Insubstantial Unnecessary Posting

Hooray! Filler!

I woke up early today with a vague intention to do the Ingrebourne. Who knows, maybe I'd find a bittern at dawn on Berwick Ponds before checking out the yellowhammer flock on the farm trail and the ducks and waders on the river. Perhaps even a couple of pendulines on the reedmace by the bridge. High expectations. Well, needless to say none of this actually happened. I don't mean just the finding decent birds part, I mean the whole thing. It was raining and I was cold. And lazy.

So I stayed at home. As it turns out this wasn't so bad as the garden today has been a bit good. It started with a pair of foxes sitting next door for most of the day.


I kept checking up on them, hoping to catch some fox-vs-cat action but had no such luck. That right there is a crying shame - I'd pay to see the black and white ones from over the back get eaten by a fox. On one hopeful checkup that was just as devoid of dead cats as every other I picked up a large mixed flock coming through. Didn't expect too much, but gave it a good go; the usual blue, great and long-tailed tits with a few sparrows and a female blackcap. A good start. As this is about the time of year they usually arrive it wasn't entirely unexpected but that makes it no less welcome. I watched the garden for the next hour or so picking up a flock of 6-7 blackbirds (rare here since the 5 cats took over) and finally a party of three, possibly four male blackcaps. Winter has arrived in the garden. All we need now is the grey wagtail to put in an appearance.


There is a bird in that picture, and it is a blackcap, honest.

Over the last few days I've been planning for next year. It should be the year I'm finally able to drive, so I'm hoping it's going to see a big list. I'm not sure quite how much to aim for or what system to use. Other people seem to use a "x new birds per month" system, which is a good idea, but I'm considering aiming for a yearlist of 259. Seems suitably stupidly ambitious considering the life list of only 220 at the time of writing, but this year it looks like I'll miss my paltry target of 200 by just one or two, and I think I'd rather miss by a bit more than that. Luckily 2010 is set to start well with a long weekend in Norfolk in the second week and there are a couple of other potentially good birding trips in the pipeline, so there's always hope.

And finally, just how the fuck do Iron Maiden get away with not being able to play live these days? Compare them today to this from 1985 and you'll see that over the last 20 years they've actually got worse. I mean, sure, Dickinson was as dodgy back then as he is now, but at least they're actually in time...

Tollesbury, backwards

We usually park up at the marina and walk out along the Tollesbury Fleet seawall to Shinglehead Spit, often with the intention walking back along the Blackwater side coming back up to the village through the fields. This never happens. So, after a late start - how long do you really need to cut a girl's hair - we decided to do Tollesbury backwards, and a good decision it was, too. High tide was 1409 at Bradwell, we arrived at about 20 past. We pressed on down the paths to Mill Creek, where all the usual Tollesbury waders were around in good numbers, flocking low over the water. Good, old fashioned winter birding with tea, sandwiches and chocolate surrounded by thousands of dunlin and knot, and several hundred grey and golden plovers with smaller groups of redshank, curlew and ringed plover.


We were really there for the possiblilty of some seabirds on the tide though, as there are still several "easy" seabirds that would add to the yearlist. Once we could see round the huge great black backed sitting on the pillbox, the first bird we saw was a long overdue lifer: a great northern diver just offshore, giving good views. Further out we had a pair of common scoter, with another three further downriver, and later on a shag flew towards the sea. The girl was, as usual, far more excited by the seals than the birds. Grey, I think.

More stunning photography.

This leaves me with a life list of 220, 2009 list of 197 and a self-found list of 192.

Unrelated, we also had a ring-necked parakeet over the garden yesterday - our second ever.

The Rainham Serins Clearly Don't Exist

... or perhaps I'm just terrible at spotting them. Another go at the serins, another failure. I think I'm just gonna have to sit out there for a whole day next week.

All very pretty, but I wasn't after pretty, I was after serin. Note how the blackbird photo isn't actually all that hideous.

At least the site is looking like a marsh again. The huge lapwing flock is back and, well, huge, as is the wigeon and teal flock. As we walked up, a flock of 6 or so pipits on the riverside was pushed right up to the new seawall by the high tide. It was about this point that I realised I don't know rock from water as well as I thought I did. I reckon there were both - some cold grey, some warm grey, some streakier than others - but I'm pretty disappointed I couldn't be surer. I'm getting out the books tonight.

Left is original, on the right I dicked around in photoshop.

I mean, seriously. I should know this. The call was a somewhat weak "feeest". Not as strident as I'd expect from a rock pipit... but now I'm just trying to convince myself.

Still, it's not all bad news - the day's minor perfectly acceptable consolation prize was a flyover snow bunting, heading upriver towards Coldharbour Point. On the one day I don't take out a radio I have something worth calling in... Still, in my book it's a pretty good bird.

The Magical One Year Post

Yes, this blog has been lowering the standards of written English and avian photography on the intarwebs for a whole year now. Thing is, I never intended it to be a long term endevour. I think I started it when drunk or bored, possibly both, and kind of planned for it to fizzle out a couple of months after it started or when I got bored - whichever came first. I don't know what went wrong, but I'm very sorry I'm still here.

So, earlier this week I looked over the last year and analysed it using SCIENCE and MATHS. Having invested time and money in specialist ANALITYCUL programs as Firefox, MSPaint and dwarffort.exe I was able to condense my findings into the graph below. To contain the sheer amount of RAW SCIENTIFIC DATA I produced nothing but a widescreen .png was sufficient. Click on it to enlarge it.

Actually don't. It's not very good.

Annotations:

Post Quality: I used to make an effort, but this soon wore off. These days I pretty much spack out on the keyboard and post whatever emerges. Doesn't look set to change.

Post Relevance: Again, I used to make an effort and so this started well, but soon dropped. An attempt in about July to try and bring it back on course had limited success, but this has since worn off. I might make another attempt at keeping the blog on course but don't hold your breath.

Swearing: Has increased. No evidence to suggest this trend won't continue and eventually plateau at every second word being an expletive but I'll try and stop that happening. Probably.

Hits: Showed brief promise after a spell of adding new followers and posting arguing on birdforum - I made it well into the top 500 birding links for a whole week - but this has since dropped off as the people tricked into clicking my link realised just how god damn awful it is. No evidence to suggest any of this will change.

Image Quality: Started low, is still low, will always be low. Would you want anything else?

What next for the web's finest shittiest bird-blog? Well, coming soon, a long-awaited photo-journey round my patch - a blatently stolen post idea - and a long awaited follow-up to the art post I made a year ago, again, an idea I blatently stole. I should draw more. And find the cables for my scanner. Maybe I'll even make a banner that fits the page, or actually go birding and write about that.

I had thought about including some birds in this post, but have seen none of note recently. In fact, the only interesting bird thing wot I sore recently was a pigeon go under a car in Upminster today. Actually went under the car and came out the other end perfectly fine, if a little shaken and down a primary or two. Was back on the road eating bits of poo about thirteen seconds later.

Given that the weekends between here and Christmas are set to be filled with shopping and band rehearsals that 200 is looking pretty unlikely right now.

Listing ethics and bad ticks: a blatently stolen post.

At the time of writing, my life list is at a whopping 219. Yes, that's a good 100 off being respectable. Having read this post followed by the blatent ripoff post over at Wanstead Birder, I decided to audit my own list and water down the original good concept yet more to produce my own piss-weak and considerably over-long version. It changed slightly in the writing and is now less of an airing-out of my dirty listing-laundry and more of a justification of the way I tick birds. Honestly, in your place, I'd close my browser about now. Enjoy.

This whole issue is so personal that no two peoples' lists are really comparable even if they follow the same strict set of rules. Personally, there is only one consistant, black-and-white rule: that the bird's ID is correct. Beyond that, things such as who made the ID, how much of the bird I saw or heard or even when I tick it vary depending on the bird, the list and my mood. I think my wordy basic definition of a "tick" is "the bird in question has undoubtably been present, and direct sensory evidence of such has entered my brain". This is suitably vague and allows for all manner of sins.

There are only 17 birds on the life list tagged with the dreaded "better views desired", a total far lower than I had expected. This "bvd" tag covers all sorts of things, at one end from seeing only one plumage/sex to the lower end where I may have only heard the bird and got distant, brief views of something more or less the right size and colour. There's nothing on the life list I feel truly guilty of having ticked but there are a couple of ticks I'm almost ashamed of on the patch lists.

There are varying standards for different birds and lists. Having compared these to those that other birders claim to adhere to I've found them to be fairly low. These standards tend to bend more for commoner birds, self found birds and lesser lists. For example, I don't really mind ticking a patch first on a poor view or call alone provided I'm famliar with the bird in question. Patch birds and self found birds can be and often are counted on the very worst views if, after searching I've not been able to get a better view.

Examples:

1: Golden Oriole, lifer, Lakenheath, earlier this summer. We tried for them three times and finally came away with unsatisfactory if lengthy views of both adults flitting about in the treetops. Colourful dots basically, I could tell they were birds, and about the size of a starling. We also heard them singing and calling. Given all these factors (and the location) making an ID was no problem. They'd be easy to ID by sight on call again. Ticked? Yeah.

2: Yellow-browed warbler, lifer. There were two at Rainham one day last autumn, but only seen early in the morning. Another birder and I refound one down by the stone barges late in the afternoon. It was keeping the right company and calling, though we only saw brief flits of a small phyllosc. Given this was (almost) (partially) self found this one's on the list under for the same reasons the oriole is. I think this is probably my dodgiest tick.

3: Caspian gull, lifer: a flypast second winter at Rainham last winter, ID'd by another birder. I had good views. I feel a bit odd in ticking a bird like this that comes in about 80 different plumages when I've only seen the one, but it was irrefutably a caspian gull and I saw it.

4: Long-tailed duck, lifer. Same as above, really. I've only seen one, a female, at Blakeney Point back in May. I'd like to see a male at some point, but I've ticked it anyway. I'd do the same for any other massively sexually-diamorphic bird such as a bluethroat and I ticked smew as a lifer on seeing a redhead on the thames at Rainham.

5: Brown Shrike, Staines, a few weeks back. We had great views, but did I realise, truly, what made it a brown and not a red-backed or isabelline? Do I know that now, and could I ID one if I found one tomorrow? Probably definately not, so should I tick it? What a stupid question, of course I should, and it's not coming off the list. Again, this principle applies to other birds I've seen that I didn't truly "understand" at the time, such as my first curlew or wood sands.

6: Whiskered Tern, Inner Marsh Farm, Wirral, a couple of years ago. It had been present for a couple of weeks, and I was shown a distant, dark tern by some local birders. Like the golden eagles I saw on childhood holidays to Scotland, I don't think I really understood what made it what it was, but I've counted them anyway as the ID's were never in doubt. I feel a little bad about this.

7: Little tern, patch tick. Seriously my worst tick ever. I had one over the car in Little Gerpins Lane earlier this year, on the way to the band's rehearsal space at Gerpins Farm. The sighting was confirmed later by another local birder who had picked it independantly. This is a very good bird for the London area and not one I'm likely to see again, and seeing that Little Gerpins Lane is so very, very close to the Ingrebourne Valley I, er, extended my patch boundaries out to the band's rehearsal space. The bird was now inside my patch boundaries. Ticked! Do I feel bad? Well, yeah. Will I ever reverse the decision? No, of course not, don't be stupid. This is a hideous example of the rules being more maleable for lesser lists and birds I've seen many times before.

... and a couple of more hypthetical ones:

8: Tristis Chiffchaff, Rainham. That "siberian" one last winter. Assuming it actually was a tristis (which it probably wasn't) I would in theory have no qualms ticking it if and when they were split, adding to the life and 2008 lists. This particular case is a moot point though, as so far as I'm aware the bird's ID was never truly nailed beyond "it's a dodgy eastern chiffchaff of some form". This armchair ticking seems to be standard practice, as with the amur falcon and yank flycatcher last year. Obviously if a bird is re-ID'd once I've seen it I'll try for it again. If I dipped, I'm not sure what I'd do. It's not happened yet.

9: Green Winged Teal, Southport, a couple of years ago. I saw this bird really well down to a couple of metres and it was a stunner. Still, if when carolinensis is re-lumped with crecca I'll remove it from the life list. Armchair ticking works both ways.

So there we have it. I expect you're no clearer as to my ticking rules than you where when we started but I don't really feel bad about that, as personal rules are about as important to other people as an itch in someone elses scrotum. Such is the beauty of bird-listing. So long as I'm happy with the birds I tick, and you're happy with the birds you tick then you'll never have an itchy scrotum. Or something

Another blog post complete.

Serins are shite anyway.

Who needs them? Small shitty brown things. A yellow arse doesn't make you special, you know. You're just another small bird. Not as cute as a twite, as good looking as a goldfinch or as well named as a snow bunting. Plectrophenax nivalis > Serinus serinus, every day of the week. Pfft.

At least Rainham has water now. It also has my tripod case, cos I forgot to pick it up on the way out, but that's not nearly as exciting as the water.


See? It's a marsh again! Hooray! The numbers of birds wot like water were looking better than they have done for a while and there were enough geese to get me hopeful for a couple of interesting ones as the winter progresses. I say "interesting" when I really mean "less boring than usual". I find it very hard to get excited about geese when there's fewer than, say, 3000 of any one species at a given time. The pair of canlags were back, up at the top end somewhere. This year stonechats have been pretty thin on the ground at Rainham by my estimation and it was good to see several along one short stretch today.


An adult male marsh harrier over the targets was only my second ever at the reserve. Of late I've become a little... well, complacent about marsh harriers. Go to almost any stretch of coastal marsh in East Anglia and there they are by the bucket load. You can't walk for them bashing into your head, and it can be quite unpleasant, like putting your head in a box of flies, but bigger. So yes, it's good to see them against a background of an industrial estate, a six lane road and two railways, because you appreciate just how god damn awesome they are. Especially adult males ones. The gull flocks were pleasingly large - I'd be surprised if the flock doesn't contain a couple of white-wingers at some point this winter. Equally, I'd be very surprised if I actually managed to see any. A peregrine sitting on the ground at the far side of Wennington was minor recompense for the time spent freezing at that fucking mound looking through flocks of goldfinches for nothing.


Grudgingly I'll admit 60 goldfinches on teasles is quite pleasant, but yeah, as I say, who needs serins anyway? Rubbish birds, and I'm not upset that I didn't see them.

...

...

...

(I'll be back to look again next week.)

Minsmere

Sometimes I think my digiscoping is getting better, then I realise it's probably just luck.

Today I got 5 year ticks, and I can hear what you're all thinking; "noob stfu" and "gtfo my internets", because as we all know being able to reach late November and still have 5-year-tick days means you're a bad birder. A really bad birder when one of those ticks is lesser redpoll. Shitting cocks, I shouldn't have to admit to that. On the plus side however, hitting that magical 200 species for the year is within my reach - barely a couple of stringed serins away. (And three others).


Today was another trip out with Howard and others, up to Minsmere. The weather was mosly clear and warm (see above) which was amazing considering the forecast hinted that the apocalypse was more likely than cloudless blue skies and mid-teen temperatures. (I wonder what interesting google searches will find my blog now, with "mid-teen" and "birds" in?)

We were primarily hunting the great white egret, and so went straight out to the Island Mere hide. On the way we had numerous marsh tits, treecreepers and other woodland birds, along with a flypast bullfinch, 8 wild red deer and 2 muntjac. Just out of the woods I picked up an egret overhead and gave it a second look - it was the great white. Life ticked, fuck yes. Unfortunately it was leaving the Island Mere area, but we pressed on anyway to find the view sorely lacking in any birds. Still, we stuck around, and shortly after the egret came back in. Then everything happened at once - the marsh harriers came in close, a kingfisher went by, water pipit called overhead (dirtily year ticked), bearded tits were calling all around us and the egret was alternating between stomping round outside the hide and circling the area in the morning sun. Just as we thought it could not get any better from the one spot, 7 berwicks swans flew past (life ticked again) and a bittern came up from the reeds and headed off left. It disturbed a harrier, which disturbed the egret, and at one point as they flew round each other in a state we had all three in one scope view.


The day was off to a fine start and thoroughly satisfied we made to leave. As we got up a flock of at least 35 bearded tits - no, really, 35 in one flock - came through the reeds just a metre or two from the hide. I'd never considered they might congregate in such numbers, so it was totally unexpected and more exciting for it. The numbers built up as we watched to an estimated 50 individuals and we had stunning views for as much time as we wanted. From our raised viewpoint over the reeds we could see down through the reed-heads and watch the birds flying and feeding low down on the stalks. I've never seen anything like that and it's probably a once in a lifetime experience. It was considerably better than the swans and the egret.

From there we cut up to the scrapes, where we had the usual array of waterfowl, snipe and blackwits and close marsh harriers, but nothing else. I can't resist marsh harrier flight shots.

"Hi guys!"

"Oh shit oh fuck oh no what even is this argh"

"Lol"

I honestly think it was just playing. It made no serious attempt at hunting but seemed to aim at putting up as many birds as possible.

The only large gulls were black-backeds and herrings - nothing that we could turn into a caspian. The sea was pretty lifeless, and the dunes held a single stonechat, a couple of linnets and mipits but not the hoped-for snow buntings. Another try at the gulls later revealed a second winter med gull and we left the site after a fantastic lunch of an extra-greasy bacon and sausage sandwich. The centre feeders and tress had more marsh tits, lesser redpolls and a siskin.

This really is a siskin. One of my better efforts.

We aimed for a flock of 40 twite at nearby Walberswick which would have been a year tick had we connected, but we missed out. There's a lot of suitable ground they could be on. The gulls there were as disappointing as Minsmere's, but we had a rock pipit or two, a couple of kittiwakes off shore and a few turnstones. The clear highlight was a low flyover snow bunting, calling as it went - year ticked. Brilliant birds, and a good view. The weather turned, so we left, day list at somewhere around 80.

I've just realised this is probably one of the most boring posts I've ever written and I apologise for that. The life list is now 219 and I'm on 196 for the year, though I'm struggling to think what else I'm likely to see. Serin, twite and caspian gull are possible at Rainham, and I guess the pendulines might be too, but I wouldn't count on any of these. I've still not had a whooper swan and I don't know where I'm going to get one. I'm going to have to be lucky, or twitchy, with birding opportunities fast running out between here and new-year. Oh well.