A user's guide to BirdForum's "Rare Bird News" section

I like BirdForum. It is, in terms of forums about birds on the internets, without parallel. If you don't pay for news it's invaluable. However, I've noticed, as I'm most regular users have, that the Rare Bird News section is a bit predictable. Almost every thread follows the same pattern. If you're a new user, this busy thread full of socially inept losers might be a bit confusing and intimidating. How to fit in? How will your post follow the unwritten yet essential conventions of the forum?

Don't worry! Here's a helpful guide. I've tried to explain the most common phases that threads go through so you too can join in and not feel left out.

It all starts with news that a rare bird has been found...

"Confusion"

At this early stage, noone really knows what's going on. "Confusion" is most often people asking "OMG WHERE access details plz". Sometimes it manifests as "Suspicion" or "Doubt", at which point you might for example write "lol siberian shitchat? more likely a robin LOL" or "why wasn't news put out quicker? fkin supression >:[".

If there's even the slightest doubt that the bird is present, please feel free to cast wild aspersions about the quality of the observers, the possiblity of supression, the bird's wild credentials or anything else you feel might be (ir)relevant.  

"Useful Information And Related Content"

If the bird is present, and you can't think of any way to pretend that it's not, we'll enter the usually very short "Useful Information And Related Content" phase, where some users post things like where to park, where the bird actually is and how best to get good views, etc. This stage is entirely optional and widely discouraged. Sometimes, in the very best threads, it might not happen at all. If you must take part, get it over with quickly, and move on to the far better...

"Quick, derail it!"

The useful information out of the way, it's important that you start to derail things as quickly as possible. This is usually very easy. For instance, if the bird is in Ireland, Northern or not, you could start a lengthy and ill-informed thread about internal/international borders and geographical regions. You might throw in an ID comment, for instance "the emarginations on the third and fourth anal feathers are totally wrong for loose-ringed gull" or "the secondary panel is clearly green-grey, not grey-green". Even if you can't get to the bird in question, have no interest in doing so or have no idea on its ID, don't worry - you can still take part. Simply say something like... "Oh, people still haven't seen one of these?! LOL TART'S TICK!" or "I simply don't understand why you would want to twitch this - you can see hundreds of them in their native [expensive foreign land]". 

With the thread now moving in the right direction - a broken one - we might move to the...

"Rose-Tinted Glasses" 

This is where users reminisce pointlessly about the past, gloat about it, and say things like "Ah yes, this reminds me of the '78 blue-nippled warbler at Slapton-Upon-Buttock, which I saw with Reginald Foreskin-Biscuit and the legendary late Keith Flaps. Needless to say, I won't be going for this bird and have nothing useful to add to the conversation". This is often a very productive stage. Sometimes you might get several rose-tinted users who fill the thread with inane ramblings and in-jokes that eventually derail it entirely in a useless backslap-fest that would be better placed in a thread of it's own. This is a sign of a successful thread that's enjoyable for everyone, and totally not just the old guard from Scilly in the Good Old Days.

"Complain like a pro"

By this point, most users have done the twitch - if they're going to at all. Sitting at home and arguing online is way more fun, so many don't bother to twitch at all. The "Complain" phase is an essential part of any good rarities thread. It's where you review the day's birding. You might say things like "shocking behavior and total lack of fieldcraft, wasn't like that in my day" and "it's simple innit the bird's welfare comes first, innit", all the while knowing that you as another anonymous, greeny-brown clad optics toting loser like everyone else would have done exactly the same thing if you'd thought about it at the time. Other good targets for your entirely reasonable and well directed ire might include people who park badly or younger birders than yourself.

"Hooray, Thread Derailed!"

By this point, we've reached the endgame. Well done! Anything useful has been said and the thread is essentially pointless. We enter the "Hooray, Thread Derailed!" phase, which, needless to say, is usually the longest of all. It's a free-for-all, really. You might choose to continue complaining about conduct, photographers, or how you just don't understand why people would want to travel for a bird like this. You might reminisce some more, chat with the old guard about the great twitches on Scilly, before any of the "teeny tickers" were on the scene and everything was better, or how the 1987 Shinythroat at Little Skidmark was better than anything since. You could start a pointless argument with another user, or indulge in a spot of LGRE bashing. It's up to you! Whatever you choose to do, try and drag it out. You've got to make this last until the next rare bird thread.

When it all starts again...

Sunday birding

An extremely low tide this morning coincided with me being in the flat with the time to stare at it. The low water meant that even we on the ground floor could see the nearside mud. By standing on the bed looking down through an overly heightened scope I was able to sift through waders with a little more ease than usual, although that depends how you define "ease". I was looking through around 50 dunlin and 4 ringed plover on the off chance I might relocate and flat-tick a little stint seen a couple of hundred metres downriver a few days when I found a sanderling, an excellent bird for Grays. If you're interested, it's the fifth sanderling I've had here, after a group of four seen on the far bank back in the autumn. Four turnstone spent the morning directly outside the flat, and three curlews, five grey plover, 25 teal and the usual hordes of lapwing and redshank made up the rest of a fairly productive if flat-tickless hour.

This afternoon I opted for the selfish option of birding, rather than hospital visiting. I went to Abberton.

Up north, relatively, there's still a lot more snow than there is in Grays, with some roads still covered. Made for some exciting driving.

As usual I stopped first at the Layer Breton causeway, where I failed utterly to find the long-tailed duck, any smew, or any scaup amongst the hordes of shovelers, wigeon, teal, and that disgusting chinese swan goose thing from last time. I checked twitter and thanks to the magic of mobulate phonterwebs and the generosity of its users I soon left for Abberton Church, where the long-tailed duck was fairly quick and easy to locate. Thanks, by the way, to the guy who drove ahead so I could follow him there... Views were distant and brief; for every four seconds it spent on the surface it spent a minute or two under water. It did spend all its time in the one area though, making picking it up after each dive easy. This is the nearest thing I have to a photo of a long-tailed duck at Abberton; a very confused long-tailed duck I found just inside Blakeney Point a few Mays ago.

This all seems a very, very long time ago.

After seeing the long-tail, an Essex tick, no less, and a bird I didn't see at all last year, I toured the reservior looking for open water. There were loads of goldeneye and a few goosander but they didn't nearly make up for being the only birder in the east of the UK who didn't see a smew this weekend. However, taking advantage of it being a Sunday, parking in a works entrance and viewing from the closed causeway easily made up for it as I located two scaup out on the main body of the reservior. Scaup are brilliant, one of those "if you think it's one, it's not" birds.

Not coots.

Back at Layer Breton, the apparently regular barn owl was in it's usual bush, with a hen harrier sitting nearby and three short eared owls in their regular field. From the old visitor centre drive I had a couple of white-fronted geese hanging around with some greylags out on the ice and a huge flock of skylarks.

Two of three distant shorties in there somewhere...

And then I went home. The end.

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I took the camera out today for some more thorough testing. It's definitely borked, though inconsistently so. Sometimes it was like this:

Acceptable.

And then others, it was like this:

Unacceptable.

Arse.

Another day, another flat tick

Apparently, when you reach adulthood you're supposed to stop enjoying snow and become either fearful of it or incredibly grumpy whenever it happens. I must have missed that lesson because I love snow.

However, I do hate how we as a nation deal with it, or more accurately fail to deal with it and I also hate how, for at least a week prior to a possible snow event our media goes into snowverdrive (HAHAHAH) and bombards us with endless shit about how we're all going to die. As I'm sure you're already aware today was one such snowpocalypse. I didn't die. If you weren't aware of that before, you are now. I was able to spend most of the day either watching the river from the flat, which is a rare luxury, or poking about on the seawall in front of it.

As you can see, we live in a really nice area.

Almost promising migrant scrub and junkie hangout

The cold snap has bought a few more birds into the river, but despite putting in the hours  Grays didn't really produce the goods like other sites along the river did. In terms of waders and waterfowl I didn't get anything more than decent amounts of the usual suspects - Redshank, lapwing and teal numbers are all noticeably up. Grey plovers headed upriver on and off all day, with around a dozen or so knocking about our immediate stretch of the Thames, but I didn't get any of my target birds - godwits, golden plover or either of the snipes. Best birds on the river itself were two great-crested grebes, only the third and fourth I've ever seen here, and the kittiwakes, fast becoming "normal" expected sightings, are still hanging around. As usual they're almost exclusively seen following ships when the tide is highish. On a quick walk this morning I had a rock pipit just up from the flat that unfortunately doesn't make the list, but that's just a matter of time.

Real proper birds, just in front of (if not directly in view from) our flat

The only real birds of note were two adult little gulls that went upriver just before 1pm. They were a long way out, almost over Swanscombe Point, and hard to pick out against the snowy background. I snapped off a few shots hoping to catch them and while one or other of the birds appears in several pictures and this is by far the best of the bunch. It's another one where I've had to circle the relevant part...

Awesome, huh?

(enter witty post title here)

Went to Rainham. Saw these. 

Didn't nearly get the killer shot I'd have wanted, given that they were, for bearded tits, quite showy. But it was bloody freezing, I was shooting through moving reeds and the birds tended to spend all their time with their backs to us, face down and arse up.

Not a lot else around though - couple of snipe, couple of green sands, a good number of pintail (for Rainham), a single stonechat and a lot of ice.

Back at home, I've had three long overdue flat ticks in the last couple of days, starting with a dunnock in the carpark yesterday. Never been so excited about a dunnock. With this mornings high tide, eight grey plover were knocking around with a few lapwings, a redshank and three dunlin and looking up towards Grays itself a distant coot finally made the list. Across the river we had an oystercatcher and a couple of turnstones while a single kittiwake went downriver with a ship. For the location, far more interesting birds than we had at Rainham...

What a badly cropped picture this is.

Anyway, this will probably be my last ever blog post, as according to the news we're due an apocalyptic snowfall any second now. It's apparently going to be as cold as -6 and we might even see 5 centimetres of snow... 

Well, either this is the end of the world as we know it, or the collective media's Hyperbole Machine (tm) has gone into snow-driven overdrive.

Peanut Patch Updates

Talk on various birdy sites about this new cold weather maybe inducing some interesting bird movement had me out walking the work patch this lunchtime. I figured I was definitely in line for something like a smew coming upriver, what with the weather being so extreme and everything.

I was wrong, of course. But I did get a peregrine flying onto Tower Bridge, and so far as I'm aware, it's still sitting there now, waiting out this "snow". I'm perfectly happy that correlation and causation are pretty much the same thing, no matter what xkcd or anyone else tells you, and if you were to draw a graph showing a relationship between "peregrines resting on the south face of the south tower of Tower Bridge at lunch time" and "snowing" you'd see that there is a 100% relationship. So I guess this weather front has provided. Whatever. It's 2012 Peanut Challenge bird number 29 and only my second sighting of this species on patch.

I took a photo, which you can see below. You know things are bad when you have to label which bit of the picture is the bird. It's even worse than Lethbridge's phone-camera'd effort from a few days ago, which you can see below below and is at least recognisable as a bird.

Hope he doesn't mind me posting it. I pro watermarked it just in case.

I also saw two mallards doing teh sex, which is only notable because it was a relatively civilised affair: there were only the two of them, no gang rape (googled pic) she was actually a she and definitely alive, and had given what looked like grudging acceptance, if not total consent, with only a bare minimum of head biting and drowning by way of coercion. So yes, notable, as mallards are usually bastards.

Back to the cold weather. I predict this, on patch, tomorrow.

And while I'm talking patch, late one evening last week I had three swans over the Tower itself. Technically they and I were off patch, so no matter what species they are it's fairly irrelevant to me and my peanuts, but I think they were Bewick's. Thank god they weren't on patch, huh?

East Tilbury to Mucking Flats

Ok, so maybe it wasn't quite a dawn visit, but I did get out early to look for owls. Inevitably this was a total waste of time, so I moved on and instead opted for a walk I've been interested in for a while now, from Coalhouse Fort up to Mucking Flats.

 

When I got there the car's thermometer read 1 degree, but in the thick fog out on the marsh it felt a few degrees colder than that. I set out from the fort along the old outer seawall and the visibility was awful; I could hardly see the mud, let alone the river or Kent. While this meant I didn't see a lot of birds, it also meant that for the next few kilometers I didn't see anybody. Not one person. Not even an ambitious dog walker. It was brilliant. With the weather and lack of people it felt like I was somewhere significantly more remote than East Tilbury.

Looking towards Mucking Flats

A large flock of linnets and reed buntings were loosely flocking along the old seawall and as the fog started to lift, meadow pipits and skylarks appeared along with five, maybe six stonechats. Inside the seawall I picked up a few little grebes on the channels, winter thrushes, a water rail and a green sandpiper that flushed short distances repeatedly as I made progress.

It was never going to be a good trip for photos as all I could see was fog and reed buntings and stonechats that didn't come close enough. These are all what a competent photographer would call "record shots", if competent photographers took record shots of non-breeding common birds. Me, though? I'm happy enough with a couple of them. But I am a very bad photo-er.

Up at Mucking Flats I immediately regretted leaving the scope in the car on the basis that I couldn't see far enough for it to be of any use. By now the visibility was much better and there, out on the mud, were thousands of waders. I gave up counting the avocets when I hit 350. My conservative estimates for black-tailed godwit and dunlin numbers are 1100 and 800 respectively, in several huge flocks. Serious numbers of birds. I'm going to have to go back on a better day. 

Expertly stitched view of one of several big wader flocks.

The weather cleared as I headed back and once I could see the water I picked up 25 common scoters heading upriver. The Girl didn't see them go past the flat, so either they stopped somewhere or she didn't look hard enough.

As a kind of kick-in-the-balls back to reality, dog walkers were out in force when I got back to Coalhouse, letting their darling dogs shit on the paths and in one case, much to the hilarity of dad and associated chavling, off the edge of the path into the moat. Now I'm not one for generalisations - haha - but seriously. Dog walkers suck.

---

Back at Grays I had a quick scan for the scroters, but they weren't there. I did, however, pick up my second flat tick in two days - a male shoveler, hanging out with a record 62 teal and 200 lapwings. I love this flat.

Filler material.

I've had a particularly stressful couple of days. Without going into details it's involved leaving work in a rush early on Thursday and then spending a lot of time in a hospital (just visiting), a pleasant experience that I expect will continue for a while. In between all this and perhaps because of it I found/made the time for half an hour or so at the Stone Barges this afternoon. It's amazing the effect that just getting outside for a few minutes has.

Post-industrial Essex is an odd type of nice, but it's definitely nice.

No owls, of course, and the pipits resolutely refused to land (is there a way to tell rock from water by call?), but one of the barges was crammed with a mix of redshank, black-tailed godwits, dunlin and a couple of lapwings. As more birds arrived on the tide a small group of dunlin put on a decent show in front of an impressive sunset. So nothing out of the ordinary, but particularly nice after the last couple of days.

This also put in a brief appearance. I'm not as hot on my seal ID as I thought I was - any suggestions? The Girl reckons it's common, as do I, but it was a big old beastie. Anyone who knows seals by bad silhouette pictures, feel free to leave answers on a postcard. Or comments section. I care not.

Update: twitterland agrees. It's a common seal.

Had good numbers of waders at Grays the last couple of days too. Yesterday I counted over 100 redshank, around 20 lapwings and a few dunlin. Today, just as the tide started to rise there were 20-30 each of redshank and lapwings, a few dunlin and a ringed plover. The plover is flat-tick number 60.

Tomorrow, I've tentatively pencilled in a dawn owl spotting sesh at somewhere even scummier than Grays or Rainham. Let's see what, or if, it happens...