Creeping up

After spending the first day of 2024 not birding in Wanstead, my patch list stood at two on the morning of the 2nd. Time to get to work. The weather being a bit so so, and me being very much a fair-weather birder, at least locally, I was limited to looking out of the window at home before I went to work. Nothing surprising at all, but I found I could hear two separate Song Thrushes, and all the regular Gulls flew over. I ended on 15, upped to 16 on the commute with a Stock Dove on the way to the tube. Meanwhile all my birding compatriots having diligently flogged the patch on Monday were on about 50. I am not too concerned, this is a marathon and I am good at those. Not running ones obviously. I recently found out that I came top of last year's patch list which I wasn't expecting, and this despite no Snipe, Wigeon or Lapwing. It wasn't a great year for anyone by the sounds of it, including for Nick who usually wipes the floor with all of us by virtue of being out all day every day. With the amount of time I spend off patch I am amazed I stayed in the game, but I did put a lot of effort in when I was here. There is no prize beyond kudos, and barely any of that, so we have all reset to zero and are starting again. Hurrah!

So January 2nd wasn't great but it started to come together on January 3rd when there was a brief gap in the constant deluge. I got out on the Flats nice and early and did a complete circuit before going to work. Nothing spectacular, but Chaffinch and Greenfinch were a little unexpected (this is a measure of how dire it is at the moment) and I ended up on 38 before catching the Elizabeth line in.

This morning there was another brief gap in the weather and so I headed out on my annual foray to Bush Wood. In about an hour I managed to pick up both regular Woodpeckers, both Crests, and Nuthatch, and as I was working from home today Collared Dove fell pretty easily. I  also stopped by the Basin for Great Crested Grebe whilst running an errand at lunchtime. 45. 

My January average is 63, with a max of 72, so there is still a long way to go. I confess I am not feeling it very much though. Northern Waterthrush in Essex? What seems like eons ago I went to Scilly for one of those, one of the best birding weekends I have ever had. Everything falls eventually. I had been wondering if the September storms might have squirreled away some goodies, a bit like that Yellowthroat at Rhiwderin in February 2012, but I hadn't predicted Essex being the place!

Blast from the past. 2011

Anyway, Happy New Year to one and all, hope all your birding wishes come true.

A Positive Start

I've had a great start to the year. My Wanstead list stands at two. Brilliant. Robin before the sun rose on New Year's Day, and then a Magpie. On January 1st I left Wanstead behind as threatened and went to Essex, a great choice. Door to door service from Mick S to Abberton, where we gave the Aythya flock a good grilling. I had meant to go on the 31st but had wimped out in the end, preferring to stay local, where of course I saw nothing. But of course Monday was a brand new year, and why start it off somewhere I will no doubt visit endlessly? Abberton it was. Mick had dipped the Canvasback the previous day, but the weather looked good if a little on the cold and breezy side. Nonetheless I was confident it would be there and that I could find it. It was and I did. I am still amazed that Howard found it without knowing it was there, that is just next level birding. Even knowing that it is there somewhere it is very difficult indeed but somehow I picked it out amongst the hundreds of Pochard and was able to get everyone on it. The all black bill is the key, at which point you realise that it is a shade lighter than the Pochard and maybe a little bigger in all dimensions. Try to use those two distinguishing features when they are all asleep however and it is virtually impossible. We both had quite large cameras lenses and had high hopes of getting some decent photographs but it was not to be; the part of the flock containing the target remained steadfastly distant at all times.

Moving from Layer Breton to Layer-de-la-Haye we added Smew and Goosander to the day list, and then a quick scoot around to the screen below Abberton Church added the long-staying Velvet Scoters as well as a Glaucous Gull that had just been found and that was an  unexpected Essex tick. Back to the small causeway and I was able to pick the Canvasback again east of the road but it was still at the far side, nice scope views but no photographs other than distant record shots. At this point we gave up and decided to join the throngs in Colchester for the Waxwings, a species I confess I have been very keen to see despite really not wanting to be a part of a group of middle-aged men standing around in an industrial estate. I guess sometimes you just have to do these things. Ebird tells me that I last saw a Waxwing in the UK in 2013 so it is not as if I do this very often. They didn't stick around long but I was able to have a bit of a play with my camera which I had not used since October in South Africa. It still works thankfully, though I am far less conversant with it than I was. Once upon a time I could alter the settings without taking my eye off the viewfinder but today it was a bit of a struggle.

Back to Layer Breton to discover the entire flock asleep on the far side. Seemingly mission impossible but we did eventually manage to pin it down on the mantle colour alone - hurrah! So a fun day out in Essex, just over fifty species to kick off the year so nothing monumental but a little bit of quality. I'll probably have a quick check of the patch in the next few days. Amazingly Tony found a Med Gull on Monday - we didn't get one at all in 2023 and then it goes and falls on January 1st. That's patchworking for you I suppose!

2024

I read a scary line the other day that went something like this: "2040 is closer to us than the year 2000 is distant". Not a complex proposition I suppose, simple maths, but it did make me stop and think. Not only is it true but where exactly has that time gone? The years have passed incredibly quickly. I've worked at my company for nearly 25 years. I've lived in the same house for nearly 20 years. My children are 20, 18 and 16. 

In 2040 I will be 65 years old. Imagine that! I still vividly remember my Dad's 40th birthday party in Cambridge, sat with my sister at the top of the stairs as our normally quiet house filled with people downstairs. I am significantly older now than he was then. 2040 also came up the other day when I was looking to get some wine delivered. I noticed I had a case of Port that people recommend starts drinking in 2040. Starts! That made me go and look at the end dates for wine in my cellar - I have a fair few cases of red wine that goes out to 2050 and beyond. Some of it will be particularly long-lived - to 2070. Predictably that made me start thinking about my end date. I'll be 95! Or more realistically I won't be here at all. And even on the offchance that I am the nurses will probably have banned wine anyway. 

The start of a New Year always tends to provoke these kinds of thoughts in me. Time rushing by, famous Pink Floyd lyrics etc. A lifetime is literally the blink of an eye, you have to make the most of it. I urge everyone to think about that the next time they contemplate half an hour watching crap TV, or as they endlessly doom-scroll on their phones. And I urge myself to take my own advice. Get out there, stop pissing about. You, yes you! Get out of that chair and go and do something! Or stay in the chair. It's comfy, you're warm and you're quite happy, and a glass of something is to hand. Do what you want to do, enjoy yourself, you're only here for so long. 

PS. You bought that wine for one reason, and it wasn't with inheritances in mind! Drink up!

Christmas 2023

The year in numbers

At the start of this year I wondered if I would be able to see 1000 species by the end of it. A 'Big Year' of sorts, but with my own little target, nothing like these frankly bonkers global missions where somehow one person sees 7000+ species in a single year. It has taken me a lifetime to see somewhere around 2500, I just don't get it. As per usual I had a lot of travel planned but no, 1000 would suit me fine. Previously my best annual effort was 781, achieved last year and in no small measure due to having spent a week on a guided birding trip in Colombia.

To cut a long story short I didn't make it, and even with a month left to go I knew I wouldn't. But I did come pretty close - 960 at the time of writing, completely obliterating my previous total but nonetheless falling short of that nice round number I had hoped for. Oh well, it is only a number. I half thought about doing another trip just to get over the threshold but dismissed it as silly and frivoulous, a rare instance of self control. I am exceptionally fortunate to be able to travel as I do, and it's very self-indulgent. Then again it's one of the principal reasons why I work where I work. But you knew that, I covered it a few weeks ago. Anyway, I didn't quite manage it but I will simply try again next year, something to aim at and as you would expect I already have a few things lined up. 

With apologies to those who hate flying, frequent flyers, airplanes and any other mode of transport apart from a bicycle, above is a map with a breakdown of where I went in 2023. I didn't mention this in the post I referenced above as that wasn't the thrust, but a few years ago I had a long think about how much I fly. This was during COVID when I wasn't going anywhere and was rather depressed about it. When the world re-opened would I resume, or would I be so used to seeing nothing and going nowhere that I could just give it up? Over the course of a few weeks I wrote a mammoth blog post as I agonised about my personal contribution to global warming called "The Elephant in the Room". This contained all of the good things that I did for the planet, all of which were then rendered completely redundant by taking just a single flight anywhere. It was full of arguments, counter-arguments, contradictions and despair, and when it came to it publishing it I instead just deleted it in a strop. With myself, and with mankind's seeming inability to see beyond one week in the future. Bottom line it is a lot of travel for an individual when compared against the average. I don't know how these things are calculated but if a person takes just one flight it likely uses up their entire annual 'carbon budget' or close to it. Then again I'm told that even driving a modest car around the UK a fair bit has the ability to do that. Of course I take many more flights than just one a year but after beating myself up for a couple of months I concluded two things. 1) That the only way to actually stop contributing to global emmisions is to essentially stop doing almost everything. 2) Even if I and my entire family immediately went and lived off-grid in a cave it wouldn't change the outcome in any way. We're pissing in the wind, fiddling in the margins. The world is going to continue to heat up with or without me, the planes - more and more of them - are going to fly regardless of whether I am on them or not, and frankly we are all screwed and nothing is going to stop that and certainly not the actions of an individual or even a family. It comes down to this - I enjoy travel above pretty much everything else. I could stop but then I'd be miserable, and I see no point in being pointlessly miserable. Moral superiority perhaps, but at what cost? That's where I'm at. One day, when I have the time, I am going to do some very long voyages by train and by car. I've been reading about long-distance train trips across continents and they sound incredible. Right now I don't have the time, so I fly places. 

I've read the counter-arguments to my stance and I agree with a lot of them. Call me irrational and selfish (or less charitable things) but they don't change my view on individual flying, or indeed the wider picture as it's not just aviation that is the problem regardless of what some would have you think. The complexity of what we face and the morass of inter-related themes is mind-boggling, but flying, which is measurable and where individuals can exercise a choice, is a soft and understandably popular target. Actually more carbon emissions come from commercial shipping, much of it to support all the crap we don't need but buy anyway. And as for coal-fired power plants across the globe, well we might as well all give up. My own "What the hell is the point?" moment came from one particular visit to America a few years back. I had just arrived and it was dark. I was headed away from the city along a six or seven lane highway (each direction) that was bumper to bumper with cars, many of them gigantic SUVs. Alongside both sides of the highway were a sea of illuminated signs for an almost infinite number of fast food joints, car and truck dealerships, fuel, shops and megastores, personal injury lawyers, you name it it was on a sign, just extraordinary levels of consumption and consumerism. Planes were coming into land overhead one a minute and I had this realisation that this was the current day incarnation of Bladerunner. Was I in LA? I can't remember, but the scene surrounding me felt semi-dystopian and it went on for miles and miles. And I knew that not only was it like this night and day, but that it was like this in every major city across the country. I just saw this same road stretching across the States and felt insignificant and helpless in the face of it. Fair enough on that particular evening I might have been a part of it, but for the vast majority the time I wouldn't be here. But the traffic still would be, the fast food places, the gas stations, the strip malls, the fumes, the noise and the excess, it would run continuously. Deep down I knew that nothing could change America or anywhere else quickly enough to make a difference. Some people might witness this and return home to become a hermit. I took a different path, not one of denial exactly but one of resignation. Critics can say that I gave up because the alternative was too hard, that I took the easy and selfish route, buried my head in the sand. Fine, I did and I have. I can't justify it, who can? Feel free to flay me in the comments because I dare to acknowledge it.

So yes I continue to travel by air, and despite all the above I find it incredibly liberating. As I have mentioned before I plan each of these trips meticulously, I get almost as much enjoyment from the planning as I do from the executing of the plan. Travel is also not always straightforward, but I get a perverse kick from being able to navigate through non-straightforward situations and still make it work. One day it will no doubt all do wrong but that day has yet to come, and 2023 was actually a pretty easy year. Here it is in bird count form.

USA - 258. I went to America three times this year. An expedition to Hawaii in April which also included a morning in California. Five days in New England in May was all about birding, and I then had five days in Ohio visiting family in September. It's my biggest ever year list for the States and I saw 31 new ABA species.

Colombia - 184. I went again, but to visit friends and experience some real Colombia, chilling out with a large extended family. I did have a day being guided near Bogota at the very start, but this was mostly a non-birding trip if such a thing exists in my lexicon. Most of the time was spent in the lowlands towards the start of the Llanos, hot and humid, and teeming with birds. Many were just seen from a garden or a pool, beer in hand....

Mexico - 167. Mick and I went on a fun trip early on in the year to Cancun and explored the jungles towards Belize and Guatemala using the Mayan ruins as entry points into pristine forest. It was hot and difficult but extremely rewarding - Ocellated Turkey anyone?

Argentina - 150. Another non-birding trip, ahem....A week with Mrs L in Buenos Aires in October somehow netted an amazing number of birds. What can I say? Well, for starters Costanera Sur, an urban reserve within the city, is simply fabulous and is responsible for most of them, but we also went south of the city for a day out. This is as yet not written up, I ran out of steam after.....

South Africa - 146. I took two of the kids on safari in July. Although the primary focus was mammals, there are also a ton of birds in the Kruger and the trip report probably contained as much on them as it did Lions etc. A fabulous country, utterly beautiful.

Greece - 89. I spent a weekend around the Gulf of Corinth in January exploring ancient sites and birding some coastal marshes.

Iceland - 66. Another long weekend on the west coast. Dreadful weather probably didn't limit the total - there just aren't many birds in Iceland.

Canada - 53. This was the same trip as New England, I just started and finished in Montreal instead of, say, Boston, because flight timings worked a little bit better and I fancied spending a bit of time in Canada.

Croatia - 51. A weekend in the spring, a country tick and I saw a few birds at the same time as exploring Zagreb on foot.

Portugal - 41. My son and I spent a weekend in Lisbon, and then Mrs L and I went to Madeira. The low species count is evidence that I don't just go birding everywhere.

France - 34. A walking holiday in the Alps over the August Bank Holiday weekend with my friends from university. We were in Chamonix but started in Geneva, so the Switzerland count is from the same trip.

Spain - 30. I flew to Colombia from Madrid. Air Traffic Control meltdowns meant I had a day in Madrid rather than an hour, so I decided I would go birding, you know, just to do something a bit different...

Switzerland - 16. As above.

Hungary - 11. Birds seen from Budapest airport as part of the Hawaii trip. As I think I've explained before for some crazy reason it is significantly cheaper to depart from various European cities than London, so that's what I do. Airlines (or Governments) need to sort their shit out and disincentivise this, rather than positively incentivise it.

UK - 201 I spent most of November and December inching towards 200 and just cleared the hurdle in Fife with a Black Redstart. Many people see this number by the end of April, indeed when I spent more time away from the local patch there were years when I did too. This year most of my UK birding was local, and so 113 of the 201 were here in Wanstead. This is very slightly over the average, my eighth highest total out of the 15 years I've been keeping score.

Wanstead through the Ages

Nationally, I went on just five twitches in 2023, two more than in 2022. One of these was a dip in Kent where I sat in a hide listening to inane conversation for five hours. Fun times. The others were successful though and I added five new birds. In May the Grey-headed Lapwing in Northumberland en route to the Stejneger's Scoter in Fife, which in turn was en route to my parents who live there. I then surprised myself by going to Wales in September for the Magnolia/Canada duo, and finally in November I went to Essex and Norfolk on successive weekends for the Canvasback and Pallid Swift respectively. I enjoyed all these days out considerably but I still reckon my twitching days are more or less over. You have no idea how difficult I find it to motivate myself to get in the car.

Globally I added 233 new species to my life list. The Nearctic dominates heavily, as it always seems to in my case - I nearly always head west rather than east for some reason, probably my heritage. I need to try and change that but I have to say I am becoming heavily addicted to South American birding, a dangerous thing.  It is just so ridiculously good. What is interesting about the above (to me at any rate) is that of all of those days away just two days were spent with professional bird guides, and between them they didn't even contribute 80 species that I didn't see elsewhere by myself. I reckon that's pretty good going and something I want to try and continue to do. Roll on 2024.

In terms of checklists and my contribution to citizen science through eBird I've had my second-most productive year, with 632 checklists submitted. I'd do it anyway of course, even without the research aspect of it, but equally it does make it feel less pointless. A lot of people scoff at lists, say they're pathetic, silly, but each singing Song Thrush I dutifully record ends up being part of a wider effort and contributes to our understanding of what is happening to our wildlife. 228 are from the UK, of which 129 are from London, all but 7 from Wanstead. This pales in comparison to the 'lockdown' year, 2021, when I submitted over 300 checklists from my local area. In total I've submitted over 1600 lists within a mile of my house, and next year could see me submit my 1000th checklist for Wanstead Flats alone - that is true dedication.

Elsewhere I submitted 54 lists for Fife, and then a further 45 from other parts of the country, mostly East Anglia from a few day trips out to Essex and Suffolk. Further afield I submitted 144 lists in the USA, 48 in Mexico, and 46 in Colombia. Birding abroad is rather different, and the same amount of time birding will generally contribute far more lists than in the UK as I move between sites, often submitting over 10 lists in a day. Back home it will likely be just one, probably before work, and even on a weekend it will mostly just be a single visit to Wanstead Flats. I really go for it when I'm away, and it is no exaggeration to say that eBird has transformed how I bird. Where I need to do better is with media - adding photographs and sound recordings to the lists. That requires a lot more time as it generally can't be done on the fly. And it's also true that my photography has waned this year, again this is likely due to eBird emphasising recording of species as numbers rather than as media, but it can of course be both with a little extra effort. Let's see. I am starting off 2024 with what I hope will be a photography intensive trip away, with any luck it will rekindle a spark that I have been missing. I thought about doing a "best photos of 2023" post but realised I would struggle to even get to ten. How things change! What I probably could manage is my top ten bottles of wine, but although that would fulfil the brief of a year in numbers, it might be a little over the top even for this blog.

And what of this blog then? When I was trying in vain to find the post about climate change I discovered a draft post signalling the end of this blog, a big goodbye of sorts, penned a few months into 2020 and coinciding with the start of the dark days of COVID. I never published it for some reason, perhaps the simple act of typing it got me over whatever it was, and somehow that year I managed to eke out around 100 posts. This year it finishes with this one, the 103rd. Remarkable that I had the stamina, it came in a rush at the very end. As I write this this in late December 2023 there have been 2.42 million clicks (since 2009). Not quite the latest Taylor Swift video, but for a boring middle-aged man with comensurately boring hobbies..... Of these 220,000 came in the last 12 months, slightly under 10% of the total, but under 5% of the content. Should I read anything into that? Maybe, maybe not - I still think that blogging is dead/dying.

Per the stats the most read post this year was about Hummingbirds in St Lucia, which I wrote over ten years ago. There is nothing quite like being relevant I suppose. That's an anomaly though as after that they're all from this year, with - gratifyingly on one level - an innocuous post from the patch about seeing a Sedge Warbler in the same bush as a Garden Warbler. In third place was a post about new birders on the patch and how  to deal with an understandable tendency for over-excitement and related over-reporting. Wren! So two out of three about the patch is reasonably telling, shame it is so dull most of the time. Seeing as we are here, number four was about the aforementioned Stejneger's and White-winged Scoter double, and the fifth was that one also referenced above where I railed against being told to shut up. If I ever seem to be in danger of quitting, just make me angry.

So those are a few of the numbers from 2023 - birds, countries, lists, trips, posts and patch.  

Happy New Year! 

Notable deaths in 2023

Bob the Turaco 2008-2023

I didn't actually know it had been named Bob, but this popular Wanstead bird passed away this year in a local Old Turacos home. I'm not sure of the full story but apparently he was found unwell in a garden, easily scooped up, and transported to a vetinary hospital. Old age or illness had taken its toll, and he died on December 3rd. Bob, a White-cheeed Turaco, was first seen in Wanstead around 2008, the earliest photo of him I can find is from February 2010. A local legend frankly, amazing that a bird from Ethiopia could survive here all these years - including some really cold spells. Local residents used to leave out chopped fruit, and he quite liked hanging out with Chickens. I attracted him into our garden from time to time by whooping and clucking which generally worked a treat. His red wings were nothing short of spectacular when he flew, and of all the birds that live here this was the one that non-birders most often mentioned to me. RIP Bob.

World's Stupidest Black-necked Grebe, 2021-2023

In early May 2021 a Black-necked Grebe took up residence on Alexandra Lake, a pond so unsuitable for it that you had to question whether it was firing on all cylinders. It stayed for something like six months and became a bit of a looker over the summer. The following year, in April, it returned - clearly this was a very dim bird indeed.  The next year, 2023, it returned in March, and this time brought a mate. I mean really, what an idiot. Mrs Grebe hung around for a few days, dismissed it for the dump it was, and left. What followed was tragic and ultimately very sad. The Grebe called for days, a plaintive "why hast thou forsaken me" moan, but to no avail. A few weeks later it was found on the side of the pond in bad shape. It was collected, taken to Grebe hospital, and died overnight. Of a broken heart we suspect. RIP.

It even looks a few slices short of a loaf in this photo

Nacreous Clouds in Fife

I was in Fife for Christmas with the family. Birding opportunities were thin on the ground and the festive season seemed to coincide with a real drought in birds. I neatly missed the Waxwing incursion, missed the sea-watching season, replete with big Shears and Brown Booby, missed the Snow Goose and the Shore Lark. This is the trouble with trying to keep a list in a county that I don't live in, all the good stuff happens when I'm not there which is of course most of the time. I had a couple of sea watches off Fife Ness, picking the exact two days when Little Auk wasn't seen.... The sole crumb of consolation was a long-staying female Black Redstart on the beach at Crail which showed very nicely and was my 197th bird for Fife. Five trips this year, about 17 days, added seven birds which is not a great return. I was working for many of them, but still. 200 remains annoyingly distant and elusive but surely 2024 will be the year?

Clouds on the other hand are much easier to see than birds, and I was pleased to be able to get in on the Nacreous action during my visit. I thought I might have missed these too, as most reports had been just before I arrived, but luckily on Christmas Eve just before dusk I nipped outside to have a look at the sky and found one from the terrace. Looking the other way there were at least three of four more. I put the message out on a Fife WhatsApp group which may have prompted a few more people to nip out as soon there were reports from Crail, Newburgh, Anstruther and Ladybank. Clouds being big things we were probably all looking at the same ones. Still, it was nice not to dip and whilst my photos don't remotely do the scene any justice I very much enjoyed this natural phenomenon which somehow I have not seen in the close to 50 years I have been rotating around the sun. 

Wanstead: Bird of the Year 2023

Some of the local birders had a small gathering at the pub before Christmas to talk about how rubbish 2023 had been and how 2024 was going to be so much better we were going to do something totally different next year. It has been a poor year for sure, with many migrant numbers well down and most people's annual tallies suffering for the same reason. There is a school of thought that says that the physical boundaries of a patch end up becoming a mental barrier for enjoyment, and I can definitely see how that could be the case. For instance I am stressing about the now high likelihood that I won't see a Wigeon on the patch this year, which for me would be the first blank year for that species since 2009. I am having similar Snipe anxieties, a blank here would be the first ever. This is despite the fact I have seen lots of both of these this year elsewhere, often extremely well.

Birding a patch is an exercise in futility and stupidity, and as a number of us remarked that Saturday evening, it is the hope that kills you. With the year nearly up I have submitted 118 eBird lists from the patch. 118 trudges around the local area, almost all of which have been incredibly dull from an avian perspective. Clearly you can't see good birds on every visit, but the times that you do are incredibly few and far between. But when you do, oh boy.....

This year there have been no stand-out birdy events. There has not been a cold snap that has delivered hundreds of Lapwings. There has not been one of those mass hirundine events that has you gasping in wonder. There have been no noteworthy migrant falls of any kind. I think we had a couple of days where we had 10+ Wheatear but something that will long in the memory? Nope. Our usual stalwarts like Redstarts and Flycatchers were well down, a small concentration towards the end of August that was over nearly as soon as it started, so nothing really on that front either. There was a big movement of Redwing one morning, and some large Woodpigeon migration, but those actually happens with some regularity and so cannot really qualify. That only really leaves new birds, the event that all patch birders live for. Patch ticks. 

I had three in 2023, an unexpected improvement on the last two years, especially as it gets progressively harder to add anything the more you have seen. 

Corn Bunting - June

I had been engaged in some high stakes gardening, trimming a tree down to allow more sunshine to penetrate my greenhouse. After a full day of death-defying clambering with no health and safety considerations whatsoever I had finally finished and was just sitting down with a cool drink when I noticed I had missed a number of WhatsAspp and text messages during the previous 40 minutes. I got to Wanstead Flats with about two minutes to spare before the bird flew off never to be seen again. Phew. So a very brief encounter but nonetheless a major improvement on the sorry tale of October 2020 when I was standing at one end of Centre Path seeing people looking at a Hawthorn and taking photos down the other. Not a word was spoken at the time but later that evening, or maybe even the following day, photos emerged of a juvenile Corn Bunting. Those who didn't see it were distinctly unamused!

Pintail - September

Another bird that nearly escaped, this patch mega was photographed early one morning but as the species was unknown to the observer, not circulated until early afternoon asking something along the lines of "What's this funny Duck?". By that time the bird was no longer present on the pond it had started on, so a search of local water bodies was undertaken, with negative results. Much later that evening a photo from this search emerged clearly showing.....a Pintail. Cue a third search for the bird and this time news went out straight away and everyone saw it. Now I was in America at the time and so was just watching this whole debacle unfold on WhatsApp whilst consuming a large box of popcorn, but it was still present the next day. And the one after that. Now the nerves began to kick in! I arrived back from the US and managed to make time that same afternoon to go and look for it. Thankfully it was still present, but it was a very rapid tick and run and by the time I had any meaningful amount of time on my hands it had gone. The only previous sighting of Pintail since 1975 had been in 2020 when a bird was seen so appallingly that the first time it flew over it went down in someone's notebook as a Godwit, so this species definitely has form with bamboozling local observers. Like the Corn Bunting my main feelings were of relief rather than delight.

Whooper Swan - November

I've only just recounted this one as it was last month, but in a nutshell there had been strong northerly winds the day before and the following morning a couple of central London patches managed to record an initially nine-strong flock of displaced Whoopers. By the time they flew over Wanstead they were down to five, and our views in the field were not especially conclusive even though we had been alerted that they could be coming our way by other observers on the river. Photographs, even at distance, saved the day, and remarkably this was actually a first for Wanstead. 

Photo by Tony Brown

Whooper Swan is my bird of 2023 without a doubt. Despite the fact we knew they were on their way it was not a given they would be visible, and so for me this was easily the most satisfying of the three patch ticks as despite the distance and the brevity as I was actually involved in the find rather than playing catch-up. It was vaguely reminiscent of the Cranes that flew over in September 2020, the sheer unlikelihood of the trajectory and that anyone would be present in the right spot at the right time to intersect elevating the sighting.

So was it worthwhile? Are these golden, sometimes incredibly brief moments worth the 115 other visits where you nearly died of boredom? We might grumble about how poor it has been, but we all live for these moments. As such do we all feel trapped by the patch? The trouble is that the margins are so fine that it would have been incredibly easy to have missed all three, and that's where the problem lies. I still remember the story of a well-known and very dedicated Beddington birder missing a mega on his patch and putting his binoculars down there and then. Possibly throwing them down. That same evening he deleted his blog and resigned from the local records committee. Maybe it had been a long time coming, but for him it was the final straw. He never visited again.

I'd like to think that birding in Wanstead would never affect me in this way. If that were going to happen then there have been more than a few birds over the years that could have been a trigger, but I just plough on. If I miss something I miss something, I am away sufficiently often that I am actually amazed I don't miss more. Imagine being too scared to leave the patch? No, not me. It's just one place I go birding. A lot for sure, but the world is a bigger place.