I have said this before but rarely do I take myself seriously. And neither should you. Nonetheless, and cutting through the manner in which I chose to express myself, I wanted to say two things. One, I wanted to make the point that some people actually want to watch birds from hides, which is after all why bird hides exist. Two, I wanted to point out the reason why number one is rather hard if not impossible is because many people that spend time in hides appear to have rather lost sight of that, or more likely have never been aware of that at all. Personally I find tooled-up wannabe wildlife photographers to be the most egregious of these, hence why my blog post featured them front and centre. People who think I highlighted the toggers purely out of some arrogance stemming from my own interest in bird photography are for the most part mistaken. It was primarily all about behaviour and hide-etiquette, wrapped up in some gentle ribbing.

I do not want to start the whole birder vs photographer argument all over again. I am a bird photographer and I am a birder, and I am beginning to understand what each of those disciplines means. One thing I can definitely tell you is that one hobby is not more noble than the other, no matter what some may think, or may think I think. What I can also tell you is that bird photographers should make an effort to know their subjects just as they should make an effort to know their art. The people I singled out in that hide knew neither.

But I digress. Reading huge number of contrary responses I realised that the issue could be summed up as follows. In order to encourage more people to connect with wildlife, and with birds in particular, should existing and dare I say competent birders turn a blind eye to bad behaviour in hides, put it down to life’s rich pageant, it takes all sorts etc. And going one step further, should they nonetheless seek to encourage and indeed possibly educate these new entrants? 

And if they don’t are they sanctimonious pillocks?

To be continued....

Junk Mail

As many people do, we have a sign on our front door that specifies no circulars, or no junk mail. I can't remember what is says actually as I never read it. It seems nobody else does either, as we continue to get mountains of rubbish posted through the letter box on a daily basis. From there it makes a conveniently short hop to the recycling box located just adjacent to the front door. No great inconvenience, but very wasteful. The Christmas season is of course worse, all sorts of colourful flyers designed with one goal in mind - to take money out of my pocket and put it in somebody else's. No thank you. 

Luckily I am more or less immune to advertising, a skill gained from a lifetime of ignoring television and most other forms of media. But I do use computers a lot, both for work and also for typing out forlorn blog posts in the post-blogging age. This means I use email, and as I suggested in my last post, doing anything online inevitably means that in addition to having to create passwords you also have to dole out your email address so that they have someway of getting in contact with you when you, er, forget your password. And once they have your email account good luck with getting them to give it up.

Here are some statistics compiled from the 13th of December - yesterday. I received 44 emails, from 29 different senders. Broadly they reflect a cross-section of my interests - for instance 8 concerned birding, 4 concerned gardening and plants, 4 were about travel, and 2 were about wine. Fair enough, however of those 18 emails I only wanted to read 7, and of those, only 5 would I classify as useful. A full 13 (nearly 75%!) I had no interest in whatsoever, and in theory this is what I want to be getting.

What about what I don't want to be getting? Ah. Here is where the parallels with actual junk mail are most closely drawn. 20 of the 44 emails, so roughly half, were from online retailers, and all wanted me to part with my hard-earned cash. Things were on sale they said, cheap they said, the lowest price to be found they said. As I've said before, 30% off is still 70% on. A further 4 on top of that also wanted my money, including two that were tantamount to begging. Of the retailers, well I suppose that I must have bought something from each of them at some point in the past, but they continue to send me email after email. Some of them send me something every single day, and many of them are at least once a week. Most of them I cannot ever recall having used nor when. Take for example a company called Newfrog. What would I have bought from them? Do they sell frogs? And anyway what is wrong with used frogs exactly?  Another is from L'Occitane, a company specialising in soap - this I do actually know as I do use soap now and again. But I have no recollection of ever having bought any from them, which means it must be a very long time ago yet checking my "Deleted" folder I found 18 emails from them since the beginning of October. Why don't they give up, surely the message is clear? I am all good for soap. If organisations had to pay to send an email things would surely be different. 

And "deleted" is what happens to all of them. But not yesterday. Yesterday I did something about it as I'm fed up of going through my inbox once a week and block-zapping them. At the bottom of each one of the emails, hidden away miles down, sometimes in small fonts and in colours very difficult to read, is a small line. It reads "unsubscribe". It is probably a legal requirement, the equivalent of ex-directory. If you click on it it frequently takes you the retailer's website to tell you they've done it, which no doubt is merely one last gasp attempt to get you to crack. I went through 18 such emails on my phone whilst multitasking on the toilet, and did the same on each one. Every single one promised to take me off their mailing lists immediately. One even sent me an email to tell me this.....

So that covers about 33 of the 44 emails (some were about things that interested me but still fundamentally just wanted me to buy something - a flight to somewhere for instance). That leaves 11 that fit into neither category, and 10 of these were from various Social Media platforms.Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. The fact I've logged into Facebook twice since my children started school is seemingly not relevant. I do use Twitter of course, and I may find some use for LinkedIn over the coming months, but nonetheless every single email was junked - the digital equivalent of moving from the doormat to the recycling bin. Every single one was basically exorting me to do more Social Media, there was almost an air of desparation. Read this! Follow this person! Here are some suggestions for things you might like! Here's another suggestion, stop sending me crap.

But what about the final email? #44? Well this is the most telling statistic of them all. #44 is from an actual person and they have written an actual email. It isn't a "fwd" or a circular, it's an honest to God missive from one human being to another. Clearly they have no idea what the internet is for.

Scrolling scrolling scrolling

I am struggling with ageing at the moment. Mostly physically of course, as bits of me snap, break, or go twang. But there is also the mental side of things. Forgetting why I walked upstairs has been happening for years now. Forgetting what I did last week at work. Being unable to remember nice long words and phrases of the type that I typically like to avail myself of (use). But most of all what I forget is passwords.

Everything requires a password or a PIN. To even speak to my bank on the telephone I need a number that I can never remember, and it's a different number to the one I use to get money. You want to order something online? Fine, create an account and choose a password. What about if you want to give a charity some money? Password please. Book a flight? Obscure account number and....password. Sign a petition? Yep password. So annoying. For instance I now have an account at the East Riding of Yorkshire Council that I will never ever use again, and for which there was a lengthy registration process (I was registering an objection about the Spurn Visitor Centre that nobody wants). I'll probably start to get emails from them now. At least on that one I’m unlikely ever to need to log on again, but for every account that is a one-off there are ten that I might need to use again. This typically means that any time I want to do anything that I have to try out all my regular passwords, and if I’m unlucky or just being thick, eventually I have to click on the reset password button and go through it all over again. These days I sometimes choose that option at the outset, as (so far) I can still remember my birthday, my first something or other, and where I live. One day I suppose I won’t remember those either. Life will be cheaper at least. 

Online is supposed to be efficient, quicker. That’s not my experience at all. Partially it's people designing websites who need a big kick up the backside. But mostly it's my age. Too high basically. 

And ironically enough, the internet is at hand to constantly remind of it. Mainly during the process of setting up online accounts, but also sometimes during the password reset process. I’m talking of course about the horrible drop down boxes you get when you need to select the year of your birth. What used to be a quick little retraction of the finger on the mouse wheel to select the appropriate year, or a drag down taking a few centimetres of desk..... sometimes I have to lift my mouse up and start again on a larger piece of real estate. And it may me just me, but it seems to get worse every year for some reason. I am now regularly having to scroll and scroll and scroll before I get to it. I can only imagine what it must be like for my parents, or indeed anyone significantly older than me.

What I don’t understand is why they don’t start it at a sensible year? How many babies and toddlers routinely use the internet? And given there’s no difference between scrolling/dragging up and down, surely the clever thing to do would be to have the start year be, say, 30 years ago. Parents registering a child for something or other would have to go up. OAPs resetting passwords would need to go down. Me, I’d be pre-selected, give or take a decade…..

I have to go down a lot further than this!!

I'm sorry, do you know me?

Do you think you know me? I mean, from reading this do you think you understand who I am, what makes me tick, what I don't like and so on? This is purely exploratory you understand, I am trying to gauge if people who read internet material feel that they have a personal connection with those who have an internet persona that choose to express themselves there. Like me, though the question is more general than that. Do you think you know anyone whose web output you consume? I have a reading list of regular bloggers over on the right hand side. Some of them I do know, some of them I've never ever met. Do I think I know them? Well yes and no.

When someone writes, a certain amount of them finds its way onto the page. It's inevitable, and I challenge anybody to create an internet persona entirely unassociated with their true self. When I say anybody, really I mean birders. Birders tend not to be professional writers who could pull this off, as by definition they base themselves too much in fact. Though interestingly fiction vs non-fiction arguments frequently take up acres of web birding space...

Personally, I write fairly familiarly, lots of "yous", lots of directed sentences, in so far as the written word is ever direct. I also write a lot, more, perhaps, than many people out there who use this medium. So do you know me better than other bloggers? I tend not to shy away from making my feelings known, and I don't suspect anyone would ever call me enigmatic, but still? Can you really say that yeah, that bloke from Wanstead, yeah I reckon I've got the measure of him.

This question came up on various blogs a couple of weeks ago, during Duskygate and coincidentally coinciding with one of my more aggressive periods. I never ended up writing much about the suppression in Devon, I simply didn't know enough about it. Usually this doesn't stop me, in some cases it encourages me, but a little bit of introspection caused me to mostly hold fire on that particular incident, which was probably for the best. But would you have discovered anything else about me? Or about the circumstances surrounding the Thrush?! I'd wager no on both counts.

Do you read this and this and think "bad case of OCD"? If you read this, or read the drivel I slap on Twitter, do you think that is the whole of me? Keyboards do funny things to people for sure, but there is so much on the internet that you just can't be sure about it. Thinking about it another way, those of you that have jobs, would you send an email to a colleague in the same way that you might compose a thread on an internet forum? I wouldn't. I'm a completely different person at work. Not necessarily serious all of the time, but with a certain amount of gravitas and grumpiness that is necessary when managing a team of people in a tough environment. So, do my colleagues know me? Does my boss? Do the people that report to me? The me at work is once again very different from the me on the net, or the me at home, though I have been known to get mixed up and start giving my children deliverables when I get in.

All I am trying to say is that so much communication happens online that it's easy to get confused between the internet and real people. Those who you might think you "know", you probably don't, so judge accordingly. Don't take everything you read on the computer seriously, no matter how difficult that might be. And above all, make sure your life contains real people. If it all gets a bit much, one response to the confusion that often reigns online is to give the whole lot the elbow, even for a short while. That's exactly what one well known blogger has done. Again. Difficult no doubt, but it's only a couple of clicks away. Are you brave enough? Goodbye digital me, goodbye digital others. Tough call, but I'm going to base myself in the real world for a while. And that should remind me, recalibrate me, as to what it's actually all about. Perhaps I should try it?

A matter of light, a matter of opinion.

A few more photos, words are overrated. Keen to see if I could do any better than yesterday I went back to Southend, there to meet up with Mick, Richard and a few Med Gulls. Mick, as you will know if you have ever clicked his web page (over to the right somewhere, in the photo-bloggers section), is mildly fanatical about Gulls and photographing them. I can't think of anybody who does it better, and that includes any pro you care to name. I on the other hand have a great deal to learn about this art form, so spending a bit of time with him is always worthwhile, and I hoped to get some killer shots. The light however had different ideas, and I barely pulled the trigger, ahem. In between not taking blindingly amazing shots of Gulls, we nattered about camera settings and how today was a complete waste of time, about forthcoming trips such as Morocco and Iceland, and theorized on why some so-called bird photographers that plaster their 'work' all over the net are able to consistently take such shockingly poor photos. And why lots of other people acclaim them as amazing when in fact they are shit. A mixture of the usual nonsense in other words, highly cathartic, good to get various things off my chest rather than just tweet or blog about it. Oh.

Ah, it is all good fun really, and indeed my new moniker of "Internet Birder" has even provoked some blog posts from a couple of people who are always worth a read, and who tend to make you think. For example the words Pompous and Ass were used, which at points in the last couple of weeks I almost certainly have been (see example above, written for illustrative purposes). This of course isn't unusual, I would not be me without the occasional outburst, venting spleen. Highly correlated to periods of bank-based employment it appears. Unbecoming though, and as Gav points out, in this internet age it will live on without you if people can be bothered to look for it. Interestingly though, the comment the prompted this, the curious insult of Internet Birder (no, I have little idea either - if anything I write less about birding than many birders), has now been deleted by its author and I cannot find it. That tells its own story if you ask me. I am not going to elaborate, and like most things on the internet, it will all just drift away until people will read this post in isolation in a few years and wonder what on earth I am going on about. Very little really. Storms and teacups, the usual shite. I really must learn to keep my big mouth shut is the key take-away here, hard though that is. Tolerance, tolerance, tolerance.

Anyway, the light was awful. Technical specs can be found later on my other, nicer, blog. But suffice to say that flight shots were largely out of the question, and even portraits ended up looking flat. But it was still enjoyable, and trying to coax images out in dire conditions is always good for a laugh. I.e. you look at the back of your camera and just laugh. Oh for white clouds rather than grey, but other than this slight issue today, I can't think of many other things I'd have liked to have done this weekend. Funny how you get a bee in your bonnet about some things - an itch to be in a specific place doing a specific thing. This weekend that was Southend-on-Sea. Next weekend it could be something completely different. Even though I exist on the internet only, I lead a relatively varied birding life. A bit of this, a bit of that. And of course the key thing to remember is that my view of what birding is about trumps anyone else's. And as long as that's clear we'll get along just fine.

Basic needs

I studied French and Management Studies at university. The French bit was fairly obvious - Zola, Maupassant, Cezanne, asking if you have any pets, Chagall, Magritte, that kind of thing. I can still vaguely recall some of the texts I read, some of the paintings I studied. I've still got quite a few of the books, as well as various coffee-table books of the paintings. What I gleaned from them I can barely remember, but I did find my dissertation in which I managed to insert a Darth Vader quote right under the noses of the examiners. On the Management Studies bit I am less clear. There was something about EU Competition Law, and the amusingly titled Abuse of a Dominant Position, which even as a 19 year old was quite amusing. We also did some kind of case study on The Pier, a shabby chic home décor chain which clearly didn't listen to us as they closed down in 2008. Whatever else I did in those three years I am completely unable to say, but I came away with a piece of paper denoting achievement and glory. None of it, to my knowledge, has proved of any use whatsoever, beyond being able to show people the piece of paper when asked.

So I was very pleased to have my memory jogged by the BBC News website recently, when it published an article about Maslow. For those of you that don't know, Maslow was a man who studied human motivation, and devised the eponymously-named Maslow's Triangle, or Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I remembered it instantly, though the context remains lost in the past. Presumably it was some kind of wishy-washy Human Resources module. The theory is that you start at the bottom with very basic needs, food and warmth for instance, and gradually move up the triangle until you reach the peak, which is complete fulfilment and happiness, and, presumably, uninhibited productivity for your employer. I'm nearly there.

However to one side of the article was a fresh interpretation of Maslow's most famous work, which I have nabbed and posted below. It made me giggle, not quite as much as photo-shopping Tropicbirds it has to be said, but sufficiently to motivate me to write about it. It's sublimely brilliant, hat's off to whoever first came up with it - there are endless variations on the net. Pure simplicity, but so true. I'm as guilty as the next person, as my recent visit to Ireland proved. Food - sliced bread that was left over from a gull photography session. Water - one bottle lasted three days. Shelter - Nissan Qashqai. Warmth - Nissan Qashqai heater and a sleeping bag. All of the above are completely superfluous to surviving in the digital age, but wifi? Critical. I need to check Twitter. I need to look at RBA. I need to see if anyone has emailed me. I need an internet connection. Food, water, not bothered. Warmth? Whatever, what's the password? Shelter? Will it work through the walls if I'm sat in the Nissan?

The need to be connected at all times beggars belief. I was having dinner in the rather nice little village of Skerries just outside Dublin. All alone, I spent the time watching the other diners. At a table of four just in front of me, the young lady in the party spent the entire meal, and I mean the entire meal, on Facebook. She chatted a bit, responded to the conversation as it ebbed and flowed, but her right hand always held the phone, scrolling back and forth, seeing whatever pathetic updates and links have come through from a pile of people she barely knows. I suppose I'm hardly the ideal person to be criticising this ridiculous over-use of the internet, but that never stops me on other topics, so I got to wondering what it is like to be completely off piste? Is there even anywhere? I reckon most places I go, all of them now have wifi. It's the first thing people ask for, so it's the first thing that people install. It's a selling point. How many hotels have a crappy little telly and tea and coffee making facilities? They all do. My last hotel had a trouser press, how quaint! Nobody cares, they just want wifi. My hotel on the tip of Tobago had wifi, Kilbaha (population, 9) had wifi, various places in Morocco had wifi, the Shetland ferry in the middle of the North Sea has wifi,. Where can I go that doesn't have wifi? I want to see if I can survive more than a day.

A cautionary tale

I'm late to this due to a bit of time spent being intolerant, but there has been one and only one story in British birding circles this week (well, twitching circles, if that's different) and that has been the fiasco surrounding the mis-identification, or the mis-broadcasting of the almost-identification of a monster rarity in Devon, Orphean Warbler.

Like many, it would seem, I checked for bird news before heading off to bed on Tuesday evening. I am a well-rounded individual. Not that I'm a hugely keen twitcher, especially not now, and on a school night there is little potential anyway, but it's developed into a bit of a habit due in no small part to a tendency for recent megas to break fairly late, cf the recent Dusky Thrush.

Ooooh, will you look at that! An Orphean Warbler in Devon. Mega-alerted no less! A specific routine now kicks in - I jump in the car and drive there immediately! I'm kidding. What I mean is that I log onto BirdForum to see if anyone actually believes it. And lo, there is commentary suggesting it is without a shadow of doubt one, with confirming (and comforting) observer names. There is even a blurry photo of about a tenth of a warbler and a song recording. I have a quick listen, both to the recording on the net and to the recording on my phone, come to no sound conclusion one way or the other as it is late and for me it makes no difference as I can't go anyway, and then I go to bed, dreaming thoughts of mass twitchery and ticks. I wonder briefly who might be waking up a little early and can't think of anyone so filthy........ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The next morning dawns with the mega still present and correct, but before I am even out the door it appears there is a problem. Twitter is going ballistic, and there are MAJOR CONCERNS about the bird. Two minutes later and it is a Lesser Whitethroat. Eh? Oh dear oh dear. I mean, really? One is about twice the size of the other for starters. So last night a definite nailed on mega, today in the half-light a common summer breeder. How did that happen?! And far more importantly - and with a suppressed snigger - how many people are currently in Devon about to start a riot?! And even more importantly than that, do I know any of them?!!

More twitter messages are now coming through, and.......wait a minute, yes! There is some excellent news of exactly the sort I had been hoping for! I do know somebody! Fantastic! I couldn't possibly say who it is, but this is what birding is all about in many ways and easily one of the best things about twitching. And this is a proper banana skin. Yes it's about the thrill of the chase, yes it's about the numbers, yes it's about relief and despair in equal measure, but mostly it's about being able to have a bit of a giggle at your mates, or indeed at yourself. We've all done it of course, a desperate journey, the bird seen well and self congratulation begins. In my case it was even worse - I was actually home again before the Greater Yellowlegs a hundred miles away was re-identified as a Greenshank! I hadn't suffered the ignominy of having already put it on Bubo and having to slink back on and delete it, but I felt enormously stupid. However rather than blushing furiously and cursing, rewriting history and myself out of it, my response then and now, once the initial disbelief had passed, was to have a bit of a giggle. I mean what else can you do? Even today, when I think back to how smug I was feeling having arrived at the school gates, a distant mega snaffled in the meagre time available to me, an involuntary giggle never fails to escape my lips. Yes it's embarrassing, yes it's very silly, but above all it's very funny. Especially if it wasn't you! I appreciate that those who had driven overnight from various distant places (for instance, and entirely hypothetically, Walthamstow) might not see the funny side quite as clearly, but in time I am sure they will come round.

Of course the real fun starts now, the finger-pointing, the rewriting of history (and deletion of blog posts), the accusations and denials. And it's all there for everyone to enjoy, on the same place that confirmed the ID for many people in the first place. Top quality entertainment, and 100% free! Perhaps the best bit of all is that the young guy that found the bird hasn't had to revert to revisionism at all, as almost from the start he maintained it was a Lesser Whitethroat with a funny song, and presumably was quite surprised when birders from all over the country arrived on his patch slavering in anticipation of an Orphean Warbler, only to slope back to their cars feeling confused and ashamed, and with work many miles away, presumably all with nasty coughs coming on.....

Internet Tomfoolery

In the absence of birds, I had a lot of fun this weekend mucking about with internet. I am a dunce when it comes to internet, but happily internet realises this and has made doing things on it spectacularly easy. Nonetheless I feel a sense of achievement that what I wanted to get done I appear to have managed. Mostly this has to do with vanity. I wondered briefly if this is one of the seven deadly sins, but it appears not to be. Pride comes close, but is slightly different, so my only feelings now are those of virtue and humility.

So, the first thing is that for the princely sum of precisely three pounds and fifty-nine pence I have purchased the much sought-after domain name of wansteadbirder.com. A stroke of divine luck that it was still available....  It was remarkably easy, as was making Blogger understand about it. Like I said, the internet was designed with dumbasses like me in mind. The upshot of this is that the new URL for this blog is http://www.wansteadbirder.com/, and not the one ending blogspot.com that it used to be, though I understand that it will still work and bring you here. There. Whatever. Anyhow, if you are the linking sort, please refresh your links to the new address, as it will not make a blind bit of difference. Compelling, no?

Internet didn't let me have it all my own way though, and so as soon as I changed the URL Blogger dropped all my links, including all the photo ones that I have only recently painstakingly added. I have added as many as I can remember back on, and a few more besides, but if there is a glaring gap where once there was a link to your blogging efforts, please get in touch and remind me. Chancers welcome, you never know....

In yet another act of gratuitous pomposity, I have totally revamped http://www.justbirdphotos.com/, including migrating the whole shebang to a new hosting service called Zenfolio. I think it looks a lot better than the old one, and has the benefit of added functionality and a much lower cost. Win win, as they say. It also includes blog functionality, so all the geeky camera shit that I mostly manage to repress on here I can dribble out on there, safe in the knowledge that only fellow photography buffs will be browsing. In addition to the slide show on the homepage, each and every photo - and there are over 500 - now shows EXIF data. You can see what focal length I used, what aperture, ISO and shutter speed. See why I spare you all this normally? I've also branched out, so the Just Bird Photos name is now well and truly non-sensical, as you will now also find butterflies, landscapes, and even one of a frog. Just Frog Photos. Creating the site was childsplay, even if I do say so myself. The difficult bit had to do with repointing DNS somethings. I'm not sure what it means of course, but I had to go onto internet, and make sure that the domain name pointed to a series of numbers that looked like 123.45.678.910 instead of a series of numbers that looked like 098.765.43.21. Amazingly I managed it, and once the overnight hampster shift ended and new hampsters took over, the next time I typed in the address it took me to the new page and not the old one. And if it works for me, I expect it will work for you too. If it doesn't, please complain to Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Understanding the Internet

The internet is a difficult place in which to be understood. Two people may read the same sentence and come away thinking two entirely different things. To ensure that you get your message across to one and all, it is suggested that you use emoticons. There are almost endless variations upon the now-ubiquitous smiley face, the following short guide is intended to help people who can actually read english, and thus don't know what emoticons mean. And if, like me, you are an avid consumer of rare bird threads, you had better know how to use them.

This one is really easy. It means that you are happy. And have had a good dentist.
Again easy. It means that you are sad about something.
Not quite as easy. Let's just say you are enigmatic, but it all depends on how the reader views the emoticon.
I honestly can't believe it, I am so surprised.
You have been browsing a rare bird thread for too long.
You need to adjust your monitor brightness settings.
You're blessed with good teeth and a great dentist, and you've just been on the Scillonian for the first time. I can't see this one getting used a lot.
The badge recently came off your Leicas.
You are confused. Or a muppet.
Everyone's favourite. Use this when you are being deliberately rude or obstreperous - it softens the impact and helps you get away with it more often. Also useful for hinting at sarcasm or humour for people who have trouble recognising either.
If you are a twitcher who believes you have a god-given right to see all rare birds, you could use this when talking about Needs Ore Point, East Norfolk, or North Cornwall.

If you are a birder from Needs Ore Point, East Norfolk or North Cornwall and are using the internet to gloat about rare birds, this would be ideal.

Should have gone to Specsavers.

Of course, you can use combinations of emoticons as well. Take the following sentence, of the type that I might contribute to a rare bird thread:

"Gosh, I could not possibly have predicted that people would start bitching about Lee Evans on this thread that has actually got nothing to do with him."

What would you use here? You could use the one to indicate the use of sarcasm and frivolity. Or you could use the one instead to indicate surprise and thus increase the amount of sarcasm that you wanted to convey. But why not use both? The more emoticons you use the better people will be able to understand you.

How about this:

"It is a shame that I could not see the xxxxxxx bird that was shamelessly supressed by those bastards in North Cornwall , but I respect everyone's right to do as they please and accept that because I am sat behind a computer reading rare bird threads all day long I cannot see every bird that turns up . However I will exercise my right to nonetheless whinge massively in the interests of utterly ruining what might otherwise have been a sensible and mature discussion . By the way, my bins recently broke ."

Saeculum Obscurum

Hello Internet Acolytes, I am back. For the past five days I have been forcibly transported back in time to the Dark Ages. On Saturday afternoon, my phone died, and has remained dead until about two hours ago. I was sat on the sofa with everything crossed, praying that England would survive the last few overs of the cricket, when the phone rang. It took a while to register where the sound was coming from. I eventually traced it to a funny white thing with numbers on it in the front hall, and on picking it up my Mother's voice came out of one end. Amazing!! She was blissfully unaware that this was the first phone call I had received in a week, and carried on as if nothing was wrong. "Yes mum",  "Right mum", "Anything else mum?" "HANG UP NOW MUM!!"

The Renaissance has arrived in Wanstead. If the phone now worked, then...... I ran to the computer, switched it on, and THERE WAS LIGHT!! I threw away my chisel and stone, furled my semaphore flags, put out the fire, and got tapping.

Sweet sweet internet. Thank God. I can finally stop actually birding and instead sit in front of my computer. There is a Lesser White-fronted Goose in Norfolk that I have, from a hundred miles away, been itching to spout forth on. An Eastern Yellow Wagtail thread on Birdforum was looking like heading south very quickly, and I had perhaps missed the terminal slide. Gah! And my blog, this blog, what of my Fatbirder ranking?! It was all too much to bear.

The story goes thusly. On Saturday, some pretend workmen set up on the main road near my house, and pretended to do some work. Nobody batted an eyelid. Frankly if there were no cones or piles of rubble nearby, that's when we would start thinking things were amiss. The work they were pretending to do involved 1600 very thin strands of copper, all bundled into an immense cable 160 metres long. Copper is apparently quite expensive these days. If you need some, it is far cheaper to nick it, and two of those strands were mine....

'Snip'

In an instant, my life fell apart. A phone I can live without, what son ever phones their mother anyway? But broadband, whoa there! That's entirely different. A disaster. I was just perusing a popular birding site, clicked to the next page, and....nothing. Nothing at all. I pulled all the wires out and tried again. Nothing. Imagining what a help-desk would advise, I turned the computer off, and then on again. Still nothing. Eventually I made it to the white phone in the front hall. Ah-hah! I made an appointment with BT using my mobile phone. A lady in India said an engineer would visit in five days time. Five minutes did you say? What an excellent service, see you soon! No, five days. Oh, five hours, oh very well then. I'll um, watch some TV. Oh, I can't. Er, I'll, err, hmmm. Sorry, did you say five DAYS?! "Yes sir." Is the engineer coming from India?

Somehow I made it through Sunday, and on Monday morning on the school run noticed a large number of BT vans parked on the verge on the main road. They had a digger, lots of cables, and finally a little red and white tent over a hole in the ground, in which a cold and miserable-looking man was sat surrounded by 1600 little wires in a huge tangle....

Well, they weren't kidding, it has taken five days. I called up to cancel the engineer, but it was too late, his flight had already landed. I had about eighty emails, and was disappointed to see that the Eastern Yellow Wagtail thread had returned to being about an Eastern Yellow Wagtail. How boring.

So, has not having an internet connection been refreshing? Has it been a test of character? How have I coped? I was surprised how much I missed it. If somebody had said to me that I'd be without a functioning computer for a week, I'd have shrugged it off. Ah well, I'll do something else then, I would have said. The reality is much more illuminating. It is amazing how much we rely on the internet. And this is not just me wasting hours reading bird blogs and so on. I have wanted to look at weather maps, I have wanted to look at travel updates, I have wanted to do some Christmas shopping, I have wanted to see if I have any money, I've wanted to get in touch with my Aussie friends to crow.... It hasn't helped that it is December, with no daylight and crappy weather. In May it would have been a lot easier. We've been out quite a bit, but the children prefer to be indoors and warm, and anyway, I can't see birds in the dark.

So have I been productive? Have I done all those jobs for Mrs L that I've been putting off. No, of course not! I've just been moping about the place, trying the phone every hour on the hour. Having no internet has been terrible. After no blog updates for five days, one of my mates thought I'd gone and got a job, that's how bad it's been. I defy anyone reading this to not miss the internet, though the fact that you're reading this suggests that perhaps I have a more prone demographic....

Anyway, enough moaning about my bourgeois problems, I've got stuff to do. I'll be back later to talk about birds, as not having a computer means I've actually seen some real ones.

Online Birding

What is it about being in front of a computer that brings out the worst in people? How does a keyboard and a screen somehow turn a normal human being into an idiot, happy to type things they would never actually say out loud, happy to offend on a whim. Happy to discredit, delighted to stir.

I'm a member of one of these august online communities. I won't say which one, suffice it to say that it's a forum about birds. Capiche? Often I wonder why I don't just delete my account, as sometimes even I type something idiotic based on no knowledge whatsoever, but somehow I cannot. It's not that I'm addicted to it or anything, or that it's my guilty little pleasure; I hardly ever post anything on there. But very (very) occasionally I find it useful. Very occasionally I actually learn something, but the amount of rubbish I have to troll through for that one nugget borders on the ridiculous.

The rare bird threads are the worst ones. The idiocy factor often spirals out of control, and it will not surprise you to learn that there is a clear correlation between those who post negative and divisive comments and those who are several hundred miles away from the bird in question and have not seen it. So is this just human nature? Sour grapes and jealousy leading to venting frustrations online? I didn't see it/can't get there to see it, so I'll do my best to utterly discredit the record, the observers, the site and anyone who tries to defend it.

This photo is clearly shows a Golden Oriole, and as anyone who has been there will know, was clearly taken at Lakenheath, a good site for Golden Orioles. Yet there are people out there who will try and claim that this photo is a fake, or staged in some way, simply because they have nothing better to do.

In my experience the majority of rarity threads head south fairly quickly, and can normally be placed into the following categories:

- Moaning about behaviour of birders on site; too close, too loud, too selfish. Unlike the keyboard commentators who invariably have many years of faultless fieldcraft under their belts and have never EVER got too close to a bird and have always behaved impeccably at twitches.
- Moaning about behaviour of photographers on site; flushers the lot of them, with no fieldcraft ability whatsoever. Unlike the online commentators who are true birders, pure and honed through many years of looking through water-logged brass telescopes balanced between their knees, and only ever take distant record shots on kodak brownies, and by the way it never used to be like this and the digital age has a lot to answer for.
- Moaning about the speed the news came out; over a minute between the first sighting and news breaking counts as surpression.
- Moaning actual about surpression; Some internet commentators have a divine right to see every rare bird found in the UK, whether or not they would actually bother going to see it or not. Other internet commentators would never tell anyone about a rare bird that they found, although as they're all sat in front of computers slagging each other off all day long, this is somewhat of a moot point.
- Some kind of spurious debate about geographical and political boundaries. If you've not read fifty threads about Ireland, Britain, and the United Kingdom, frankly you haven't lived.

There are probably some categories I have missed, but they'll all involve moaning and whining, because the internet turns people into juvenile imbeciles. In almost no cases will be there be any informed or mature comment about the bird in question. The first few posters might attempt something along these lines, but they'll be relegated to the periphery as soon as the regulars find the thread and start trotting out the same old rubbish. And don't even get me started on attempting to inject humour into these discussions.

Although irritating, ultimately people can do whatever they want. The internet is a platform for free speech. If people want to promulgate twaddle on internet birding forums, they have every right to do so, it is just a shame that they obscure so much that could actually be good.

My advice to those who want to peddle nonsense on the internet?

Start a blog.