A short post apropos nothing at all

My life is excrutiatingly dull. There, I've said it. This week was the pits. I mean, pleasant enough in its own way I suppose, a bit of sunshine here and there, but I cannot think of a single noteworthy thing that I have done. And by extension, to blog about. Still, not to let that get in the way of a short post,  no doubt a corker.

My week
Monday: Bought a new camera. Played with it all afternoon.
Tuesday:  Birded Wanstead Park. Of note, Water Rail and Waxwings.
Wednesday: A blur. No idea. TMS?
Thursday: Cleaning. Might also have played Snakes and Ladders.
Friday: Went shopping, almost bought Sea Bass. Played with Lego. Haddock for dinner.

Scintillating huh?

Moving on, I'm still trying to compile a list of all bird in Wanstead ever. This week - can't remember which day - I read the London Bird Reports from 1940 to 1952. The good news is that they were all pretty short, paper rationing perhaps, so it didn't take long. In those twelve years Wanstead was mentioned perhaps thirteen times. Twelve of those were of breeding Herons in Wanstead Park, and the thirteenth was a uber-rarity, a record of a Buzzard flying over the Flats on September 26th 1949. Rather in keeping with this post. I aim to tackle 1953 to 1960 this weekend during a quiet moment.

But that's not what I wanted to tell you about. I wanted to tell you about Red-backed Shrikes sixty years ago. Sixty years ago, they were so common in London that they barely get a mention. Look at this, which is from 1951.

Thirty-five nesting pairs! You know, of course, how many now breed in the whole of the UK? Correct, none at all. It has been twenty years since the last known breeding attempt in the UK. I can't bring you a graph showing the decline, but you can visualise how depressing it would look. I love Shrikes, brilliant little birds - an adult male up on the Norfolk coast last June (huh?) eclipsed by some margin the Trumpeter Finch we had in fact gone to see. Forty-three pairs in London, sensational! I've seen one solitary bird in London in six years. There have been a few others, but I've always been busy. But that's not the point, the point is that back then they were common, just another regular bird. A Buzzard over Wanstead Flats gets more print time in the LBR.

There was an article on the BBC news today about birds of prey making a comeback. It - the article - followed hot on the heels of a scare-mongering gutter press story about Golden Eagles feasting on thousands of lambs in Scotland somewhere. Just what we need. A lamb is worth, on average, about two pence, perhaps three. That's what supermarkets pay farmers in this country for them. They then mark it up by about a trillion percent, making it beyond the reach of most people who would like to eat it, forcing them instead to eat £2.99 chickens pumped full of shite, but I digress. If you read and believe the comeback article, most of our birds of prey at some point have been utterly eradicated from our landscape, and every single one has now made a comeback, either by accident or by design. I'd like to add Red-backed Shrike to that list. Sod the Great Bustards, sod the Cranes. White-tailed Eagles I like, but Wanstead is hardly the habitat. Red-backed Shrikes on the other hand may find it to their liking with only a small amount of work, such as tearing up all the football pitches and planting hawthorns and mice.

Bin the Swarovski

Have you got a nice fancy telescope? Superb image, waterproof, armoured, great for digiscoping, weighs nothing, costs a fortune? Now is the time to rationalise. Sell it on, and apply to Telescope House, Holborn for the latest in optical innovation. But be quick, as there are only a few available in the UK. They only cost twelve quid, whereas a new Swaro will set you back roughly two grand. It's a no brainer, surely?

More from the Baltics, and a boring bit about Cameras

Just a few random photos from the Baltics. I'm pleased to say I am still all toasty and warm, and if the current heatwave continues I am likely to be found wandering around butt naked around Wanstead Park in an effort to remain cool. Not really. In fact, today has been a bit parky, and I put on a fleece whilst at home this afternoon. This is patently ridiculous, as the temperature was probably 5 or 6 degrees positive today. How quickly the body adjusts. Here is a picture of me birding in Estonia - I think I had six layers on, plus my new fleecy scarf wraparound thingy, which a correspondent informs me is called a snood, and implies that it is deeply unfashionable, so last seaon, or too down with the kids, not befitting a man of my advanced years etc etc. All I can say is that without it I might have died.





 

So, that's the Baltics done and dusted, and from now until about April this blog will revert to its usual banal mix of domesticity and Wanstead, with some minor excitement (for the author, rather than the reader) when the Wheatears turn up. About another two and a half weeks I reckon - you heard it here first.

Today I didn't do a great deal, mind you, when do I ever? I had a quick mooch across the playing fields, this time armed with a camera, in the hope that either the Med Gull or Caspian Gull would be there. Needless to say neither was. To be fair, I hadn't expected the Caspian  (or should I say putative Caspian, as the record now needs to be judged by some committee or other)  to be there, large gulls rarely linger, but I had had high hopes for the Med Gull. My only photos of it to date have been a bit crap, so I was hoping to get some proper ones. It was not to be. The overall lack of birds on the Flats had saw me instead heading for the Park, via the Waxwings at Westmorland Close just to the south. I counted 37 birds, and then the whole lot got up and flew off west, probably over my house, though they are of course on the all-important garden list already. Photo on the other blog.

Caution - boring bit
Then into the Park proper, there to stake out the Water Rail and test out the high ISO capabilities of a new camera body. As people who know me will testify, I go through camera equipment like it is going out of fashion, and recently sold my backup camera - sent it to Australia as it happens -  in order to finance (partially) a different one. It's not going to replace my main camera, the autofocus capabilities and frame rate are far inferior and as such it isn't suited to bird photography, however it will do kids, landscape and macro. And, as it happens, Water Rails at ISO 5000. Yes, you did read that right, five thousand. That is almost four full stops more sensitive than ISO 400 which is what I normally use. Which allows me to use a shutter speed about thirteen times faster than I would normally get away with. And that, simply put, is sensational. Now most cameras do of course have high ISO settings, nothing new there. The difference is that if you try and use them you will end up with an incredibly grainy looking image. At ISO 5000, it would essentially look like a sheet of sandpaper with a photo printed on it. Now I'm not going to pretend that the image below is noise-free, but the Rail inhabits the darkest, dankest and most overgrown spot in the whole of Wanstead Park. All previous attempts to photograph it have ended in dismal failure. Today I rocked up, no tripod, no monopod, nothing. Click. Best photo of it I've ever taken.

PS, the new camera is a Canon EOS 5D Mark II. I'll try and post some photos in the coming days that show quite how good its 21.1 megapixels are. Something to look forward to eh?

Why Manfrotto is the last word in Monopods

Go and buy a Manfotto monopod. Do it today. In fact, do it sooner than that. Do it now. Do it even if you don't ever think you would use a monopod. One day, you will.  I convinced myself I needed a monopod, and then didn't use it for ages as despite it being about a third of a tripod (go figure) I still couldn't be bothered to carry it. As an afterthought I strapped it to the side of my bag on my trip to Shetland last year, and put my tripod in my suitcase. My suitcase didn't arrive on the same plane I did, or even on the same day. That monopod saved my ass, and meant I was able to bring you this lovely Otter.



Hmm, not bad I thought, and threw the monopod back in it's dusty corner in my living room. Down the side of the bookshelf in case you were wondering. There it lay, or stood, whatever, for the next three months. Then I had to go to America, and so I dug it out again. I knew I wouldn't have much if any time for photography, so a tripod would have been overkill. It made this Eastern Bluebird shot possible. Without it there would have been a dribble of blue and red, possibly identifiable as a bird, but nothing beyond that.



You know what monopod, for eighteen quid off Ebay, you are the nuts. I mean, you are the best. You are constructed of cheapo aluminium, have a rubber grip and a standard screw thing, and that's it. No frills, no carbon fibre weave, no fancy-ass weight-saving clips or built in spirit level. You weigh 800g, but you can support 10kg. You are one tough little cookie, and you cost me naff all. And you're the reason I'm back in the UK and not still lying in the snow in Lithuania.

The defining moment for my monopod came on my recent trip. We (Bradders) got the hire car - the second hire car - stuck in snow. Properly stuck. The engine block was resting on compacted snow, the puny wheels spinning uselessly in deep troughs of their own making. We had no shovel. Enter the monpod. The Manfrotto 680B Icepick. We dug the car out with my monopod and our bare hands. The monopod was instrumental, extended, for reaching all the way under the car and smashing out compacted blocks of snow. A tripod would have been too unwieldy, a carbon fibre implement perhaps likely to shatter with a misplaced blow. An aluminium cheap as chips monopod? Ideal. It took two hours, but we did it. I am never travelling without my monopod again.

Other uses could include bashing sueda, a walking stick, beating off muggers and rabid twitchers, helping to balance on a tightrope, punting small bitey dogs in graceful arcs across broom fields, and stirring one of those record-breaking giant paellas. Or bird photography.

More Woodpeckers

A few more pics from Lithuania, in case you hadn't had enough in the last post. A brilliant experience, best ever views of even the common woodpeckers. Look at the trees - stripped bare. I think we had eleven woodpeckers feeding simultaeneously at one point. Awesome.

Middle Spotted Woodpecker. A month ago I had never even seen one of these, and was straining to see one in the very tops of some tall trees. These close views were an unbelievable treat. This one has a damaged lower mandible.

Rufous Turtle Woodpecker, Dendrocopus streptobalticensis. Note the weak bill, it is primarily a ground feeder. Relatively rare, even in Lithuania, we were lucky to get these views.

And everyone's favourite peanut-stealer, Great Spotted Woodpecker. Wish I got views like this in my garden. I may need to re-jig my feeders to create some better opportunities.

Lithuania, again - Woodpecker Heaven

Once we had faffed about getting the new car started (it didn't like the cold apparently...) we were on our way. A bit of birding in Estonia on the way back, including the wonderful Soomaa National Park where we had stonking views of a White-backed Woodpecker smashing the bejeezus out of a dead trunk, but the main draw awaited us back in Lithuania - Jos' feeding station north of Vilnius.




Before that I should probably mention Latvia, which so far hasn't really had a look in. We actually stopped in Latvia. It was dark, and all we did was eat a burger and have a coffee, but we did set foot in Latvia and very nice it was too. An excellent country tick, though the burger was on the thin side. Anyway, Latvia done, though Schumacher Bradnum got to visit it again, including a full tour of the back of a Latvian police car.

North of Vilnius the following day, we hit the feeders. Amazing, simply amazing. Birds are pretty few and far between in the Baltic states in mid-February, but here, with the promise of boundless quantities of free peanuts, seeminly every Woodpecker in Lithuania had gathered. A Grey-headed, three Middle Spotted, six Great Spotted, a White-backed, and two Black. I didn't see them all, but some rather good photo opportunities which I am pleased to be able to bore you with.

Estonia, or "How to be even Colder"

We arrived at the ferry terminal of Virstu before first light, a flawless drive by Jos. The first sign that things were seriously wrong was when I walked from the car to the waiting room without putting on any gloves. Perhaps a thirty second walk, at most forty five. Sweet baby Moses - hands lost all feeling about halfway. So now I knew what -24c meant. Quite extraordinary. I put gloves on.


Once on the island of Saaremaa, it's roughly a two hour drive to the far end, the peninsular of Undva where our quarry, a wintering flock of Steller's Eider, hopefully awaited us. A dip after an eight hour drive would have been somewhat galling. As we approached it didn't look good. The bay was frozen as far as the eye could see - as Jos put it, we were in danger of dipping the sea, let alone any birds. We abandoned the car some two or three miles from the end due to heavy snow making the track impassable, and carried on on foot. True to form, I fell over multiple times, including a superbly flailing effort that saw me swirl about six feet to my left and land in a snowdrift. We ploughed on (literally) and gained the shore - more ice, though a few patches of open water. One Goosander, three Goldeneye, hardly a good reward. Carrying on up the beach, White-tailed Eagles flying before us, we espied a more distant patch of clear water towards the point. It seemed to contain Swans. Things began to look up, but it was another half hour of slipping and a sliding (skateaway that's all) before we rounded the tip and finally got confirmation that we were in with a chance.

 

Dipping the Sea

The sea, although 200m distant due to ice, was alive with birds. Thousands of them. Goldeneye, Mallard and Mute Swan dominated, but small flocks of Goosander, Whooper Swan, Smew, Velvet Scoter, a handful of Common Eider, and some funny apricot-breasted ducks diving in unison. Magic. We had done it, and there they were. Not the hundreds I had anticipated, but probably thirty or so in a tight-knit flock. Eventually we were treated to a close fly-by by a few birds, great views. For a while I didn't feel the cold, even though the landscape could have been the Weddell Sea. We finally dragged ourselves away for the long trudge back to the car, and once back in it, immediately crashed it. Legal restrictions prevent me from saying exactly who was driving, but suffice it to say that we ended up pointing into the sky, perhaps at an angle of thirty degrees, with surprised looks on our faces. We quickly established that we were all fine, but that the car had some, er, cosmetic issues. Let me demonstrate with some before and after shots.




 

We limped back to the hotel, and made some apologetic calls to a man who had until recently owned a pristine rental car. To cut a long story short, they agreed to meet us the following morning back on the mainland with a replacement car, albeit a crappy little car. Happy days, kind of.