Patch woes

How has another month gone by? I'll tell you why, it is because all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And boy am I dull. And lazy. And lacking in inspiration. And frankly the birding has been absolutely dire. And I mean dire. The patch seems unrecognisable from last year. There has been a dribble of migrants. Well. What's smaller and even more pitiful than a dribble? A drip? Yes, let's go with a drip. 

So, this past weekend, all four days of it, I eschewed all the magnificent birding available in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Scilly and so on, and instead thrashed the patch under largely blue skies. Lovely. Surely at this time of year a bank holiday weekend spent locally would pay handsome dividends? The drip would turn into a torrent! I walked 15 miles over 16 hours - I guess there must be a lot of standing around as I don't walk that slowly!

Those 16 hours delivered the following meagre totals: 3 Lesser Whitethroat, 2 Willow Warbler, 1 Swallow, 1 House Martin, 1 Yellow Wagtail and 1 Nightingale. The Nightingale is a quality local bird, not quite annual but seemingly being picked up more often of late. I never saw it of course, but walking past Long Wood early on Good Friday I heard a snatch of song which persuaded me to linger. It took a while to get going, and I was wary of mimicry at play, but after a while it did enough of pure Nightingale to convince James and I of its undeniable identity. Quite mobile, it moved from one end of the copse to the other, at one stage ending up at and singing from the exact spot last year's bird had. It is tempting to think it could be the same individual, but more likely is that it is just semi-decent Nightingale habitat. Not decent enough to hold it sadly, and it was gone the next day. 

So that was the highlight. It is the rest of the list that I think deserves attention. Look at it, just look at it!  I'll repeat it for emphasis. 3 Lesser Whitethroat, 2 Willow Warbler, 1 Swallow, 1 House Martin, 1 Yellow Wagtail. That is the sum total of the other migrants that I saw or heard over four days. Four days!! There are levels of poor, and this is towards the bottom of the lower rungs. Part of me wished I had just jumped in the car and gleefully headed off on a big twitch, but I kept feeling that it just had to happen and so I stuck it out. Of course it didn't happen until this morning when everyone went back to work (by everyone I mean 5% of the local birders as employment is pretty overrated on this patch these days), when the year's first Ring Ouzel made an appearance in front of Marco along with Yellow Wagtails and Wheatears. I cannot help thinking that my whole big local weekend was a big damp squib. Luckily I managed to quickly snaffle the Ouzel as I headed to work else I would be in a foul mood. I don't know what other inland patch workers experienced this weekend, but if it was anything like us then they have my pity and admiration.

At least the weather was good, which meant a lot of gardening that I have been looking forward to was able to get done. And a lot of gardening I had not been looking forward to as well, including over doubling the size of my vegetable patch by removing some large shrubs which came with two massive root balls that needed digging out. The veg patch has not been a great success to this point, and I have done much better growing stuff in large pots. The main reason is that it was excessively shaded by a large sycamore tree in next door's garden, as well as being overrun with weeds from the same garden as we have a wire fence. However some new people have arrived and drastically reduced the size of the tree as well as more generally blitzing the entire garden - cutting almost everything down and ploughing it into a barren wasteland. Not great for nature, but my garden is noticeably brighter and the weed incursion has basically stopped. I figured I'd try again, but I wanted a bigger area - it is not huge, but it has potential. Getting rid of the shrubs above ground was bad enough, but the root balls I had to dig out were huge and I am feeble. I saved this worst of jobs until yesterday. It took me four hours of digging and  levering, and so predictably this morning I was a wreck. But I now have a nice area to sift stones out of and dig manure into when I am well enough. Meanwhile the seeds are germinating in the greenhouse - beans, lettuce, cucumbers and others. Some have already started so I am just in time.

The long weekend and nice weather also meant many opportunities for eating and drinking, both favourite activities of mine. After a long afternoon of toil in the garden, what better than a bit of pre-dinner pick-me-up? It is blood orange season, so....

Lust for Life: 2022 edition

I nearly made it all month without a post but I appear to fallen at the last hurdle, close to covering myself in social media glory but felled by the sucker punch of actually having something to say. Or thinking I have at any rate. To start with though let me state that 2022 has not been great - a maelstrom of endless work and constant doom-scrolling. If we were all naive enough to think that this year might be better than its two immediate predecessors, well, more fool us. Time to reconsider. What is happening in Ukraine is barbaric, heartless and completely unjustified - the crazed machinations of a deeply bitter megalomaniac, hemmed in by in the past and unable to accept change, and who sees a world without Russia as a major power as a pointless world. Scary. That this is happening on Europe's doorstep is extraordinary - we have been able to somehow ignore similar conflicts further afield, the media willfully steering us away with some new trivial soundbite that we have been collectively stupid enough or lazy enough to fall for, but there is no getting away from this one and hard as it is we all need to sit up and pay attention. I am not going to lecture anyone, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but everyone should have seen this coming. That this country and many others are so inextricably beholden to this man and his cronies is inexcusable, and it is not just the politicians that are to blame this time - it is our lifestyles.

The timing could not be much worse, and Russia knows this. My energy supplier went bust last year, and my newly appointed supplier wasted little time in telling me that my annual bill of £2,780 was going to rise to £4,179. By the time October comes around I fully expect that this will become £6,000, perhaps more. I will do all I can to reduce it, but ultimately I will pay it, what choice do I have? Lots of households have a much harder choice coming up, think about that for a minute and about those people. And then consider what it means for the fabric of society as a whole. Mrs L is a teacher, she is already seeing the impacts in some of the kids that sit in her classroom, but versus where we are headed early 2022 will be looked back at as a golden period. Meanwhile our politicians have abandoned one dictator (a bit) and are busy cozying up to new ones so that we can continue to live in comfort and wander around in T-shirts in December. Tell that to people in Ukraine and other countries who no longer have a house or a town.

In a rare moment of good news Covid is over. Oh wait. No, sorry, that is just wishful thinking on my part. And government policy of course, thus consigning us to another year of unnecessary deaths, illness, strain and all the rest of it. Anyone who thinks this is over is a complete dope. This unfortunately means that very large segments of the population are idiots, as evidenced by my newly restored commute and a rare visit into London last week. We seem to have happily, joyfully even, dispensed with any suggestion that the virus is still present and mutating, and are all skipping along merrily pretending that everything is fine. La la la! Don't look up! On the one hand the 2020/21 approach could not go on indefinitely, on the other how hard is it to take a few trivial precautions to help out your fellow man? In Portugal recently social distancing and all the rest of it was being practiced by 100% of the population, indoors and out. We on the other hand are a nation of twats, ungovernable.

But back to this uninspiring corner of London for a moment, the initial point of posting before I was distracted by the shithousery of planet earth. I have found 2022 hard. This does not apply just to blogging but to many things. Birding. Reading. Photography. Plants. Getting stuff done. Everything I enjoy has been hard to focus on, let alone stuff I don't enjoy, and instead or forcing myself to get on with it I have instead found myself coasting along, floating on the circadian current of work, sleep, work, sleep. Even at the weekends I have had almost no get up and go. I have not been unhappy per se, just content for some reason to do nothing, to let the days pass by without fighting them. Consequently is it nearly April and I can look back at the first quarter of the year and know that I have underachieved massively in most facets of my life and that I couldn't really care less. It is a funny feeling, not caring. In the mornings I have been staying in bed for longer than I should. There are no evenings, I just go to sleep, most of the time before 9pm. Lust for life I think they call it.

However recently there has been a change. Possibly it is the weather, who can say, but I have rediscovered the joy of doing things. There have been a few early morning starts, the camera has come out - only for a few ducks on one of the local ponds, but it is something. There has been a flurry of activity in the garden - the first stages of the transition from winter to spring have occurred in my greenhouse, the terrace has been repopulated with Agave and Yucca, the pointless Yew bush under the Monkey Puzzle has gone and the lawn has been mowed. I even went to the dump to get rid of all the garden waste so that I could continue my work with empty green bags. If the mood takes me I may provide illustrations at a future point. There is a lot more to do and that I am looking forward to despite the accompanying aches and pains that getting this far entailed, but for now it appears that winter is returning so I shall pause.

On the birding front there has been a smidgen of returning interest. I have missed both Wheatears to have graced the patch, and so far my migrant searches have turned up only Blackcaps that may never have left in the first place. Overall I would say fervour is still lacking - the patch has been quiet for sure, but my drive has been more silent still. I suspect I am being hindered by the ghost of 2021, a nagging feeling that last year cannot be topped and this is weirdly preventing me from getting out there. It may of course be the general all-permeating malaise of 2022, but whatever it is, this time last year I had seen 15 more species that I have so far this year, and which ranks as my least impressive start since my records began. This is not restricted to Wanstead - I have not been birding anywhere in the UK in March. A drive to the coast feels like a world away for some reason (and not just diesel being in excess of £1.70 a litre!), a twitch for a rarity even further than that. I do occasionally wonder if the sight of a Belted Kingfisher in Lancashire might do me some good despite the cost, time and effort, but I quickly move on. Part of the reason I went to the dump was to ensure the car battery didn't go flat, I can't think when we last went anywhere or did anything in it. In that respect it is a fine symbol for 2022.

In more potential evidence of a change in the air I am nearly done with the London Bird Report 2020 images - a "to-do" that has been hanging over me for ages. It is a month later than I said I would have it completed by; when I say that I have I had trouble doing anything I really mean that. I've dabbled with it in fits and starts, made the shortlist, sorted the covers, but what I have not been able to do is sit down for three or four hours straight and absolutely nail it. I think about it frequently but then I go and do something else instead. Or do nothing most likely, the overriding theme of 2022. When I finally hit send it will be one of the only things I have achieved of any note this year. I hope to use it as a catalyst, but let's see how we go. Initial indications are reasonably positive, and not before time. Small steps. 

I am 47 years old, I cannot believe I am typing this but these are strange times and they affect people differently depending on who they are and where they are on life's journey. Like many I feel that the events that started in March 2020 have been nigh on impossible to control, and have dominated our personal narratives for two years. The state of the world is quite numbing, or at least I find it to be. And as mentioned above we are kidding ourselves if we think we are on the up. We are not, and not only that we seem to be seamlessly morphing into a new phase of awfulness, a cost of living crisis that will impact almost everyone. 

For now, have another Pochard. I'm fine by the way, just not very productive.

Shooting the breeze

I have several items of news to share, none of them hugely exciting but enough to eke out some verbiage.

One - I've been to Scotland again, a few days up in Fife. Once again the birding was really nice, way better than locally. I did a bit of sea-watching from Fife Ness. Nothing spectacular flew or bobbed past, but the fact that it was so different from my normal circumstances made it exciting for me. 27 Gannets in case you were wondering. That's what I classify as exciting these days. I also finally found some Crossbills up there, not sure what took me so long. I also managed to time my trip to coincide with Storm Dudley which made for some exciting homebound travel.

Two - No sooner had I arrived home than Storm Eunice paid a visit. I spent half an hour in the garden moving loose items to safer places, laying several plants on the ground which have a tendency to fall over in just a moderate breeze, generally being a responsible neighbour. I was away during the last equivalent storm in 2013 and back then we did not have a loft extension. This time I was here and sat working in said loft extension. Scary stuff, a lot of shaking - and not just me! I have various plants on stands, and to see them rocking and quivering indoors was quite something. We were battered and buffeted by four hours of some of the most intense wind I've ever experienced outside of Shetland and the Midwest. Whilst all the trees and fences survived, the loft dormer roof did not fare very well. The fiberglass sill on the most exposed corner was ripped off and I found it in the front garden, but worse than that the entire length of the lip above the balcony has tented up, no longer secure against the top of the brickwork. As I type Storm Franklin is rolling in, followed by yet another one Monday, and it remains to be seen whether either of these will contain enough puff to rip it off entirely. Needless to say it was impossible to raise the insurance company on the phone so we have submitted a claim online as I have a feeling the whole lot will need to replaced - I can't bend it back to resecure it and we are rather at the mercy of the weather until someone can come and sort it out. 

Three - I renewed my passport online which was remarkably straightforward. My old one only had about two months to go, and I had no travel plans so bit the bullet. The old one had not worked in the eGates since I sat on it Morocco in about 2013, so to have one that will allow me to get out of the airport without joining an almighty queue is rather a novelty. It is nonetheless a downgrade of course - it is disappointingly blue and no longer affords free access to 27 countries that the old burgundy one did. I am paying the price for other people's xenophobic stupidity and I don't care who knows it.

Four - Whilst out inspecting local storm damage yesterday I both heard and then saw a Dunnock, a tricky species that has been eluding me all year. Great Crested Grebe also fell, as did Mistle Thrush. It was nice to be out, but I cannot say it was inspiring. IN fact it was about as naff as it has been all year and spring cannot come soon enough as far as I am concerned. I say this every year, but the first Wheatear is just around the corner. Ideally the corner of March 21st.

Indoor Weekend

I have managed to go outside - a visit to Topps Tiles to return extra tiles we hadn't needed in the bathroom was very exciting, especially as in a reversal of roles the shop gave me money. Only money I'd already given them, but still. Even more exciting is that soon we will have a functioning family bathroom, something we have not been able to say since 2018. We move quickly around here.... About halfway through the work our plumber caught Covid and everything stopped, but when you have not been able to have a bath in your own house for over three years what is an extra week? We are very much looking forward to it. Mrs L and I then proceeded to the local aquatic shop to replenish the fish tank - some very cute Tiger Barbs and various Tetras are now exploring their new home. Again, this is something that we have been threatening for ages but somehow never got around to doing and so for at least two years we have been staring at a mostly empty tank. I find staring into a fish tank very soothing, not sure why we didn't get our arses in gear a long time ago, but that is just real life for you I suppose. Other things come up, weeks and months pass, time disappears. 

I did think about going birding today, but one look outside at the lashing rain, swaying trees and horizontal bamboos persuaded me against it, and so another weekend has passed without any advancement of the year list. I'll cope. I nearly saw a Sparrowhawk over lunch yesterday but it didn't feel quite right and quickly snatching up the house bins proved it to be a Kestrel, far less frequent from the garden. Colour and interest came from within these four walls. Firstly our large Fan Aloe has started flowering, as is normal at this time of year (it is a southern hemisphere plant). It is unscented, but nonetheless very cool indeed - even without flowers it is a stunner - pretty big for a potted plant and with several stems, but still a baby in many respects. I've seen them in botanic gardens abroad where they form actual trees and are simply magnificent. If I can pluck up the courage I might put it out on the terrace this year as it does get very dusty indoors. And as if this were not colourful enough, more summery thought were evoked by these two beauties. How was your weekend?

Sky high

I am not doing very well at birding at the moment. It will sneak up on me at some point no doubt, that is what usually happens - Wheatears are after all just around the corner. What I am doing very well at is sitting in my attic eyrie working excessive hours. Still, if it means I can afford to heat the house I suppose it would be churlish to complain, not everyone is so lucky. I have many thoughts on what is happening and where we are headed, but my own relatively secure position would I think diminish those thoughts a great deal. What I will say is that I am getting hammered by every single economic headline at the moment, but not to the point of having any genuinely impossible choice. That is the grim reality for many people, and it is just outrageous that it has been allowed to happen. Something is going to have to give and the frightening lack of empathy at the top does not bode well.

Whilst my day is not often improved by the news, it is occasionally enhanced by a glorious sunset as I settle into the final third. Wednesday was one of the best I've seen in a long while and I was forced to take a short break to step outside and admire it. Deep breath, and exhale. Wow, magical. Maybe things will be OK.

Sourdough Recipe

Oh look, a birdy post! Just kidding! I have not seen any birds recently so this is about bread again. A blog correspondent asked about the recipe and process we are using for sourdough, who am I to refuse such a request? Sourdough is tough, I will be the first to admit that and it comes as no surprise that some people don't get on with it and have given up. It is a big faff that requires planning and some hands on work over a number of hours, but the new environment we find ourselves in with many of us working from home is ideal. 

I can take no credit for what follows. Last year we went to visit J and J, good friends of ours from college days, and were stunned by a home made soup and blown away by a glorious loaf of bread. They not only gave us some of their starter but also wrote out this recipe for us. We have not adapted it, but we have learned which bits you have to get right and which bits are more forgiving. And the best bit? This is really cheap - there is no butter or ongoing need for yeast. The flour for a loaf is about 70p using a normal supermarket packet, and if you buy it in bulk sacks like we do it is more like 40p. Salt is 0.5p. What may become the biggest cost is turning the oven on for an hour - about 15p today but lord only knows where it will end up. But the point is that today at least you can make an amazing loaf for the same as it costs to buy a cheapest 'value' one in a supermarket. A sourdough loaf from the local artisanal bakery is £4.

Maintaining a Sourdough Starter 

1. You need some starter. The best place to get some from is from someone who has some already!

2. Feed your starter at least once a week,1 part starter to 1 part strong flour to 1 part water.

3. All you need is one pot of it, you can discard the part you don't renew/feed. The starter should live in the fridge. It looks like gloupy milk.

Making Bread

1. In the morning the day before you want bread, mix 50g starter, 50g water and 50g strong flour in a clear jar and leave out on the kitchen counter for 4 hours with the lid on. It will roughly double in size so make sure your container is large enough.

2. At the same time as step #1, mix 600g strong flour with 375g water in a large bowl and also leave it for 4 hours, covered with a wet cloth. Our kitchen is probably between 18C and 22C. Your 600g can contain other flours, for instance you could go with part rye or wholemeal.

3. When the 4 hours is up, pour the starter mix into the big bowl of flour mix. Add 12-15g of salt and mix it well for about 10 minutes with a wooden spoon or similar. Cover and leave for an hour. Wash your mixing implement immediately before it solidifies.

4. When the hour is up, stretch and pull the dough a few times by hand and cover it again. Literally pull it flat, and then fold it back on itself. Turn it 90 degrees and then do it again until you have got round 360 degrees. Wash your hands well afterwards as it really hurts when tiny bits of dough dry on the hair on the back of your hands and fingers!

5. Repeat step #4 three more times, once an hour. The first and second times it will likely be quite sloppy and sticky. Once you get to the third stretching it will look and feel a lot more like dough. The photo below is just after the first stretching. Timing is not critical here, if I have a heavy afternoon of meetings it may be that I leave it three hours and it seems not to matter. This is where a warm environment helps, but it does not seem to be critical. My pet theory however is that the cooler it is the more flexibility you have in terms of timings.

After round one of stretching. You can also see the cooking pot in the background.

6. After the final stretch, cover the dough again and put it in the fridge overnight, or 12-24 hours. If approaching a weekend, you can easily make a double recipe on the Friday and make one loaf on Saturday and another on Sunday. The Sunday dough would therefore spend more like 36 hours in the fridge but again it seems not to matter.

7. The following morning is baking day. The ideal time to do this is obviously before breakfast, so send your beloved downstairs to do it whilst you remain tucked up in bed. Put semolina into the bottom of a large cast iron pot that is oven-proof and has a tight lid. 

8. Heat the oven to 270C (fan)

9. Shape the dough, stretching it to form a tight skin.

10.Spread flour over the top of the dough, a solid covering or a pretty pattern. Make a few scores with a sharp knife in the top, don't skip this step. Some people use a razor to make elaborate patterns. 

11. Put it in the pot on top of the layer of semolina, put the lid on, and bake for 40 minutes.

12. Remove the lid at the 40 minute mark and bake for a further 10 minutes.

13. CONSUME!

Behold the finished article

A body of work

At some point towards the back end of 2021 this blog ticked over two million clicks. I did notice and meant to mark the 'occasion' but other things came up and it slipped my mind. Whilst trying to change the text blurb at the top the other day I came across the stats page and saw that this now read two million and fifty thousand. Fifty thousand? Really? If I am lucky the average blog post will get something between 100 and 300 reads. Or between 100 and 300 arrivals at least, many people will quickly realise they have a mistake.... In January I somehow bashed out 16 posts - it is not uncommon that I start the year with a surge and then decline. So 16 posts at an average of 200 suggests that the total clicks should have advanced by a little over 3,000. So where on earth does 55,000 come from?

Taking the last 24 hours as an example, 60-odd people read the most recent blog post. A further 300 read something else. Going back a further 24 hours to the start of February there are now another 450 visitors and no other recent blog posts. What on earth are they reading? Well, digging a little deeper (or as far as you can get within the innards of Blogger), it suggests that the vast majority of visitors are in fact reading stuff I wrote ages ago. And I mean ages ago. There is only so much information I can gather, but here is a snapshot of the last seven days.

No surprise that the most recent posts are at the top of the list, followed by those from last month, but what is St Lucia doing in there? That was 2013. A random post with a photo of a Mallard is from 2010. A bit further down there is something I wrote in 2009 about needing a better pair of gloves. The data runs out below three clicks, but I suspect that there are probably a large number of similarly ancient posts that perhaps get one or two a week. And then you get onto "Pages" - these are things that sit in that bar at the top, where I keep my various lists, a map of the patch and so on. Within the last week eight people have looked up my 2019 patch list. Or one very forgetful person. Five people looked at my garden list! How niche is that?!

If these stats were not available I would have come up with the opposite answer, a gradual downwards trend. In general blogs are somewhat passé, people today favour a shorter web experience measured in characters and seconds. Certainly the number of writers that I follow keeps declining - that list on the right hand side of blogs I visit has several people who have not posted for over a year, and every now and again I go through the list and perform a sad cull. My own output is also a shadow of its former self. I post far less these days and consider what I do post to be far less interesting that it used to be. I reckon I hit my stride in about 2010 when I was a house husband and have been on the wane ever since!

The answer is volume. This has been going for over ten years and there are now over 2,000 posts. They are probably all indexed in some way by Google and other search engines, and thus entirely innocent internet enquiries send people my way. And with so many posts on what is actually a more wide-ranging subject matter than just birds, this must happen on quite a regular basis. I suspect I could stop posting altogether and it would still keep going up. 

I will leave you with one final stat that I think proves what is happening. In 2021 I scraped together just 106 posts, 5% of the grand total. It was hard work and had I not managed to eke out a dozen posts from my trip to the Midwest it would have been my lowest output ever. However the total site visits in 2021 equated to 21% of the historic total. I reckon I can sit back and relax!