2020 on the patch and in lists

At the end of last year I began an equivalent post bemoaning my feeble efforts on the patch. I was reconciled to it I think, I have no desire to be restricted by that particular variety of nobility. Fast forward twelve months and neither do I now, Wanstead Flats simply does not have anywhere near the breadth of birding that I need or am satisfied with. However for much of this year it has been about all I have been able to do and I am truly thankful that it is as good as it is. There are better places to live for birding but it could be a lot worse. 2020 was the year of the patch or nothing.

And for some parts of the year it really was nothing! But I am a birder, and birders cannot not bird. No matter where they are or what they are doing birders are always tuned in to movement and to sound, to the bushes, the trees and the sky. I channeled this in a big way in 2020, mostly from the bedroom balcony which overlooks our garden and the surrounding neighbourhood. With the additional potency of NocMig my garden list went ballistic. Tawny Owl, Moorhen and Coot were common, but surprisingly there were multiple instances of Oystercatcher and other waders. Soon I was to be found not in bed asleep, but out on my balcony, wrapped up and listening for calls in the dark. With snacks. It surpassed my wildest expectations. I added - 'live' - Common Scoter (along with most of the country it seems!), Whimbrel, Little Owl and Common Sandpiper. The ones that got away whilst I was sleeping included Little Grebe, the aforementioned Oycs, Green Sandpiper, and most amazingly of all, a Quail!

Away from heard-only, long vigils in the early morning, or on conference calls during the day, allowed me to pick up Tree Pipit, Reed Bunting, Crossbill, Siskin, several Short-eared Owls, Raven, Marsh Harrier (thanks Nick!) and astonishingly a Curlew!  My garden list, static for two years, jumped from 82 species to 93. 

The same story played out on the patch. After 16 years of living here adding patch ticks is supposed to be quite hard, but all the additional time in situ unsurprisingly paid dividends - Whimbrel over the vizmig point, Common Cranes from the same spot. My patch list total is now 159 - when I first started birding here and saw what long-standing patch workers at places like Dagenham Chase had racked up I rated my chances of ever attaining those dizzy heights as non existent. Similarly when I first moved here one of my early year lists was about 70. This year I picked up all the usual migrants as well as some of the birds I missed in 2019 like Common Tern and Shelduck, and with the White-fronted Goose at the end of November I broke my long-standing patch year record of 118. The recent Med Gull has put me onto 120.

I also said at the end of last year that I intended to do a lot more birding in the UK and less birding abroad. Little did I know! I posted a graph that showed a slow slide towards nonchalance. But now look!

The trajectory has changed dramatically! OK so this is not exactly a competitive year list total, a mere 229 species, but compared to recent years it is nothing short of remarkable. Largely this is a result of a birding break in Yorkshire and a couple of family trips to Scotland. My birding away from London other than this has been pretty minimal but a few well-timed and well-planned day trips can accomplish quite a bit. Next year I hope to do more of the same if we are allowed out of our houses.

A graph of my world birding would look very different, the exact opposite trend. With planned trips to Israel and Colombia I was going to see loads and loads, possibly more than ever before even though I was not going to be travelling as much. As it was I snuck in just two birding trips away before the shutters came down and I have to go back to 2010 to find a year where I saw less. C'est la vie. 

Costa's Hummingbird, California

For 2021 here are my predictions. I am reconciled to the first quarter of the year being dedicated to local birding as I think we're going to be in lockdown until at least March. You heard it here first. Things will then ease, but other countries will still not be very keen on seeing people from the UK and so travel will continue to be restricted or at the very least, rather complicated. So the first half of the year will be all about birding in the UK. I can cope with that, provided I am allowed to go to the coast. After that I really don't know. It could be that the kind of places I would like to go birding are simply not safe to go to - spare a thought for those parts of the world with no infrastructure. We shall see, but right now the focus is close to home.

The great patch birding nocmig debate continues

Back to the nocmig debate I'm afraid. Pandora's box for the individual lister perhaps, but for a collective of local patch-workers the can of worms is far more accurate. One night last week I heard and recorded Whimbrel flying over. Amazing! However celebrations at the time were rather put on hold as I grappled with the whole nocmig argument.

We have a local birding WhatsApp group to share news and sightings (and now audio files....), there are perhaps ten of us on it. It has been busier than normal what with lockdown; even the most banal of birds now get shared. Then I set up my bucket and in short order have recorded a series of what are basically patch megas. The WhatsApp group has gone into overdrive - we just don't get sea ducks and waders here. The former - Common Scoter - were recorded twice last century, the most recent nearly 60 years ago, and under what circumstances we will probably never know. All we know is that there was a bird on the Basin for a day way back when. Waders, with a few exceptions like Snipe and Common Sandpiper, are basically all flyovers. Nasty weather - rain or fog - seems to aid our chances, but essentially they're as rare as rocking horse you know what.

Nocmig is making them less rare and that's the crux of the current debate. With my slightly gleeful morning reports of x y z recorded "rarities", even if heard "live", there was a suggestion that nocmigging could cause a devaluation in status of rare birds on the patch, especially for those that live a little further away and can't partake in nocturnal recording/listening. If this trend continues and noc-migging remains a thing even post lockdown, will birds that for most patch-workers were a once in a decade sighting be reduced to merely expected annual nocturnal migrants that nobody actually sees?

We're divided I'm afraid. I think we're all agreed that vision is the superior and ranking sense for people [most people - what if one of us were blind?], and that we therefore all find visual records of birds and photographs of birds more satisfying than aural records and mp3 files. We also all seem to agree that a recording of a bird reviewed after the event is just not as kosher as a heard at the time bird, and as such whereas that bird cannot be denied an entry onto the patch list for we all agree that it was indeed present, it can't be said to have actually been heard by the individual who turned on the recorder and thus can't go their personal list. Fine.

But that is where it ends. Personally I was extremely excited as I heard the Scoter and now this Whimbrel go over. Probably less excited than had I found either of them on the deck, or flying past in the daytime*, but more excited than if somebody else had found one on the deck and I'd then twitched them. I am finding that there is definitely a big element of "self found" associated with nocmig.

I was actually indoors at the start of both events, listening on headphones connected to the microphone on the balcony. Lying in bed actually! Is this allowed? To deflect the most obvious objections I took them off, opened the door and also managed to hear a call 'naturally', but I didn't bother for the Moorhen and that's now on my garden list too. It strikes me writing this that if there are issues with the use of a microphone and headphones then we may also have problems with binoculars and telescopes, both of which also augment human sensory capabilities. We have yet not had the 'webcam' debate, whereby an internet connection replaces a short cable, and hopefully we don't need to, but camera traps did get a mention.

As I have added more decent nocmig records the debate has naturally intensified. So does this argument of devaluation hold any water? To my mind not really, but I am new to all this as many of us are, and the reason I am penning this is to see if any readers would like to offer an opposing opinion, or to give their thought on nocmig and patch birding if they have already been through this stage. If anything I think it makes our collective local list more complete. We may have thought Common Scoter was mega but we were ill informed, simply not aware that each year an annual overland migration takes place. That wonderfully quick-to-market graphical representation of the Scoter migration had a lot of people similarly enlightened I expect. We also thought that poor weather saw the best chance of waders on our patch, and it probably still does, but perhaps their spring movements commonly take them over urban areas like ours in fine weather? My nocmig sessions along with everyones else's help to understand that. To ignore these records or give them any less merit than the diurnal migrants that we hear (a high percentage Yellow Wagtails go unseen for example) strikes me as counter-intuitive. The opposing argument to this is that for the sake therefore of scientific exactitude, why not set up camera traps and microphones everywhere and ensure that nothing, bar nothing, gets through unrecorded?

Where we are really getting hung up is how we list these birds. A separate nocmig list? That's one option I suppose, but only a single list can describe the totality of what birds use or fly over a patch. If we were to have a separate list for nocturnal migrants should we also have a list for diurnal migrants? A separate list for birds that we heard but didn't see? I think that as long as we clearly state what type of record each is then we're fine. Where this falls down a little is that year on year patch lists, or current and historical lists, are not easily compared in the post nocmig era. The view here is that we should mention in the annual report that a new survey method has begun to be employed, albeit in a limited way, and that this has contributed to a change in how some birds have been recorded. It will work the other way too as with significantly less coverage by local birders, passerine spring migrant records are likely going to fall. Were it not for lockdown this wouldn't be happening of course, and frankly the only way I can manage nocmig is because of lockdown. I don't have to go to the office so nobody can see the huge bags under my eyes caused by lack of sleep - these nocmig records have not come for free, especially with the "at the time" stipulation we have decided on.

If the worry here is individual lists, i.e. the competitive part of local birding - and let's face it, many of these birds are certainly becoming a lot less rare on my list. I can of course see why my new records may ruffle some feathers. I sympathise, not everyone is able to nocmig from the patch, in fact most people who keep a Wanstead list cannot do so without serious effort (Nick has been talking about it!). In that respect I and a couple of others have a clear advantage, albeit not one we have up until now ever used. Fifteen years I could have been doing this! Location is just one aspect, time is the other. There is a huge amount of disparity in the time each of us are able to devote to birding the patch, in any manner. Some of us have partners and kids, some of us don't. Some of us travel frequently for extended periods of work, others not at all. At best, I could at certain times of year do an hour or so each weekday morning, and then all weekend every weekend if I sacrificed everything else I enjoy doing. Others struggle to do more than a couple of hours every Saturday morning. At the other end of the spectrum at least one local birder spends ten hours a day on the patch during the prime months and could do more if he wanted. It all comes down to personal circumstances, there just isn't a way to level a playing field this diverse. I don't think anybody is suggesting that we introduce birding caps, and I am not going to deny the geography of Chateau L - if it's not giving the game away too much I can be on Wanstead Flats in under thirty seconds. Indeed I think last week's Whimbrel were over Wanstead Flats when I first head them. I would have no problem keeping a separate list for nocmig (in fact I do in a way, via eBird nocturnal sightings). However when it came to describing my total patch list I'd simply add them together, i.e 158 of which one is nocmig. Clearly specifying nocmig records on a combined list achieves exactly the same thing. I also feel I've made more effort for these recent records than many daytime rare birds where I've just got lucky with a flyover, a case of being in the right place at the right time.....**

But there is no denying that nocmig, a new concept for all of us here, has started out as a bit tricky in terms of reaching a concensus, and it feels like we're still feeling our way a little bit. As such, and to check that we're not an outlier in how we might deal with this, I'd like to find out how other local patches deal with these types of nocturnal records.




* **  POSTSCRIPT

Nick managed to get the crucial photo that I could not!

Three days after I made my nocmig recording of Whimbrel, two flew over me on Wanstead Flats early in the morning. This is patently absurd given all of the above, but there you have it. Patch birding - sometimes you cannot make it up! Did I feel any less elated having ticked the species a few days earlier? Not in the slightest! Did it feel like a full fat patch tick? Well, not quite, although I confess I did feel slightly and strangely vindicated. There were also a few others around who I was able to get on the birds which for me made it far more satisfactory - there is joy in shared sightings. I then also recorded another bird a day afterwards, so that's three definite flyovers in five days. Whether this is simply a 2020 phenomenon or part of a regular Spring movement remains to be seen.

eBird hero to zero

There is a new eBird hero on the block. Me. And I deserve some serious kudos, for I've just uploaded some 2500 UK checklists. For those not familiar with the concept, a checklist is a defined list of birds seen in a certain location on a certain date - either actual counts or an indication that a species was present but without a count. The theory is that other users also enter their lists, and thus you have a gigantic database that grows exponentially and in time becomes an incredible scientific resource. I had a lot of lists going back years, all stored in a huge Excel spreadsheet. Thousands of lists with every bird I've seen. Counts too in some cases, not simply that I'd seen a species, but that I'd counted twenty three of them. Not many birders will have that kind of electronic record. Faced with that many lists in a series of notebooks for example, how many birders would attempt to digitize them? Some of the earliest lists date from 2003, and there is a glut from 2009-2011 when I found myself gleefully unemployed and able to go birding the length and breadth of the land. UK birding has of course rather tailed off now that I don't twitch, but I still dutifully record each and every outing on the patch when I get home. I submitted 997 lists from Wanstead alone.

EBird has the facility for bulk uploads, so I painstakingly created a template that would allow me to transfer my Excel records in large batches. At this point I'd like to apologise to all the volunteer bird list checkers out there, graciously giving their time to try and keep eBird free from nonsensical data. It's not that my lists are complete garbage, but there has been a teensy weensy problem with dates. My spreadsheet is a thing of beauty, but I will be the first to admit that spreadsheet design is not my forte. It appears that about fifteen years ago i made the momentous decision to combine the location and the date in one cell. Apparently I also decided that consistency was something that needn't concern me too much. Anyway, many years later I have an exceptional record of sightings which are almost impossible to extract a date for, despite the fact that it is there in black and white.

"Wanstead Flats, Sep 2nd", with the year recorded in a separate cell.

Looks simple, but it isn't. 

What about "Wanstead Flats. London, 2nd Sept"? 

You get the idea. How do I get from myriad versions of this to a simple US date format of mm/dd/yyyy? It was very nearly beyond me. Numerous eBird volunteers may suggest that it was definitely beyond me. Eventually I worked out a formula that converted vast majority of the dates correctly, removing commas, splitting the location, days and months, and then concatenating them back up. It was so nearly perfect....ahem.

Many of the dates are correct. Many however seem completely random, and where these concern rarities, as many do, this is confounding the volunteers. Some are close, for instance I was only ten days out on the Portland Brunnich's Guillemot, my translation formula having produced 12/19/2012 rather than 12/29/2012. But when the bird was not found until the 26th..... Others are just rubbish, with no element of the day, month or year bearing any resemblance to when I actually saw a bird. Puffins on the Isle of May in December, Pink-footed Geese in high summer, that kind of thing. When you order my lists by date this results in my being in Scotland, on Scilly and at home in Wanstead more or less simultaneously, or at the very least hints at some rather crazy driving.

Correcting these foul ups is taking some time, and in many cases the vols are get to them first. I think they have some sort of auto exception flagging, but nonetheless it must be rather irritating, especially when these records are from 2008 and so on. Mostly they are being very helpful, suggesting what the actual dates was based on weekends etc, or telling me the period during which the bird was present. Others are more curt, just saying my list is wrong and to please check it. Fair enough really, and so that is what I am doing, helped by the original spreadsheet, this blog, and also good old fashioned notebooks - essential for working out which list is which where it involves a pace I've visited many times. Norfolk seems particularly screwed up, along with Scottish records excluding Shetland. I'll get there, but so much for the efficiency of the batch upload. Then again without it I likely would not have bothered.

Hassle aside it is a great trip down memory lane. I didn't half get about in those days. Every weekend there is something. A juicy mega, a long sea watch, a day of migrant quality on the Norfolk coast and, in between, hundreds of patch visits. I birded a huge amount. It makes me want to do so again.

A tale of two lists

Now that I have given up UK listing and year-listing (a brief flirtation, two or three years to get it out of my system) only a few lists now remain. I still have a passing interest in London, and a little bit of me still wants to see birds in Essex, but actually all I currently fussed about is Wanstead. The patch. I've now lived here for about 14 years, and I reckon I've been birding the place seriously for about nine of those.

How do I define seriously? Well, I have some statistics.....

I moved here in 2004. At that time a bird list was a completely unknown concept for me, and it wasn't until about 2008 that I started to record what I saw with any regularity. My earlist year list for the patch shows that I saw just 83 species, but back then that was an extremely pleasing result as the up until 2007 I had seen just 70 species ever. By the end of 2009 I had lifted this to 105, of which 102 were in that year alone. I was hooked. 

Gradually the year totals grew, as did my overall patch list. 2010 saw me record 108 species and boost my patch list to 120. A further seven in 2011 and five in both 2012 and 2013 put me on 137 with some great patch birds like Wryneck, Stone Curlew and Osprey. 2014 was a slower year with just two new birds added, but normal service was resumed in 2015 with a further five including a quite stunning Red-legged Partridge. 2016 added three more, including Ortolan Bunting and Great Grey Shrike - quality needs to be eked out. The great Hawfinch invasion of 2017 provided that year's only tick leaving me on 148, and 2018 as I am sure I have already said has been mind-bendingly good. 150 was swept aside with what amounts almost with disdain (actually I went weak at the knees, as related here)

This year is now the tenth in which I've seen over 100 and I once reached the dizzy heights of 118. It has been a slow and mostly steady climb, and a truly dedicated blogger would have made a graph. 

But there is another.....

In 2009, almost exactly two months after I started this blog I lost my job. I'd like to think the two are not connected. Whilst I didn't lose interest in Wanstead, indeed I birded it more than ever previously, I had the time to go further afield. Rainham Marshes. With children in tow I appeared at this riverside site quite frequently and gradually established myself with the local birders. Andy, Phil, Dave, Howard and others would kindly keep me updated and it was not at all unusual if I went several times a week, often on a twitch of sorts. In two years I went from 141 to 183, including such London gems as Montagu's Harrier, Snow Bunting, Merlin, Gannet and Eider. Those two years boosted my London list massively, but then along came the need to go back to work and everything slowed to a crawl once again. In the eight years since then I've added just 13. It does of course get progressively harder, but from the start of 2014 to the end of 2015 I added none at all! 

I know all this because I have kept records for Rainham in a similar fashion to my home patch. I won't bore you with them except to say that I am back in the game and a significant milestone that I really ought to have crossed many years ago is now in my sights. Last year I moved quite quickly for Quail, Black-winged Stilt and a Common Crane, and this year Marsh Sandpiper and Rough-legged Buzzard were snaffled at short notice. This leaves me on 196. I know what you are thinking.

Tantalising.

I agree, and that is why last Sunday morning shortly after first light I was on the sea wall at Rainham listening out for Siskin. Whilst I may have seen close to 200 species at the site, there are a few embarrassing blanks on my list. Others are Firecrest, Bullfinch and Raven. There are enough seasonal possibilities that could occur and indeed regularly do occur that I decided now would be a good time to really put a bit of effort in, spend a bit more time there.

But of course this comes with risks.....

I expect you can see where I am going with this.

Yes, whilst I was on the river wall at Rainham straining my ears for non-existent Siskin, Nick was happily inking in a pair of Cattle Egrets flying over Wanstead Flats, the first for donkeys years. My first genuine non-twitching attempt to add birds to this other patch list and not only do I draw a complete blank but I miss a mega back on home turf. There is probably a lesson here. 

Next weekend I'm going to Florida.