A new low is established. Or a new high.

Do you know where I was this weekend? Where I, the ardent patch-worker and anti-twitcher was? Scilly. I am disgusted with myself, I am so so weak. If I look back at this blog, I am certain to find post after post decrying twitching, promoting common sense, enobling patch-working, and generally sounding holier-than-thou. And then what do I go and do? I twitch Scilly. No, no, no, I'm not interested in twitching any more, stupid hobby, not for me.

Never, ever, believe anything I say.

Perhaps you didn't anyway? I do, it is true, have a love hate relationship with twitching. I think it comes and goes in phases. Earlier this year, certainly at the beginning of the year, my interest in twitching was at an all-time low. Ditto with year-listing. Gradually as the year has progressed I've been getting these urges that I have been finding increasingly difficult to suppress. This has culminated in hiring a car at Aberdeen airport and snaffling the Sandhill Crane, day-tripping Scilly for a Solitary Sandpiper that eluded me but coming away with a Black-and-White Warbler, and now this latest fraud, twitching Scilly again, this time for the Northern Waterthrush, a bird I saw about ten of in New York in April. What, exactly, is wrong with me? Why do I do it?

Because it was fun! Yes I spent a ton of money, yes I drove a stack of miles, yes I played no part in family life this weekend, but boy oh boy, what a great trip! And that's what it's all about. I spent a very pleasant two days strolling around St Mary's looking at mostly common birds, but with a bit of mad running around for the Waterthrush. I spent two evenings in two extremely nice pubs, drinking excellent beer and eating enormous quantities of delicious food. I had a great time taking photographs of highly obliging birds, some of which are the best I have ever taken, and I got loads of yearticks. Er I mean, I saw loads of birds I haven't seen for a long time*.

It's all the bird's fault. Why on earth has a Northern Waterthrush taken up permanent residence on Scilly? Back in September when I was last on, it had just arrived. I didn't see it, in fact made no effort to see it, putting what limited time I had into the Black-and-White Warbler, a brilliant Bee-eater, and the no-show Solitary Sand. I left the islands a very happy man, the Northern Waterthrush of no consequence. The next weekend it was still there, but I was on Shetland. Pah! The following weekend it was there again, but I was in Norfolk. As you can see, I hardly ever go birding... The next weekend it was still there. Pah! Not twitching Scilly again, lunacy! The next weekend it was there again. For God's sake just LEAVE!!!! It didn't, and was still there the following weekend. Fine, stay then, it doesn't bother me as I am DEFINITELY NOT GOING. Not now. Not ever.

By Tuesday of last week I was surreptitiously checking Scillonian sailing times and Skybus prices. By Wednesday, all pretence had gone and I was pricing it up and convincing Bradders that it was a really really good idea. Thursday, and I was packed and ready to go. Friday morning and I was actually on the boat. Berating myself, obviously. It was a glorious day. Hardly a breath of wind, blue skies and bright sunshine. There is something magical about birding in short sleeves on the cusp of November. The pace was relaxed for most of the day, and in truth we saw very little. The other target birds, Upland Sandpiper and Wilson's Snipe, had both contrived to disappear the day before, and Thursday's Red-eyed Vireo remained precisely that; Thursday's. At about 4.30, knowing the Waterthrush's likely movements, we strolled the ten minutes from Lower Moors to Higgo's Pool. Sidetracked by two Firecrests going bonkers at each other, we arrived about half an hour later to learn that the Waterthrush had been showing for the previous fifteen minutes but had disappeared five minutes ago.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A tense twenty minutes followed with no sign. Then a message came through to say it was at Lower Moors, about twenty seconds away as the Waterthrush flies, but about five minutes as the fat person runs. What to do? We ran. Bradders is much, much younger than I am, and so arrived much, much more quickly. He is also less fat. I kind of ran, but mostly panted, struggled for breath, and walked a bit. Finally in sight of the Shooter's Pool screen, I could just about see Bradders frantically waving me on. Arriving at the screen, someone made way, but in those last fifteen seconds.... "Just gone round the corner mate, far left" said one of the birders there. Gah!
And then suddenly there it was. I had ten seconds of it, perhaps not even that many, and then it disappeared and didn't come back. Magic, pure magic.

When I came to and could stand again, we decided that we would wander back to Higgo's Pool in case it came back. Ignoring the plaintive calls of the evil Firecrests, we arrived back there to learn that the bird had come in for two minutes and then zoomed off again. Higgo, pool-digging supremo, opined that that was that. We waited. We waited some more. Nothing. And then it was back! Calling at ASBO-inducing volumes, it came back in pursued by a Robin, and spent the next twenty minutes feeding in front of perhaps eight silent observers. Towards the end of the evening, there were only three of us watching it. What a bloody brilliant bird. The trip, the expense, justified in an instant. Forgive the photos, ISO 6400, though in one sense utterly miraculous, is relatively unforgiving.

That evening, thrift went out the window. Despite being sucked dry by the Isles of Scilly Steamship Company and Esso, we were on the kind of high that couldn't be dampened. Ridiculous as this sounds, particularly coming from me, sometimes twitching is really really good. This was one of those times. The previous evening I had been in an office in Canary Wharf. Less than twenty-four hours later I was in the Mermaid Pub in Hughtown on St Mary's, indulging in a vast and waist-expanding meal, and drinking Doom Bar, Scuppered, Betty Stoggs..... Twitching might be stupid, but sometimes, just sometimes, and if you can get past the meaningless tick aspect, it is superb.

* About a year...

My new old home

I'm back at Canarius Wharfus Maximus. The very words are depressing. Canary Wharf, a place of shiny buildings and expensive suits. A place with pointless shops and more coffee and smoothie places than are needed in the whole of the UK. Three quid for a tall, skinny, soya caramel latte? Sign me up! In truth, I did not miss it at all. Neither the commute, nor the place. Give me Wanstead Flats any day. But this is irrelevant. I am back.

Home Sweet Home

Nothing has really changed. It is still a concrete jungle with a few pockets of habitat. The stories you read about Blyth's Reed Warblers hopping around in roses at the foot of tower may or may not be true, but take it from me, you struggle to find even a Robin on the estate. Search back through this blog for long enough and you'll find joyous posts about finding some Great Tits (take that Google engines!) and a Wren. Beyond Crow and Pigeon, I've not seen a passerine yet. The place is a desert. My gloom was momentarily lifted today when a Peregrine happened to fly past the very window I was sat at, a smallish male by the looks of it, but on the whole the place is bird free.

Not that I have to go birding anyway, as I am working my little cotton socks off, trying to get my childcare-dulled brain to comprehend securities lending and repo financing. It is a world away from plasticine and colouring-in fairies. It pays better though, which is why I'm doing it. Today, before I'd even had lunch, I had to go to a meeting in a different building. On the way I passed what is officially known as "habitat". Look, here it is.

"Habitat"


It looks like someone has actually gone to Habitat, the shop, and bought some of those ridiculous bamboo stems of different heights in white china pots that were so fashionable several years ago, atatched them to a discarded doormat, and then chucked the whole lot over the side of the dock. I'm no ecologist, but what exactly is the point? Maybe they're in fact very very small Phragmites, and I'm as good at botany as I am ecology, and in six months time they'll be crawling with Sedgies. Time will tell. Today they held nothing, a few desultory Mallards avoiding them at the far edge. Highlights today on my walk were two Coots and a Moorhen.
Take that Shetland!

Binocular Confessional

I have a Binocular obsession. There, I’ve said it. Like most people I have two eyes. They are, again like most people, nicely positioned either side of the top of my nose. In other words my face, other than being a bit fat, is perfectly normal. With my two evenly-spaced eyes, I can use precisely one pair of binoculars. Any more than one, and I get into all sorts of difficulty.

Why then do I currently have six pairs of binoculars? Ok, so one of these was a freebie with a magazine subscription and lives in the car, and is about as technologically advanced as two smarty tubes with the lids popped off (and about as useful for seeing birds with) but the other ones are all proper ones, and at any one time, four of them are likely to be gathering dust. I could argue that I have one pair for each member of the family, but I put them all off birds years ago, and with the exception of muffin, they’re about as likely to pick up a pair of bins as they are to take Duivendijk to bed for some light perusing.

Once upon a time, I had one pair of binoculars. I’d saved up for them, they were my first really nice pair. I’d thought that the ones I’d inherited from my grandfather were amazing, then I picked up some Leica Ultravids and I saw the light. I watched out for my pennies, they turned into pounds, and after what seemed like an age I gathered them into a huge pile and dragged them to a Leica dealer in central London, emerging some time later with a very nice and shiny pair of my dream bins.

Do you know what happened to them? I’ve almost certainly mentioned it before, and it still chokes me up. On my way back home after a long, hard day of honest toil, four less-honest people jumped on me in Bush Wood because they wanted my mobile phone. Needless to say they took my mobile phone, and as an afterthought, my bag too. With it went my prized binoculars. What happened to them, who can say? Outwardly they look like a pair of bins, with nothing to suggest they were worth twenty times what my phone was worth. The ready currency of thugs and petty criminals generally being portable electronics with things like Nokia and Sony written on them, I suspect that my bins, with their quaint little red scripted dot on, ended up in a bin. Or a bush perhaps.  It doesn’t matter. They were gone, and from that point on binoculars ceased to be something special. With the insurance payout fortunately coinciding with the dealers looking to clear old stock in preparation for an updated model, I bought two replacement pairs, a 7x for general birding, and 10x for when I would be without a scope. And then for good measure, I bought a cheap(ish) pair of small second-hand roof-prisms to use on the patch that wouldn’t cause me much angst if I was robbed again. Needless to say I always used one of the other pairs instead.

For a year or two, this new status quo was maintained. To Mrs L, one pair of bins looks much like another, and no subterfuge was needed. Recently though, I bought a pair of porros out of curiosity, and they are so good that I can’t possibly sell them again, but unfortunately I can’t possibly go birding with them because they look so antiquated and rubbish. I have an image to maintain, dontchaknow? Not really. Though they are optically sensational, wide and bright, they are not waterproof, and as such, useless for birding. They now live on a windowsill at home, ready for the day when a distant raptor needs resolving into a Short-toed Eagle with an abysmally poor sense of direction. I’ve used them twice I think, and they were both Crows.

All was going well, and then for no reason at all other than that they were a “bargain”, I bought another pair last week. I really really like them. They could easily turn into the bins I use every day. So now I have a problem, a stupid problem entirely of my own making. What I really need to do is pull myself together, select one pair, two tops, that I will keep, and get rid of the rest. Any one of them will last a lifetime, and I only have about half of one of those to go. I can perhaps justify keeping one of the cheaper ones for the kids to use when they come out with me, or as a backup in case something bad should happen, but beyond that it is just plain stupid, not to mention greedy, to have any more than one pair. So I am going to man up, and get rid of some. It pains me, but I know it is the right thing to do and that I will feel better for it. Question is, which ones.....

Barrel-dredging

I was so bored today that I drove round the M25 (well, was driven round the M25 would be slightly more accurate) to see a Glossy Ibis. Yawn. I am told that Glossy Ibis is a real London blocker, that there hasn't been a twitchable one since Andrew M saw one in 1937. Well, perhaps there hasn't, but I could still derive very little pleasure from seeing it, and my mood only lifted slightly when it flew off. There was a time, only a few short years ago, when I looked at Glossy Ibis in my field guide and drooled a bit. What a massive rarity - look, three stars in the Collins! Bet I'll never see one of those, mega.

My chance came in October 2008 when I dashed to the Cambridgeshire fens and connected! It was my 274th UK bird (I very nearly got a Tshirt made up). So what has changed? Have I lost my birding innocence? No. The trouble is that I have now seen three in the last two weeks. Glossy Ibis are everywhere, almost pestilential. No watermeadow is safe, and rumour has it that DEFRA will have to be called in soon to start shooting them lest they start breeding with our native Cattle Egrets.

Still, the day could have been a lot worse. A LOT. At six in the evening yesterday I was on the point of packing my bags for Cornwall, and we all know what would have happened then.... Thankfully common sense prevailed, and I decided to stay at home. Wanstead was very quiet so Nick & I went to Rainham. This was once again packed to the rafters with waders and wildfowl, so after kicking a few stones by Aveley tip we decided the only thing for it was to circumnavigate the M25 for a Glossy Ibis. That is how bad it's been today. Roll on tomorrow...

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. This one was in Essex last weekend. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Finchtastic

I had intended not to blog today, but I have news. I was going to give you all a break, but I cannot help myself. I don't honestly don't believe in daily posting for the sake of it, as I'm sure you all know. Though how would you tell.....

Anyway, I have important news. Happy news. Played for and got news. The best kind of news really. I recently moaned, uncharacteristically, about not being able to get out on the patch for proper birding. This remains true, but I realised that there was an alternative, which was to engage in a spot of viz-migging from the garden. This is where you get up really early, stand getting really cold in the half-light, and neither see nor hear birds. Winner. That said, this is how I got Waxwing on the garden list last year. That was a fluke of course, but my thinking today was that there are a lot of finches about, including Crossbills...

It started slowly, as it always does. My warming mug of tea a distant memory, it took forty-five minutes for the first migrating birds to make it onto the list - some distant and invisible Redpolls. Things picked up at around half seven when I started to get decent numbers of Greenfinch and Chaffinch, as well as a rare Pied Wagtail. But the real played for and got birds appeared just before eight. Eight, possibly nine Crossbills flying north-east. Calling, and calling loudly. OMG.

Now it's all too easy when viz-migging to "hear" a bird you need for your some list or other, and Crossbill is not a bird I hear often. But there was no doubt - I had been listening to Crossbill calls on my phone only half an hour earlier. What surprised me was how loud they were. They probably passed over about six or eight houses down, but the calls positively rang out. The whole experience lasted about fifteen seconds, as the loose flock appeared over the big trees and then disappeared over the houses. Fifteen seconds, but still sensational. What I particularly enjoyed was the planning element. Just the inkling that I could strike lucky, and that tiny tiny thought meant I was there, and ready. I can't wait for tomorrow.

Crossbill is a patch tick, and the best place to get patch ticks from is of course from the garden. On the offchance that anyone is interested in the numbers, I feel it is my solemn duty as a birding dullard to lay them out. Here and now, you cannot escape. It is bird #126 for the patch, bird #76 for the garden, and bird #109 for the patch yearlist, which is of extra significance as my patch record is 108, achieved last year with a Treecreeper. There are still quite a few possibilities as well - Goosander, Goldeneye and Ruddy Duck, or perhaps winter Geese. Or Nuthatch, Brambling, Siberian Rubythroat, Firecrest....

Coffee Break

Nick is finally back from ticking every bird under the sun on Scilly. This is great news, as between children and work I have had almost no chance to get out on the patch, and coverage has thus been almost non-existent. With the declining daylight, I can't get out in the mornings, and this work malarky has meant I can't get out in the daytime either, and to round it off nicely, the children and encroaching darkness preclude getting out in the evening. You have no idea how frustrating this is. When Mrs L was at home, I'd do a quick half-hour on the patch before going to work; it kept me going, made work that much easier. Now there's no chance.

Today, just before lunch, Nick found a Stonechat in the Broom on his way home. "Coffee break?" he enquired, sardonically. What perfect timing, you know what, I do feel like a coffee. Excellent. Leaving my extremely large and very interesting spreadsheet containing 50,000 rows of things, I grabbed some bins coffee and headed out to Wanstead Flats to look through them drink it. Two young ladies from somewhere east of here were unfortunately walking eleven dogs (yes, eleven) through the exact spot where the Stonechat had been, so there was no sign of it. Not that I was looking, I was drinking coffee, remember? Soon though the pack disappeared, and the Stonechat re-appeared. Hooray, a patch year tick, and equalling last year's total of 108! And coinciding with my coffee break too, what luck. I put my bins back in my pocket finished my coffee and went back home to continue looking at the extremely large spreadsheet, but with added elan and happiness. My first visit to the patch in five days, and although extremely brief, extremely pleasing.

I have no idea why I took my camera on my coffee break

Life lists are a load of crap

Yes, I’m sorry, yet another blog post on listing. The opportunities to waffle on about listing are many and varied, and frankly I’m amazed I don’t write about it more, for it affords an insight into the minds of many of this country’s finest birders. Or is that listers? The prompt for this post came yesterday at Landguard.

For those of you who have not been there, Landguard sits below Felixstowe on the very southern tip of the Suffolk coast. It is a short shingle spit, and like many shingle spits in this counrty, is covered in old concrete things designed to impede tanks, with yet more old concrete things that used to contain large guns with which to blast tanks as they attempted to negotiate old concrete things, or at that period in history, new concrete things. In the event I don’t think any tanks ever arrived, but that is by the by – this is not a history blog. In the middle of the spit there is a very large concrete thing that was once a fort, or something, and this is now home to the Landguard Bird Observatory. The Obs is surrounded by Holm Oaks and Tamarisks, and is somewhat of an obstacle course for small birds, being filled with mist nets and people with small bags. These people find a lot of birds, not only entangled in nets, but also in the bushes and brambles surrounding the fort. This is what happened yesterday, and Bradders and I were the happy recipients of news that either a Booted or Skyes’s Warbler had been found at Landguard. Being a mere twenty miles away, we decided, there and then, to go. Filth.

We arrived to find a lot of people already there, with more arriving all the time. The bird was remarkably obliging, feeding in the open, and sometimes just sitting around in the open doing nothing. Excellent and prolonged scope views were had by all, and the noise of camera shutters, had we been in the 1940s, would have had gunners in concrete things in a right old panic. Booted Warbler is a rare bird, but Skyes’s Warbler is even rarer. Much rarer. The two were previously considered conspecific, so nobody went to see Sykes’s Booted Warbler. Now that it is treated as full species there is a surprising amount of interest. More than a few 500+ listers still haven’t seen a Sykes’s Warbler. Oh dear, what a shame.

Can you guess what the favoured outcome of the identity debate on this bird was? Bet you can’t…..I shall put you out of your misery – amazingly, many people there wanted the bird to be a Skyes’s. Unbelievable, but true. Out of genuine interest? Not on your nelly. They wanted to be able to say that they had seen a new bird. Sykes’s would a be a tick, Booted, nothing. Nul points. At this point I should declare a vested interest. Being fairly new to this seeing vagrant bird malarkey, I had only seen a Sykes’s Warbler, and not a Booted. Booted was an outcome that suited my list particularly well. And although the bird was a challenging one, it didn’t take long for the backs of cameras to get scrutinised to the nth degree, and with Obs literature to hand, the bird quickly resolved into the one I wanted. But this was against a backdrop of very experienced birders trying to talk it into a Sykes’s Warbler, searching for tenuous things that might make it one, trying to convince others of the light. Surely this is a Sykes’s, one implored.  

My comments about teaching Nils (Van Duivendijk) everything he knows were obviously in jest. He spent some time with other people too. But even I, with my pathetic bird knowledge, my almost non-existent grasp of bird topography (I believe I got tertials and secondaries mixed up yesterday, but maybe not, that’s how clear I am), managed to look at it critically. And really, it was simple. The bird was browny-beige. The Sykes’s I had seen on Shetland had looked grey. Booted. End of. The ringers caught it a bit later and measured its eyelid or something. Guess what? Booted. Hurrah, so I get to tick it, and the legions of mega-listers came away disappointed. Not a new bird, just another bloody Booted Warbler. Wasted journey.

What amazed me is that it was obvious that some of the people there didn’t actually know the difference between the two birds. Granted that it is subtle, but the information is out there. If I can read (and mostly comprehend) Duivendijk, then trust me, anyone can. But when a bird is just a tick in box, it’s clear that being able to ID it for yourself is for some people irrelevant. I am guilty of this of course, as I am sure are many twitchers new to the glorious sport. In fact to begin with I was a hopeless tick and run machine, and my recent experience with a funny Greenshank served only to hammer the point home. But to continue to be guilty of it after twenty or more years and having seen in excess of 500 species is an exercise in the pointless.

I would not go far as to say that the size of someone’s BOU list is the inverse of their birding abilty or knowledge, but it raises the question as to exactly what the point of having a large life list is. Given that a tick is prized so highly, what exactly does it mean to have a lot of them? What does it measure exactly? Well, it is not totally without value. It measures your ability to read a map and drive somewhere. And it also takes in your ability to have a flexible working arrangement/low moral standards re work, or a large trust-fund? The UK400 club “list of lists” that causes so much furore is what then? Irrelevant? One-upmanship in tabular form? And Bubo, where I record my little-league list?

I like lists, I have no problem admitting that. I take regular medication to ensure the number of lists I keep remains sensible. I think I have about eight, if you exclude year-lists. The one that really matters to most people is their UK life list. This is the biggie, the one people brag about, the one people mistakenly think commands respect. My entry on the list of lists, were I to have one, would be 380, presumably a few more in UK400 terms. This is so lowly that I wouldn’t even get on the list. I am nothing, a birding nobody. And yet those pitiful 380 birds on my list tell people nothing about my field ability, but presumably the assumption would be that I’m not much good. That happens to be true, but the number of birds I’ve seen isn’t the reason. Isn’t that odd?  The fact that I’ve even seen as many as 380 birds is down to two things. I can read a map, and I can drive. Well jolly well done me I say. When I reach 400 I will slap myself on the back and offer myself hearty congratulations on my tenacity. But not on my skill. The two are not related. Pointless.

So what does mark a good birder out? The classic measure would presumably be a self-found list, but there is an argument to say that land-locked birders are at a severe disadvantage. Sure, they can drive to the coast, and I’m sure many do, but ultimately the guy who can be in the sueda ten-minutes after rolling out of bed will have a clear and distinct advantage. Still, I’m sure the measure has its uses, particularly as many many keen birders deliberately live on the coast. I would, and at the drop of a hat. I am however extremely tied to London, and have sworn on many occasions that I am Never. Moving. House. Again. Stamp tax is one reason. Packing and unpacking is the major one. Thus when I added up my self-found life list the other day, it came to a meagre 215. I can’t blame that on London though, a lot of it is time birding, and the relative inexperience that comes along with that. Oh, and that and I always go out birding with better birders, thus they nearly always call the birds first. Unless they happen to be on the phone, which is what happened the other day, and I was able to seize my chance. Perhaps I should distract them. “Look, what’s that behind you!”, and whilst they turn around quickly scan the juicy habitat they were about to get to. Might work. But I am thinking of a different measure. An unquantifiable one, or rather a series of unquantifiable measures. What about the birder who enthuses about common birds, the birder who can accurately draw a Blue Tit from memory? The birder who spends time counting breeding birds, observing regular activity like nest-building. How about the birder who carries and uses a notebook, an argument that gets touted again and again, and with some merit. The birder who instantly knows the calls of common birds and thus pauses when something out of the ordinary calls from a bush. The birder who can smell weather. The birder who questions facts that are known as standard knowledge, that push the boundaries. Surely these guys are the real gurus? The real masters of their craft.

Anyway, next time someone tells you they’ve seen over 500 birds in the UK, the approach is as follows. I dare you. Look amazed. Look stunned. Say “Wow” a lot. Say that you find them god-like, incredible. Then say that you are in awe of their driving skills, amazed by their ability to follow simple directions, and extremely jealous of the amount of free time they have. Do let me know what they say.