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.

Evil

A small whinge from me to all blog readers, twitter followers, and anyone else who may be vaguely interested. This kind of follows from my post the other day as to whether you know me or not. So, with that preamble out of the way, here is some shocking news. I am not evil. No, really, I'm not. However I do work in a bank. Such dichotomy, how can that possibly be true? I have been known to voice opinions, some real ones, some in jest. However the speed with which my job is rolled out and laid before me as an accusation can sometimes be astonishing. It need not even be a vaguely inflammatory blog post like the one based on Kevin or Nigel or whatever his name was. For instance this week I tweeted a piece of news that I felt needed retweeting, which is that our wonderful badger-slaughtering government (you will perhaps note another apparent dichotomy here) were seeking to reduce fuel poverty statistics simply by redefining what counted as fuel poverty. This is clearly outrageous, so outrageous I didn't even feel I needed to say it. I'd barely pressed send before an unknown Twitterite rolled out my career again. To be fair, he later apologised, realising he had gotten the wrong end of the proverbial stick, but it's still a valid example of quite how prejudiced people can be. Yesterday I moaned about people wanting to rob me on Ebay, and joked about there being no honest people left in the world. Guess what got rolled out? Maybe it too was a joke? I don't know, but as the saying goes, we are not amused.

I am not a political person, nor a religious person, so most of the time I avoid getting involved in either. On issues I feel strongly about, such as port-swilling toffs slaughtering our wildlife, or the massacring of badgers by a blatant collusion between our so-called public servants and the priggish landowners to whom they are beholden, I do occasionally comment (until I get sick of it), but obviously I steer well clear of perpetuating absurd stereotypes. On the whole though I do not feel strongly enough about many issues at all, and religion and politics are both huge turn offs. I've yet to be called saintly, but any Toryboy label people might like to slap on me is hugely wide of the mark. Then again, as you may have gathered, neither am I a left wing activist noted for my charity work. I lean in no direction and would quite honestly rather not vote for any of them. Any implied connection between where I work and how I might vote is mind-crushingly simplistic.

I do believe strongly in some things though. I believe in hard work and being rewarded for it, and I do not like layabouts or scroungers. These two facts do not make me Margaret Thatcher. However, and here's the big problem, in addition to the above I work in a bank. Oh dear, I must be scum. No? Well, you may have guessed I don't see it quite that way. Rather than this be the crime of the century, this is an entirely normal career, and close to 300,000 other people in London do the same thing. It is called working for a living, and I do not deserve to be castigated for it. Neither do the vast majority of the 300,000 other people. Clearly banks of the kind that I worked for, and continue to work for, are not softly softly charitable organisations with a focus on cuddly animals and social justice, but that does not make me evil. If the banks all disappeared tomorrow, many things that many people take for granted would cease to occur - they're not a necessary evil, they are simply necessary. That the actions of a few people can cause an entire system to come crashing down, and cause ripples across the whole of the labour market impacting people who don't even work in banks is I something I don't really understand, and it sounds very unfair that it could happen. I'm not going to apologise for it though, because guess what, it wasn't actually my fault, and simply working in the industry does not, contrary to popular opinion, make me somehow guilty by association. I do not know a single cigar-smoking, Ferrari-driving, bow-tie wearing, cocktail-swilling person of the sort perceived to have caused the financial crisis, the same crisis that if you recall cost me my own job quite quickly. I work in a team of entirely normal people who are decent human beings that I would share a beer with all day long, and probably so would you if you met them. I have made a conscious choice of where to work in order to fund, amongst other things, a house for my family to live in, which last time I checked is also entirely normal. My choice of work is based entirely on sound economic reasoning. I would love a 9-5 job, and I would adore a 10-4 job, but I have yet to find one that supports my cocaine habit. Nonetheless I reserve the right to constantly moan about how hard I work. Mainly simply because I enjoy moaning.

Here's what I wanted to say about three paragraphs ago. Please do not fling the term "banker" at me as some kind of pejorative put down. It's ill-informed, ignorant, and an insult both to me and your own intelligence. By all means criticise me for being arrogant, rude and intolerant. This is good for me, and will make me a better person. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go pick up my Helicopter which was in for servicing. I worked from home today, but I need it for the daily commute tomorrow.

Chancers

The internet is a funny old place as we all know. A couple of days ago I replaced my dead surround sound system, and seeing as there was nothing wrong with the speakers, only the actual electronic bit, I decided to try and recoup a bit of cash by flogging them. I'm not a big Ebay user, but what the hell, stick them on and see what happens. There were five of them, so on they go at 99p a throw - up for a week, any return at all is a result as the only other thing I would do with them is keep them in a cupboard for a decade before throwing them out.

So I dutifully photographed them, weighed them for a postage estimate, worked out what they were called and started the auctions off. I was very careful to specify UK only, as I can't be bothered with resolving any kind of foreign dispute with the kind of chancer you often get on Ebay. With ten minutes I had a question asking me what the shipping to Portugal was. I replied back answering "a million pounds", with the number in digits beside it so they got the idea. No bids from that person yet. A few minute later, with all five speakers still on 99p, I get another query. "How much for all five? I'll offer £150". Why ask, I ask, if you're going to offer? No reply from that person either. Since then, the queries have been coming in thick and fast. How much for two? How much for three? How much for all five, along with various low-ball offers. Having received a few queries and pseudo offers, I decided to look up how much these things normally went for - a lot more than £30 each it transpires. Cheeky so and so.

I've given up answering the questions, everybody just wants something for nothing. And anyway, the fundamental point is that is an auction. You offer what you're prepared to pay, and if somebody is prepared to pay more than you are then you don't get them. How difficult can it be? I didn't use the "Buy-it-now" option, so what are these people hoping to achieve exactly? I've come to the conclusion that there are no honest people left in the world. This perhaps sounds harsh on the basis of trying to flog five small speakers for the last four days, but honestly. Would these same people go into a shop and try the same thing? Hello mate! Those five speakers that you've got in the window for £350, can I have them for £150? Why yes, you certainly can! Do you need a shirt as well, as for only £200 extra I can give you the one off my back!!

This will be the last time I use Ebay, next time I am going to give the whole lot to Barnardos.

Autumn winter

Nothing doing today. Ideal. A pleasant stroll round Wanstead Park today, still loads of leaves on the trees, which made for some pleasant reflections. Officially it's winter, but it didn't look or feel like it. When will it start to bite I wonder? I'm content for now.