Lots of words and no pictures makes retarded children cry

So I hear there's a funny looking lesser black-back on the tip. This is suddenly a whole lot more relevant than it was a couple of days ago.

I might go tomorrow, I might not. I mean, it's just a gull and I'm struggling to get excited. It's not like the white-tailed plover. When I read about this gull at work today I didn't immediately try and think of ways to pull a sicky to go see it. With this, the feeling of having missed out on something everyone else didn't miss is far stronger than any positive feelings I have about seeing another large white-headed gull, and that's not a good reason to do anything. I have a sneaky suspicion that a fair few of the people there tomorrow will be their for that very reason. I mean, it's hardly a stunner, is it? It's not like a shrike, or pendulines, or a bee-eater, or a marmora's, or a sandhill crane, or a... (this particular list could go on almost forever)

Also, I honestly can't stomach the idea of jostling amongst hundreds of people, most of whom I probably wouldn't like, all pushing and fagging about, stringing badly seen lesserbacks into something more 'interesting'. The annoying thing is that if I don't at least make the effort, I know, that against my better judgement, and probably for all the wrong reasons, I'm going to regret it. We all know it's going to pull a fast one tomorrow afternoon, and if it does turn up on Monday at another beautiful nature reserve landfill it probably won't be anywhere accessible. It certainly won't be anywhere more local than Rainham. (And if it was, I wouldn't care - I'm going to Narfuk on Friday anyway). But again, hardly a good reason.

Abrupt subject change.

Last weekend I went to Old Leigh/Two Tree with the girl. The tide was perfect for us, reaching a high just after we arrived at the lagoon. Unfortunately, the weather was also perfect, and consequently we were joined by a large group of idiots with top-end scopes and bins pointing and shouting that there was a lapwing flying over. Now, please don't think I suddenly hate people who aren't very good at birding. I don't. Nor do I hate people with top-end kit who don't know their waders. I don't. I just don't like loud people, and I especially don't like loud people when they're near me, in a hide, while I'm trying to look at birds.

Not that there were very many birds there, just small numbers of the expected stuff - I think the highlight on the wader front was a single greenshank, and that didn't stay long. The tide wasn't quite big enough to push any number of birds in, the people in the hide were too loud and there was a pair of peregrines going back and forth overhead that didn't help either. The female was massive, a seriously big bird with messed up primarys on the left wing - a pretty distinctive individual. She had an obviously bulging crop, but I doubt the waders stopped to notice that the pair weren't hunting.

We didn't stay long. One guy was trying to photograph a blackwit that had unwittingly strayed near to the hide. He picked up his camouflaged long-lense (makes it invisible, you see) and whirled it through the hide window. It stuck out at least 18 inches, and upon seeing this, the godwit cacked itself and buggered off. The guy turned to me, shrugged in a baffled way and said

"They always seem to do that, tricky little buggers".

Right. I wonder why?

Shortly afterwards, a grey plover made the same mistake. So did the birder, and the plover did a runner. Flapper. Whatever you want to call it. The guy muttered under his breath. I have very little patience when people make the same mistakes time after time.

Better birding was to be had walking along the sea-wall. The flocks of knot and dunlin over the Kent side of the river must have numbered around 15,000 and performed perfectly - I suspect the peregrines were to thank for this. With no sign of the brent goose flock, we had to make do with a paltry 6 flyovers and a distant circling falcon that was probably a merlin.

While out at Two-Tree I even took some photos, of birds and stuff, with the best of blogging intentions, but I left them on her camera.

I can't promise they were very good, or that they were even of 'good' birds, but I can promise that they were at least 100 times more interesting than all the shitty pictures of shitty gulls you're going to have shoved down your filthy larophile throat over the next couple of days by people who pretend that they actually like spending hours on the side of a stinky landfill on the side of the Thames to see, effectively, and even uglier lesser-back.

Come off it. We all know you're lying. You don't like that. That's not why you got into birding. Nobody reading this had that moment of childhood awakening, that sudden realisation that the natural world was fucking awesome, while looking at a gull. Nobody.

You don't really like gulls and you won't really enjoy tomorrow. The drive, the hideous parking nightmare, the trudge up the river in the rain, the hours of standing downwind of the open landfill, the hours of careful gull inspection, or the 20 minutes you'll spend, if you're lucky, looking at the bird in question and pretending that now you know why it's what it is and why it's not any other large white-header. Stop it.

It's like birders who suddenly become entomologists in June. You couldn't give a rats arse about how the anal protuberances on a shit-spotted darter differ from those of the spotted-shit darter and I don't either.

But, to my shame, that doesn't stop me looking at odonatid rectum all summer long or from taking the odd diversion into the exciting land of lepids.

And it probably won't stop me from going to Rainham tomorrow.
...

Bollerks.

I think I'm feeling a bit grumpy this evening.