Blanket coverage

Just who are the Gideons? A bunch of people with a lot of spare books it seems. Given how many hotels have Sky, I'm at a loss to understand why the international traveller may need additional comfort, but somehow these guys have infiltrated every single room on the planet, to the point where I'm disappointed if I open a bedside drawer and don't find a bible. They are truly omnipresent, which I guess is part of the message. I wonder if this evangelism on the sly ever works? I mean, like any large organisation, they must try and work out how successful they are, wouldn't you think? Do they not have stats? Or is it purely based on how many books they can shift? In my view it has to be the latter, as the former is patently impossible - I've never been asked to take a survey. So, make a Gideon happy this Christmas. Take a hotel bible home and recycle it.

Where did the year go?

Like all good bird bloggers I am busy writing up the customary, nay expected, "year in review" post. They might read like they are slapped together in five minutes flat, but actually (like all posts hem hem) they are carefully constructed masterpieces of witty prose. As I started to choose what bird or birding event might win or lose various categories, and even what the categories might be (once again I very sadly find myself lacking in domestic incidents), it strikes me as amazing that 2013 is very nearly over. Where did it go exactly? I suppose that this is one reason why writing is very helpful, in that if you so choose it can force you to recall what's been going on, but even though I say this every year I am stunned at how quickly it's gone. Quicker than ever really, and I fully expect 2014 to accelerate even more. My son turns 10 in a couple of weeks. For him of course it's entirely normal, but for me it's a decade, double figures, and I can scarcely believe it. I'm close to 40, even closer than I was last year, and at some point in the not too distant future I will (hopefully) actually get there, and then where will I be? What's after 40? It isn't 41, in case that's what you were wondering. No, it's 50. And then it's 60, 70 & 80. And then I can retire....

Here's another gratuitous photo of the kids. If you add their ages up they're just over half my age. The good news is that the equation is now moving in my favour.

Lucky Dip

My hopes of doing any birding whatsoever this weekend have been utterly dashed by work both yesterday and today. Such is life, I will make it up another time I guess. I had it easy, at least getting a few hours of sleep; others were less fortunate and got none at all. There is however a massive plus, which is that at about 10pm I had basically made up my mind to twitch the Desert Wheatear on Severn Beach, which is approximately 150 miles away from dear old Wanstead.

There were two reasons for wanting to do this. The first was quite stupid, and was that seeing Desert Wheatear would mean that I would have seen four Wheatear species in the UK this year. Pretty meaningless. The second reason was that I'd seen a photo of it perched on Lee's earring, and frankly I wanted a bit of that - remember the Izzy Wheatear and how wonderful that was? This was going to raise the wonderfulness bar. Other weekend choices included the Black-throated Diver in Eastbourne, or the Grey Phal in Suffolk, but the weather looked poor in the south-east, so Bristol it was. Except that I worked until about midnight last night, and this being an indication that not everything was rosy in that space, I decided very reluctantly to knock the Wheatear on the head and instead work on Sunday as well.

And this is the massive plus, as somebody decided to knock the Wheatear on the head and it isn't there today. Rarely have I been so pleased about working at the weekend, and my mood has been transformed from severe chuntering to a point where a smile almost crossed my face! As I needed to be back in London for mid-afternoon, I had been planning on leaving home at 6am, spending perhaps 3 hours with the bird, and then heading home. No waiting on news like I might normally do, and thus it turns out I would have been very disappointed, and caned another 300 miles and another fifty quid for nothing. So a bit of a result there.

Another result is this. Not quite Ivory Gull, which having departed Orkney only yesterday is presumably still on its way, but nonetheless a great garden record, and is probably the first in London since the departure of the regular Isle of Dogs bird about four years ago. It's currently remaining quite faithful to the carcass, and as such I'm pleased to able to announce that for a small fee my garden will be open to the twitching public from about 4pm tomorrow.

Plan B

I don't really have any time in which to travel any distance. Northumberland, Aberdeen, North Uist and Orkney are all completely out of the question. So here's plan B........ If it works, you'll be the first to know.

Just a perfect day

It sometimes takes very little to make me happy. What I wanted from today was to do largely nothing, to go to the dump, to do a spot of local birding with my camera, and to take some photos of the kids. That's me, rock and roll. I didn't want to drive a long way to see a bird - it would have needed to have been spectacular and close. And lo and behold the day passed exactly as I intended, which unfortunately makes for a very boring blog post indeed. Such is life, and with a few semi-serious topics covered recently, there has been a distinct lack of colour. This I intend to rectify right now.

But first the kids. I started writing this in 2009, and I'm coming up to five years of bashing it out. This means that back then they were pretty small, but look at them now! My eldest is about to turn ten, I can scarcely believe it. I took this photo on Wanstead Flats this afternoon when we went out and had a run around. No binoculars involved! Though a tripod did come as I wanted to take a proper photograph of them.....I know this is highly self-indulgent, but just look at them! Twenty-five years ago, when I was a spotty oik, you could have had simply amazing odds on this outcome.



That was this afternoon. Prior to this was a very satisfying trip to the tip. I had been in the loft to find a cardboard box in which to package one of those speakers I flogged on Ebay (£226 thank you very much Mr. I'll-take-them-off-your-hands-for-£150!). When I was up there I stubbed my toe on what turned out to be an old computer monitor, you know, a big square one of the sort that don't exist any more. Next to that was an old TV, again large and square. Then I found a keyboard and mouse from about 1995, and a heap of original cardboard packaging for stuff that had gone years ago. Before I knew it I was heaving all this crap down the ladder and into the car, such that this morning there was no alternative but to drive it to the tip, where a man who was clearly not from round here nearly didn't let me in as he didn't know where Wanstead was and if it was part of Redbridge or not.

After a lot of strenuous heaving, I was left with two items in the car - a large lens and a tripod. Good thing I didn't get carried away and chuck them into the electricals skip....Instead I took them to Wanstead Park, where I spent a happy hour or so determining that 800mm and a 1.4x converter are a pretty useful pairing when there is no heat in the air. Nothing particularly special on Heronry, but bar an hour last weekend I'd not fired off a frame off all week, and I don't want to stagnate. Here's a few from the session - lovely light early afternoon as you can see, and still some autumn colour.

It never ends - Baikal Teal happiness!

I have well and truly got my twitching hat on at the moment, funny how it goes. Today's target was the Baikal Teal just north of Merseyside, and even though I was feeling somewhat less than 100% after a nasty (but fast-moving) cold I still felt up for it. Up for it enough that once again I planned to leave on no news - at this time of year there is no alternative when there is some distance involved. The bird has been around for nearly ten days now, and although initially dismissed as a hybrid on the first weekend, there may have been a two bird theory going on as it looks spot on. The storms in the week didn't push it off, so plans were made on Friday despite my ill health. Only Nick was up for it, with Bradders in Wales, Shaun not wanting to do the time in the car, Hawky surveying, and the Monkey suffering from a severe bout of oldwomanflu. Up at five am, on the road by half past, on site by half nine, the easiest drive you could imagine with a quality breakfast dirty twitcher's breakfast thrown in.

As we walked out along the sea wall we passed people coming back. Assuming it was therefore there we asked if they'd had good views, and were surprised when they said it hadn't been seen yet. Guess they must have been locals who had seen it already. We pressed on, and soon joined the long line of really cool people with scopes. As I extended my tripod legs somebody found it, and so fifteen minutes after arriving we were all done. It looks like the real deal as far I can gather from having looked at various images on line. No hint of any other species in it, no bling, fully winged, it can fly quite happily and nobody has yet claimed that they have lost one! Mega! Of course it's impossible to determine where it came from, whether it has jumped a fence or has instead arrived with a pile of eastern-based Wigeon, but I'm hopeful that it gets the benefit of the doubt. Let's face it, pretty much every Yank duck gets accepted in the same circumstances, so I've got a pretty good feeling about this one - I wouldn't have clocked up nearly 500 miles had I not, and in fact I've taken the liberty of whacking it on my list already. I wonder if I should remove the Dusky Thrush? Sorry no photos - I realised that they would be complete rubbish and didn't even take my camera out of my bag, instead enjoying great scope views of a really smart bird, the first I've seen anywhere. I watched it for as long as I could bear the bloke to my right giving running commentary on its every move, and when I could take no more carried on along the sea wall to have a wider look at the estuary and marshland.

Superb! Birds everywhere, huge numbers. It's not grim oop north, it's bloody fantastic! Thousands of ducks, thousands of waders. A tidy Merlin, a scruffy Buzzard, and two Great White Egrets distantly towards Blackpool. A quick Double decker was consumed in the hope that the magic would flow and the bird would fly off never to be seen again whilst Bradders was still en route, and then we had to head back south as I needed to back in London for the early evening. But 2013 is the year that keeps on giving! We hadn't been on the road long before news of an Ivory Gull in Northumberland came through - wow! A quick look at the distance involved and it was sadly pretty clear we would never make it before dark, so we carried on down the M6. A wise decision, as sat here now I just worked out that even had we turned around immediately we would have arrived about an hour after sunset. Remarkably, one Ivory Gull at Seahouses became two Ivory Gulls at Seahouses, and with another in Aberdeenshire I'm mildly hopeful of seeing one this winter somewhere. Hopefully on the seal I just pegged out in the garden.

Got home around half three, well ahead of Mrs L's deadline, and was able to chill out for a bit before heading out to pick up the kids from their trip into London. Tomorrow we have nothing planned, and tonight the only thing remaining to do is to crack open une bouteille of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Because twitching a duck doesn't quite portray me as cool enough, I'm thinking that the heat of 2003 would be good for my cold. I'll let you know how it goes.

End of the Line?

Within birding circles certain topics evoke huge feeling like you would not believe. The three following small words contain a huge amount of meaning if you're of a certain age, which I'm not, being still very youthful and devil-may-care. They are slender, billed, and Curlew. Away back in 1998, away up in Northumberland, what may or may not have been a bit of a runty Curlew was found. Proclaimed as a Slender-billed Curlew, a species near extinction, many twitchers moved heaven and earth to get up there and see it for themselves. Some managed it, some didn't. And as you can imagine this provoked a highly partisan debate about whether it was one or not. Whether or not this debate was split evenly down the lines of who saw it and who didn't I cannot possibly say. Suffice it to say that the bird got accepted by the various committees that exist in order to make decisions on these things, and those who saw it tucked it away on their British lists whilst sticking two fingers up at those who didn't see it and weren't keen on it being one. From what I can gather, righteous indignation reigned.

For years.

Even now Druridge Bay's Wikipedia entry makes mention of it, and the bird itself has a full page! But today, in the latest twist to this long-running saga, it was formally kicked off the list again, a mere 15 years later!. Also kicked off again was the longest running BirdForum thread in the history of the universe, which was started in 2008 as a ten year anniversary "celebration" of the arrival of the bird. Birders have long memories, and year after year the debate rumbled on. If I may summarise briefly....

"Is!"
"Is not!"
"Is!"
"Is not!"
.....

It was at its most active in the first two years, which saw 38 out of the [current] 55 pages, and 2011 was still pretty good, contributing a further 13. Thereafter it slowly declined, including an unforgiveable break of eight months until a mild awakening in February 2012. Perhaps some of the protagonists grew up? It then limped on for another few pages to October 2012, and until today had lain tragically dormant. But in the space of only a few hours we now have another three pages, and the top-class entertainment of watching grown men squabble over something massively inconsequential, err sorry, I meant over a matter of life and death, can begin all over again. Hurrah!

Funnily enough I was recently contacted by an American journalist wanting to find out about birding extremes in the UK. Whilst I am almost certainly not the person she actually needs to be talking to, her timing could not have been better. All she has to do is read 1,355 posts and she will know all she needs to know.