Peanut Challenge Surprise

I don't usual blog about the work patch, because it's really, really boring. That's the whole point of the 2012 Peanut Challenge - Central London patches are crap and nobody likes them.

But today, in a relative way, it wasn't. I'd set out to find a great black-backed gull, the last easy bird I've not had, and presumably not as easy a bird as I'd thought, and instead I found 13 tufted ducks. Not only were these patch ticks, but also, er, year ticks. So 13 tufties. Except that that one is smaller and is a teal. Like, Oh Em Gee. A teal. On the work patch. This is better than the day I had a common sand, and that was nearly as good as the time I found a half eaten bag of mini-eggs I'd forgotten about at the back of the drawer just in time for the 3pm sugar/morale crash.

Proper, real migrants on the patch. Sort of. The tufted ducks may just have hopped over from St Katherine's Dock, but the teal... that could have come from as far afield as East India Dock, or even Barking Bay, and I think you'll agree that that definitely counts as a migration.

It's amazing what the word "competition" does. I don't even like peanuts and I'm motivated enough to do the patch every day. Not just the easy bits either, the whole thing, sometimes twice. It's clearly showing, as I've had five patch ticks since we began - great crested grebe, robin, moorhen, tufted duck and teal - and two of those were in one lunch time. Today's, in fact. And to think, it wouldn't have happened if I'd not forgotten to bring my lunch in. There's a lesson in there.

Well, probably not, but who cares? Teal!

Honestly, that's a line of 12 tufties with a teal at the right.