Ranking system. Going to Norfolk. Almost nearly finding birds at Minsmere. Melanie Shitting Phillips.

So, a quick recap. The winds at the moment are westerlies – they have been for weeks and look set to be so until at least 2013 – and the good birds in the southern UK at the moment are all south or south-west of Grays, Grays being the traditional point from which the whole country is measured.* The far south west is playing host to a bum-clenchingly good set of birds and the grim far North is dripping with similarly buttock-affecting stuff. East Anglia is stubbornly refusing to be anything other than “A Bit Shite”. This isn’t a great ranking, but it is at least a hundred higher than “Melanie Phillips” on a scale of Stuff What Sucks.

The logical destination then, for a weekend away birding, would not be Norfolk. Right? Right.

We’re going to Norfolk anyway. Cos we’re really smart. Clearly the only reason that the RBA birdmap thing isn’t showing a whole row of squares and stars along that coast is that all the birders in Norfolk are currently somewhere else. Possibly. I’m hopeful that an as-yet undetected weather system will appear overnight, depositing loads of confused migrants in the scrub right next to the pub garden but in lieu of that I’ll make do with a sabines gull and grey phalerope at Grafham followed by copious amounts of barely productive seawatching at Cley.

Whatever happens, it’s happening tomorrow. And I’ll enjoy it, birdless or not.

*Little known truth – GMT originally stood for “Grays Mean Time” and was centred on a line somewhere between Morrisons and the taxi-rank at the station, but it was moved to Greenwich when people realised how fucking awful Grays is. Funnily enough, on our first day in the new flat in Grays we watched a couple of ill-equipped track-marked men in jeans with mismatched dirty high-vis jackets hurriedly and ineptly trying to manhandle a drain-cover from the road near the library. I’m not convinced they weren’t just trying to nick it and as far as I’m concerned it just adds weight to the theory that GMT was moved when some cheap bastards stole the copper 0-degrees line set into the pavement. Grays is officially ranked at “Oh God No”. While this isn’t quite up there with “A Bit Shite” it is still rather a lot better than “Melanie Phillips”. Coincidentally, Grays sits at the same rank currently given to aythya ducks and being near Chris Moyles.

In an effort to make this post worth posting, here’s a flamingo that I saw at Minsmere a couple of weekends ago – Fiona, I believe, originally from Marwell.

I've still not worked out the new picture embeddy thing on blogger. I still can't make it do what I want. Annoying. 

I was there with the parents, an unexpected day-trip, but there wasn’t a lot to watch and we struggled to scrape together a meagre list with highlights like common scoter, beardie and barwit. The clear highlight was sort of nearly finding a pectoral sandpiper. I first had it from one of the identikit and actively scope-hostile hides that Minsmere loves so much, pootling around the scrape with a couple of ruffs and a redshank before it ran out of sight. My happiness at actually finding a semi-good bird was soon tempered with the all-but inevitable Dunnock of Self Doubt and I’d almost convinced myself that I must have been wrong. There were so few birds on site that there was no way I’d have found a pectoral, surely… 

We were busy not seeing an apparent rose-coloured starling when a staff member’s radio went off saying there was a pec sand on the scrape. Pectoral sandpipers are way better than bashing round the north bushes looking for a bird we all know isn't there, so I went and looked. And there it was, being all pectoral and stuff. For about three seconds, before it flew out of sight. Little shit.

Screw it. I’m having that, even though the views were so brief as to rank the quality of the sighting at “Fucking Awful”. “Fucking Awful” is the rating given to being in a box with a swarm of irrational bees, or having some kind of horrible bum disease. “Fucking Awful” is still several ranks higher than “Melanie ‘pants-on-head-retarded’ Phillips”.

Melanie Phillips is a wrongun, by the way. Just so you know.
So are dunnocks.