Hanningfield again

I think we had originally planned to spend the whole day at Abberton and Mersea but life got in the way. Again. For the Girl this meant learning things like "voiceless bilabial fricatives" and the International Phonetic Alphabet, while for me it was cleaning the kitchen, a sneaky spot of Skyrim and then giggling uncontrollably at the word "bilabial", because I am secretly 14.

Eventually we decided to go to Hanningfield again. It was pretty good last weekend - far better than we had expected - so we went today buoyed by an over-optimistic and potentially very disappointing sense of site loyalty and expectation. It's the kind of enthusiasm you get when you've found something reasonable the week before so your mind convinces you can't possibly fail this time. It tends to help you forget how a place can be utterly devoid of all bird life, and in Hanningfield's case, when it's bad, it's very bad. The reason we stopped going is because of the number of trips we'd go and come back with nothing more than coots and black-headed gulls. 

Thankfully, today was just as good as last Sunday.

There were in general far more birds than last weekend, and there were a lot then. I counted "at least double" the number of goldeneyes (that's a well scientific measurement that is) and at least 40 pintails - or put another way, at least 1000% more than last weekend. Raw STATISTICLE SCIENCE. While scanning and pretending to count the distant goose flock we picked up two slavonian grebes and further round the Girl's female common scoter from last Sunday was still present. Surprise of the afternoon was a juvenile eider, from the Point Hide. At least, I aged at as juvenile, with a big old eye-stripe - I don't see a lot of eiders so I don't know a lot about them. The quiet implication there is that I know a lot - or more, at least - about birds I do see a lot. To believe that would be stupid, so don't.

This might even have been an Essex tick. I don't stay on top of my Essex list - should really count it up one day - but I can't remember having seen one in the county before now.

I know that two "good days at Hanningfield" is a very small and useless sample, but maybe we're actually getting slightly better less shit at this birding thing. Maybe Hanningfield never was that shite (well, not always, anyway) and birds of a level that I currently think of as "good", like eider, scoter, fun grebes, etc are nearly always on offer. Perhaps we just missed them. So can I use this as evidence of progress in my birding ability?

Hmm. No. It's probably just coincidence.

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Yesterday is only worth mentioning because I ordered a new camera lens. After much research and some helpful discussions (thanks, if you read this) I opted for the canon 400mm f5.6, second-hand. Exciting. More exiting by some than a spot of owl hunting at Rainham at dusk, where I saw a few hundred each of black-tailed godwit, dunlin and redshank, but nothing I could even slightly string into an owl.