Southeastern USA - April 2024 - Logistics and Itinerary

 

Logistics

• A five day trip with Bradders in the third week of April, leaving on Thursday afternoon, returning overnight on the following Tuesday evening. Straight back to work? You betcha. 
• Flights: British Airways from Heathrow to New Orleans via Dallas, booked with a car to turn it into a holiday and thus defer payment until a few weeks before departure, as well as scoop up extra points. The return was from Nashville via New York. Bradders travelled with me on the return, but added on a couple days in Texas before I arrived, driving across to Louisiana and meeting me off my flight.
• Car: We had a car wholly unsuited to birding but highly suited to America, a Dodge Challenger with a 5.7L engine. Embarrassing on one level, ridiculous on all levels, but great fun. I don't even like cars but oh the sound this thing made....
• Accomodation: As we were on rather a mission and had a long way to travel we booked all of our hotels in advance, the key criteria being that each was very close to the following morning's birding destination. It didn't really matter what time we got there, merely that we did and were ready for the next day. Budget motel chains all the way.
• My aims for the trip were threefold. 1) to visit seven States I'd never been to before, eBirding all the way, 2) to enjoy some spring songbird migration and hopefully coincide with a 'fall', 3) to add a handful of ABA ticks.
• Literature/Resources: We used eBird for up-front planning, identifying all of the best sites. We also used it a bit for on-the fly birding using the "explore" functionality in the App. For literature I used the Sibley East Coast field guide. I also used Merlin, perhaps too much towards the end when desperation set in. The Audubon App was used when I wasn't carrying my book, and was also useful for calls and songs.
• Food - well there is a lot of it in America, and we ate very well. Apart from lunches which were just garbage.

Itinerary

• Day 0 - Evening arrival into New Orleans, met Bradders at the airport and picked up our silly car. Drove about an hour south-west so as to be in position for Grand Isle the following morning.
• Day 1 - Birding Grand Isle until early afternoon, we coincided with their annual birding festival. Then back to New Orleans and across the State line into Mississippi, birding all the way as we built up that list. We arrived at our accomodation just south of Mobile AL by about 10pm.
• Day 2 - All morning at Dauphin Island, a migrant hotspot on the coast below Mobile, then up to Splinter Hill Bog for Bachmann's Sparrow mid-afternoon. Torrential rain cut our birding short here, and we drove through a front that seemed to cut the temperature in half. I wonder what this would have done on the coast? Overnight in Columbus MS.
• Day 3 - Birded a wonderful unpaved road for Warblers early morning, before spending up until midday at Noxubee. Mid afternoon at Ensley Bottoms just into Tenessee below Memphis, and a final stop at Wapanocca in Arkansas before a short drive south-west to Searcy.
• Day 4 - Early start at Bald Knob NWR, all morning spent here seeing tons of birds. Then a lengthy drive north-east across into Missouri to bird Otter Slough and finally Mingo Swamp. Overnight at Paducah, just over the border into Illinois.
• Day 5 - A day of many States, starting in Illinois to try and get a bit of a list there, before moving a short distance south over the Ohio River into Kentucky. By 9am we were back on the road, headed south-east towards Nashville where we birded a site on the Cumberland river before heading to the airport for our flight to New York. Then overnight to London.

Venice - April 2024

In April Mrs L and I went to Venice for a few days. I'd been before but this was her first visit,  somewhere she's wanted to go for a long time. I've taken kids before, and surprised my mother there once on her birthday, but somehow we had never been a deux. How exciting! We arrived quite late having taken a flight after work, and for the first time took a boat across the lagoon to the city rather than a coach. This was especially exciting as it meant that she would wake up and throw open the curtains to Venice. 

Ah, Venice. What a place. In the press a lot lately as the inhabitants of the city are fed up with tourists, fed up with people like me. But what can you do? The city authorities are introducing a tax but I don't see how that will change anything. It's a negligible amount, people will just pay it and the crowds will remain. And we found that the Venetians were perfectly happy to welcome us into their restaurants, bars and galleries, onto boats and so forth, and to accept our money. An intractable problem. Maybe think a bit harder about the huge cruise ships at the north end that dominate the skyline and dwarf the city, and that deposit two thousand people at a time.

The view from our hotel

Even in early April it felt busy in the central areas, but you didn't have to stray far in order to lose the vast majority of the visitors, and it many ways it is an ideal time to visit. The weather is nice but not hot enough to make the city unpleasant, the real crowds have yet to arrive even if St Marks might not feel like that, and it feels altogether more relaxed, as if the place has just woken up and is getting ready for the grand opening. A few streets back from the main thoroughfares quite a few cafés and restaurants had yet to open, and you could wander aimlessly through quiet streets and over small bridges and not see another person for several minutes. The layout of Venice is such that you cannot avoid crossing the main drags, but if you plan your day well it won't bother you other than for a few moments. Obviously if you want to see the Grand Canal, gaze out from the Rialto, visit Murano or the like then you will have a lot of company, but there are many many quieter bits

We were staying on the Grand Canal right next to a vaporetto station, so actually we didn't enter the city under cover of darkness as we had sailed right down it from the airport. I should have insisted Mrs L wear a blindfold. But there was still an element of surprise the following morning when we woke up and started exploring our surroundings. It was still, the city just waking up, no groups of tourists following a guide, no gondolas on the move, just a few utilitatarian boats making deliveries. All against this unique water-defined landscape that has no equivalent anywhere. If you have been to Venice you will know what I mean. If you have never been, well that singular experience awaits you still. I'll say it again, what a place. Everyone has seen it films, in paintings, it's an integral part of European culture, but until you are actually there... Never in your wildest imagination could you think that such a city would spring up, yet here it is. A good book on its history and people has been written by Jan Morris, titled simply "Venice", and is very digestible. I read it before and during our trip and it definitely enhanced how we looked at it as well as where we went and the detail we sought out.

Now I could at this point list out where we went, what we saw, what we ate etc, but that's far too much like hard work, especially all these months later. But even though this was my third or fourth visit it still felt new, and we went to parts I had never been to before. It was also an opportunity for lengthy lazy meals on shaded terraces, sunset cocktail bars, art galleries (the Guggenheim should be on any list), things that I would never have done by myself but are particularly well suited to couples. I particularly enjoyed walking east from St Marks to the public gardens and then to Sant'Elena before catching a boat all the way around the bottom tip, past the Arsenal to San Michele and then to Murano. Mainly as this provided almost my only opportunity for birding, and there are actually birds in Venice other than Yellow-legged Gulls and Pigeons if you have the patience to seek them out. This two or three hour period was responsible for 22 of the 33 species I ended up seeing during our three days. 

This lunch lasted at least 2.5 hours!

Nearly 30 years on I can still immediately recognise a Delaunay.

We had a lovely time, and Mrs L wants to go back. In fact when we were chatting about the freedoms of the upcoming post nest-flying environment the other day it came top of the list of places to revisit. High praise indeed. We just have to cross our fingers that we'll still be allowed to go. I reckon it'll be fine.

A weekend in Barbaresco

Barbaresco

As a lover of Pinot Noir it should come as no surprise that I am also partial to Nebbiolo. It is a much more powerful grape, very tannic in its youth, strident and long-lived.  In many ways you would think that this is the exact opposite of wispy old Pinot Noir, but it too creates very pale, translucent and ethereal wines that have that divine lightness of touch. The primary growing area within Italy for Nebbiolo is in the northwest, Piedmont. With this area Barolo and Barbaresco stand out, Gattinara barely gets a mention and I'm not sure Ghemme even makes it outside Italy. Certainly I'd never heard of it until a few years ago when I started making a bit of an effort with Italian wines.

Barolo and Barbaresco are almost next to each other, and the sensible place to start would be Turin. I started from Milan which in fact was the result of a complete cock up on my part. My plan had been to go and photograph Tuscan landscapes for the weekend, but I had a geographic abberation and booked the wrong airport. I did not realise this until much later when I started planning where I would stay and realised Milan was in fact hours away from where I wanted to be. Scratch that then, but what else could I do? Well, Piedmont isn't that far.....

I landed late on a Friday, another after work flight, and made it about half way before stopping in a cheap hotel for the night. A most bizarre place, and seemingly constructed expressely for illicit liasons. The rooms were all 'themed' and not in a good way, the only options on the TV were 18+, and you entered your room unseen from the rear where you parked your car, presumably so you could flee when your actual partner turned up. Luckily I was not staying long but I wondered later how I could have got this so wrong, Booking.com had given no clues. Presumably you needed to be 'in the know'. Anyway I survived it and early next morning went birding.

Yes it was a wine trip, but ultimately everywhere I go involves birds in some way, and seeing as my Italy list was pathetic (and still is) I thought I should at least attempt to improve it. Part of the draw of the dodgy hotel had been that it was close to a large lake that was one of the few eBird pins in the area, and although I slept in a bit as I hadn't gone to bed until 1am I was still there bright and early. The weather was a little grim but I toughed it out, walking the entire perimeter in about an hour and a half. The full list is here and contains absolutely nothing special whatsoever, however almost every single bird was new for Italy so clearly all very exciting nonetheless. Mid morning I hung up my bins and drove the further hour towards the town of Alba where I would be staying for the evening. As I approached the town I diverted off the autostrada and crossed the river. Before me lay Barbaresco.

Aldo Vacca, the man behind the success of the modern Produttori

I don't have a great deal of Italian wine, but most of what I do have squirreled away is from this region. There's a bit of Sangiovese from Tuscany, a bit of wine from Puglia and Sicily, but by far the majority is from Piedmont and most of it is Nebbiolo. From Barbaresco I have around seven cases, not a huge amount. Most of this is from the well-regarded local cooperative, the Produttori del Barbaresco, who work with numerous growers to produce regular Barbaresco as well as nine single vineyard wines - known in Italy as MGAs (Menzione Geografica Aggiuntiva). Barbaresco is both an appellation and a village (alongside Neive and Treiso) and it was here I went first. It must get very busy in the summer as there is a one-way system around the hilltop, but at this time of year it was completely dead and I could go wherever I wanted. The Produttori were open though, and so I wandered in for a small tasting and to learn a bit more about them. As it was low season only the front of house was open, no chance for a tour or a look behind the scenes, but it was great to be able to chat to the friendly employee about the wine, the vintages on the counter, the philosophy behind the wine, and the rules that the growers had to abide by. Fascinating stuff, but still behind the wheel at this point I couldn't really get into it!

Outside the village I popped my head in at Roagna and La Ca' Nova, the other producers I have a few bottles of, but they both seemed closed. Had I been in France I might have rung the doorbells, a conversation in French more likely to be well received on a Saturday than in English, but alas my Italian is non-existent and so I left them to their weekend and drove into Alba. Appropriately enough I was staying above a wine shop, and once I had dumped the car I went exploring on foot. Not too many of the producers have a presence in the town of Alba, and the obvious one that did, Pio Cesare, had closed about an hour before I got there. Such is life. I did the next most sensible thing and went and had a nice lunch with a glass or two of wine at the Osteria dell'Arco.

I spent the afternoon browsing wine shops and buying small amounts of goodies to take back home, including the local pasta, Tajarin, which I had enjoyed at lunch with ragu. For the wine this was window-shopping only for the time being, I wanted to try a few more producers before filling up precious luggage space. This was achieved by heading to a wine bar early evening and trying a few things by the glass. De Gustibus I think it was called, and it was here that I discovered a producer hitherto unknown to me called Sottimano. It was just their basic Langhe Nebbiolo, declassified Barbaresco, wine from perhaps younger vines and that is not required to be aged for as long before being bottled. In any wine area trying a producer's most basic bottling is always a good place to start, and it's as true in Piedmont as it is Burgundy. And this Sottimano 2021 Langhe was simply sensational, the best Langhe I'd ever had. This would be top of the list on tomorrow's wine-buying expedition. Alongside this I had an Oddero Langhe from the same year, which whilst also top notch wasn't in the same league.

In need of more sustenance I popped into the Prosciutteria Albese for a snack and another glass of wine, this time a local Barbera. In contrast to the pair of Langhe this was inpenetrable, really heavy going and not a good proposition at this time. Best stick with Nebbiolo is my advice. The small plate of ham I had was fantastic though - if I lived in Italy I would be even fatter than I am already.

I had another wander around town to get some air and think about where I might find an evening meal. The place I had my eye on was rammed, with families coming in all the time, but the totally unstressed owner took pity on me and squeezed me in on one side of a table. Perfect. I've had this happen before in Lyon and other places, and provided both you and the other diners are chilled about it, the focus being the food rather than the comfort, then all will be fine. The atmosphere in the Osteria dei Sognatori was off the charts fantastic, organised chaos, raucous chatter, huge extended family groups, and it felt more like being at somebody's house than being at a restaurant and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants both good food and a fantastic experience in Alba. They don't even have menus, just a few bits of hand-written sheets of A4 that are passed around. I had a small portion of Tajarin and ragu just to check that it was as good as I expected it to be, which it was, and then something based on pork that was also fabulous but that I was unable to get through. To accompy this a half bottle of Rocche Costamagna Barolo from the Rocche dell'Annunziata MGA. Although it was the latest vintage but one it was fabulously approachable already. Yum! I fairly rolled back to my hotel.

Osteria dei Sognatori

Unsurprisingly I did not wake up especially early on Sunday. I went for an invigorating walk around Alba in the rain and finished up my shopping at some of the wine shops I had gazed at the previous day. The Enoteca Fracchia & Berchialla is particularly wonderful, an Aladdin's cave of riches, especially downstairs where there were endless bottles of Gaja and loads of magnums. Space was limited to whatever I could fit in hand-luggage, as at that time you could take liquids on board where airports had the new scanning technology in place, which Linate did (I had 100% checked this!). Note that as of June 2024 this has been rolled back across the whole of Europe and we are back to 100ml. But at the time it worked, and this meant that I managed to cram in a magnum of Sottimano Cottá, and then four regular bottles - from memory a couple of Langhe from Produttori and Massolino, another bottle of Sottimano, and a new vintage Pelaverga from Burlotto. My bag weighed a ton but I got it all through and security didn't bat an eyelid! 

After I had packed up and retrieved my car I had another wander around the various hillsides of Barbaresco, getting the lie of the land a bit, and then with time pressing on drove back to Milan very pleased with my weekend adventure. I managed to sneak in a final birding session south of the airport followed by a quick very late lunch at an Osteria on the outskirts of town before dropping the car off and going home with my haul.

Rolling rolling rolling

The chances of catching up on trip reports and actually becoming current by the end of this year seem minimal at this point. I am about to start a USA extravaganza but there are a couple of big ones after that that I don't see myself getting to - it's hard work. However I do seem to have emphatically answered the question [to myself] of whether I will manage to scrape together 100 posts this year. At the end of July, in the mid-thirties, it had seemed unlikely in the extreme. But just look at that autumn output! It's nearly a post every other day. Wine and pizza, cats and slugs, binoculars and cameras, Ohio, Scotland, Argentina, The Gambia and Bruce Springsteen. Just reading it I feel exhausted, but actually it wasn't so hard once I got the bit between my teeth, and with this the 88th post of the year I'm confident I can get over the line. Quantity over quality. The halcyon days of 2009 to 2013 are long gone of course, but right now there is still a bit left in the tank. But it begs the question, oft asked..... is there anybody alive out there?!?

"Is there anybody really alive out there?!?"

All the gear II

I went out again this morning to try a few new settings. In addition to continuing to muck about with focus I specifically wanted to try RAW vs JPEG, and whether auto ISO was a realistic possibility. So what did I learn? Well I learned that the ISO performance of this little box of tricks is way better than my 13 year old Canon. But it also seems variable, with noise that is inconsistent, for instance a shot taken at 3200 seems to be cleaner that one taken at 1250. I think it must be related to the clarity and/or tone of the background, with a clean green (such as in the image below) behaving much better that a textured brown. I also discovered that there is no point using auto ISO on aperture priority mode. The camera seems to think that 1/500s is a sufficient shutter speed when the lens is at 600mm (900mm equiv), and whilst I don't doubt that the combination of the in-body and lens stabilisers do a terrific job, quite a few of the images came out distinctly soft as a result of the movement of the bird rather than any uncompensated-for movement at my end. It is another murky day here which does not help, but clearly shutter priority is going to be the way to go with a slow lens like this as it will almost always be used wide open hence what's the point in AV? I would rather have control of another part of the equation knowing that f6.3 is what the camera will set. I need to go and test whether this assumption is correct, but I expect that it will be. EDIT - it is.

900mm, 1/500s at f6.3, ISO 3200, handheld. Sharpened and then converted to jpeg and resized to 1000px wide

In terms of focus, it does seem that zone focus works best with birds where you want to be more precise about what bit of the bird you focus on. Once you are locked on to an area the camera does a decent job of staying on that area even when you pan slightly. Eye recognition, whilst wonderfully clever, isn't quite at the level it needs to be and the eye needs to be pretty obvious for it to be able to pick it. It worked on close Egyptian Geese but didn't work on medium range Tufted Ducks. I have no idea if this is because there isn't a specific bird eye algorithm (the choice is between human and animal) or whether I'm not doing something correctly. My Canon shooting style was single central focus point on the eye and then recompose, so perhaps I'll revert to something like that.

Another lightbulb moment was using the zoom functionality for birds in flight. I have discovered that I can set the lens at its widest 200mm setting (300mm in real terms) to easily acquire the bird in the frame and focus on it, and then zoom up to 600mm (900mm!) retaining focus all the while before taking the shot. The camera sticks to a bird against a clear sky like glue, it is very impressive. My Canon used to lose it, hunt in and out, and my keeper rate was very poor. I see this improving things dramatically.

Since yesterday I've also downloaded a basic file viewer and RAW editor, a Sony freebie called Imaging Edge. It has sharpening, cropping, levels, curves and basic noise reduction, but doesn't have a clone stamp tool or easy ways of doing anything more sophisticated. But I'm not very happy at the way that this program produces JPEGs. I think the issue may be the order in which I am doing things, but I don't seem to have a choice. The image always looks better in the software than it does once I see the JPEG on the web - I've got two screens and can look at them side by side and there is a clear difference. The free Canon software I'd been using, Digital Photo Professional, was the same. What a shame that a Windows update killed the copy of Adobe Photoshop CS2 I had for many years. I remember that within CS2 I resized first, then performed three rounds of sharpening, and only then converted, and that seemed to produce better results. And I built it all into a repeatable macro so it was just one click. At the moment I can only resize at the point of conversion and I suspect you lose something doing it this way. But then again neither of these free tools ought to be able to match Photoshop or an equivalent. Anyway I am a bit stuck and will probably have to spend some money. But at least I now have a program that can convert a Sony RAW into something else and has some useable sliders. If suppose if I really wanted the workflow from hell I could covert the files into TIFF and then export them to a portable hard drive that I could then plug into my laptop which still has a working copy of CS2 on it as I disabled the update, and from there I could do everything I wanted. I think I'd rather spend money though for the sake of ease!

As above, but then 20% sharpening on the 1000px jpeg output. 

All the gear...

First outing for the Sony, at least with a birding lens. In short, no idea. It's hard. Things I immediately dislike: electronic viewfinder. I guess there is no getting away from this particular feature of mirrorless cameras, and it seems not to matter for landscapes or cities, but somehow it just isn't as clean or intuitive for bird photography. I also very much dislike the lack of permanent manual focus on the lens, what I call the 'twig defeater', but you can program a button to do it albeit that you need to keep it pressed down. Some much more expensive lenses do have this feature. I kind of dislike the small form factor, it's much harder to use than a Canon 1D, sits in your hand far less naturally, and in particular the rear wheel is miniscule which is awkward as I've set it to control the exposure compensation and so use it all the time. But then again I bought it precisely because of the small form factor.

But I already like many things about it. I love the weight for starters, it is crazy how light it is versus what I used to carry. It's actually heavier than the Canon R7 + 100-500mm that most birders seem to use, but I much prefer the internal focussing of the Sony 200-600mm, and one tiny twist can get you from one end to the other. The AF system is terrific on the A6600. So far I think I prefer zone mode, but I've programmed a button to be able to cycle quickly to wide and spot. The eye detection feature, programmable for animals as well as people, is pretty incredible for someone not used to it. One of the primary reasons I used to use back button focus was to able to focus on the eye using a central point and then recompose. Here you just point the camera vaguely in the direction of the bird and hey presto it locks on. I've set back button focus regardless for old times sake, but it's probably not necessary any more with this feature combined with zone or wide AF. Another brilliant feature is the zebras, which is a live over-exposure blinkies feature. I've never had this before as its obviously only possible through an electronic viewfinder, but it makes exposure a complete doddle.

As with nearly everything photographic there are compromises in every area, but such is the sophistication of the camera that you can work around most of them. What I can't work around is f6.3, there is no getting away from the fact that this is a slow lens, especially on a murky November morning. I guess I need to get used to very high ISO. Or get back to working with a monopod, as opposed to arrogantly assuming I can handhold it for everything (as I did this morning with some pretty grim results!).

With VizMig dead I wandered over to Jubilee to have a play and to see what worked and what didn't on a variety of tame waterfowl. Not exactly a tough test but this was just for really basic things like which autofocus mode to use, how to focus manually, how to adjust exposure, which buttons to set up to do what. In short I am both frustrated and enthused. Frustrated that I have this amazing tool in my hands that I cannot instinctively get to do what I want it to do.  Frustrated that my years of experience with Canon are holding me back. Frustrated that something that was second nature and that I used to be pretty good at now seem inordinantly difficult. But enthused that my transferable knowledge is already being used to bend this setup to my will, and excited that there are many features of this new world that are game-changing and that will make my images better than they used to be, at least in time. But most of all I'm delighted that I'm not carrying around 5.1kg any more. Although in truth I've actually gained 2.6kg as I simply didn't bother carrying the Canon very much and it has been months and months since it came out with me onto Wanstead Flats. Whatever.

Anyway, loads to do. Here are few straight out of the camera. I don't yet have any software that can read a Sony ARW file so these are JPEGs at the moment. I don't fancy any kind of subscription model so I'm on the hunt for a one-time payment option. So far DXO photolab seems like it might be the pick of the bunch, but I also need to download Sony's own program, Imaging Edge to see what that is like.

Yay!

Remember this? Probably one of those posts that people wanted to write something rude about but thankfully refrained, virtual lip biting. To save you the time of rereading it, last year I fell short of seeing 1000 species. Woe is me. Not really. It was sort of irritating to have come so close but only in a very minor way. Life went on. I travel quite a lot, and I felt that maybe it was a possibility this year instead. I'm not sure that I even tried to work it out, in fact I know I didn't. But the year started well with a trip to The Gambia and Senegal (the one I just wrote up), and so by the end of January I was over 300 when you included the usual start-of-year enthusiasm locally. A short trip to the USA at prime time saw me cross the 500 mark. Singapore in June added about 70, and Slovenia for a weekend 25, but it was a trip to the Panatal in July that really made the difference. I came back from that on over 900 by which time 1000 was almost a foregone conclusion. This was when I began to think about the numbers, but by then my travel was essentially finished. The summer was largely spent in the UK and it was very quiet. I made a few visits to Scotland where I didn't see much that was new, as well as a short trip to the Balkans which got perhaps 15. I could have chased a few rarities during the autumn but by then apathy was beginning to rear its ugly head, especially as I knew I was going to Mexico in mid October - another visit to the Yucatan Peninsula. I was mildly fretting about seeing the 50 new species needed but in the event I saw exactly 100 and so that was that.

As I mentioned before, how people manage to see 7000 birds in a year is completely mind-boggling, but seeing 1000 actually ended up being pretty straightforward. All you really need is a bit of geographic diversity and you'll sail into four figures. West Africa, North America, South-east Asia, and then South America. 

This leaves me wondering what will drive me next year. Broken record alert - I find numbers and lists highly motivating. Tragic, but I know I'm not alone. I also just like being outdoors and walking around, sitting around watching TV has never been my thing. But I do find that I need some kind of prod to get me out there. Lists are that prod. I've already got some ideas that are more about completeness rather than actual numbers. Apparently I've never been to Shropshire. And there are a few Scottish regions I've never been to either, including West and East Dumbartonshire, and South Ayrshire, so I'll be looking to rectify that next year. Similarly there are some US States left to pick off, so I have a short trip already booked to the East Coast where I intend to drive a loop through Delaware, Pennsylvaina, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. I also find it important to have things to look forward to, so getting things in the diary early is something I always like to do. Anyway, I'll stop there as this is beginning to sound like an end of year post and we are still some way away from that! And there are still birds to be seen in Wanstead, though not this morning...