Showing posts with label Twitching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitching. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Working From Home.

Sue. “You call that work?”. 

“I am at my place of work with a cup of coffee. Blogging, replying to emails or reading the latest news. It keeps my mind active, enquiring and less likely to putrefy with old age". 

No PR spin, no advertising and no corporate agenda - there are Internet sites that uphold the lost art of journalism. Fake news, PR spin and post-truth politics; we live in a world where the information we digest cannot be relied upon; where the manipulation of news for political, corporate or personal agendas is rife; where journalists are vilified, threatened or silenced for exposing corruption, crimes, injustice or for airing non-woke views. 

So how do we, as readers, get closer to the truth? While no reporting is entirely without bias, there are still, thankfully, some sources of news and information that work against the grain by undermining traditional media and attempting to reveal hidden truths. 

”When you’ve finished festering and looking for the truth, the outside windows need a clean and the grass needs cutting”. 

“Yes Dear”. 

However, after a skim over with the reluctant to start Mountfield, the grass, or “lawn” as we Brits prefer to call it, looks just fine. And the damson tree is in full blossom even if the autumn fruit is inevitably full of grubs. 

Today I’m working from home so looked for an archived piece to delight readers; it’s where I found this item about how other people see the legend that is The British Twitcher . 

From Another Bird Blog of December 15 2013. A well written, partly satirical, but ultimately truthful read about birding, guaranteed to make us laugh again during these dispiriting days. 

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From The Washington Post 15th December 2013. 

GREAT YARMOUTH, England — Garry Bagnell is cruising down an English country road when his beeper lights up with a bulletin. A Shorelark - a distinctive bird with yellow and black markings took a wrong turn somewhere over Norway and is getting its bearings on a beach an hour’s drive north. Time to step on the gas. 

Shorelark

Britain’s wild world of competitive bird-watching can be a truly savage domain, a nest of intrigue, fierce rivalries and legal disputes. 

“I need that bird, I need it,” said Bagnell, a 46-year-old accountant and hard-core practitioner of British twitching, or extreme and extremely competitive bird-watching. 

“When a bird you haven’t seen drops, you’ve got to chase it. That’s going to bring me up to 300 different species spotted for the year.  You don’t understand how competitive this is. For some people, this is life and death.” 

Beyond these shores, the world of bird-watching may be a largely gentle place ruled by calm, binocular-toting souls who patiently wait for their reward. But in Britain, it can be a truly savage domain, a nest of intrigue, fierce rivalries and legal disputes. Fluttering somewhere between sport and passion, it can leave in its path a grim tableau of ruined marriages, traffic chaos and pride, both wounded and stoked. This is the wild, wild world of British twitching. 

Britain isn’t the only place that has hatched a culture of fierce bird-watching. In the United States, book-turned-Hollywood-film “The Big Year” chronicled the quest of three men vying in long-held American competitions to spot the most number of species in a single year. Nevertheless, observers say the intensity of the rivalries and the relative size of the twitching community here, numbering in the thousands, singled out British birders as some of the most relentless in the world. 

One of the fiercest rivalries, for instance, pits Bagnell’s former mentor and now nemesis, Lee Evans, against 41-year-old grocer Adrian Webb. Evans, 53, dubs himself the “judge, jury and executioner” of British bird-watching and keeps his own twitcher rankings. To take on the master, Webb took 12 months off from work in 2000, spending $22,000 and driving 88,000 miles to break Evans’s record of 386 species of birds seen on the British Isles in one year. They trash-talk on the birding circuit like prize fighters. 

“Evans is a bit of a strange bloke,” said Webb, who is known to drop his grocer’s apron and turn on a dime to chase a rare bird, and claims to have broken Evans’s record in 2000. “He doesn’t like people who he thinks are a threat to him. If someone has seen more birds than him, he doesn’t like it. If someone sees a bird that he hasn’t, he doesn’t like that, either.”

Evans - a figure so polarising on the birding circuit that his name is routinely smeared on rivals’ blogs and in online forums, does not recognise Webb’s claim to the title.

Over the years, Evans has racked up big legal bills defending himself against allegations of slander for allegedly under-counting the tallies of rivals and questioning whether they’ve actually seen all the birds they claim.

He dismissively calls Webb a “chequebook birder”- one who will spend any sum to reach birds spotted even on distant islands miles off the British coast. Evans also insists that he has been the victim of underhanded tricks, citing an incident when he was racing to see a rare bird in Scotland. He had lined up a plane to take him to a sighting on a remote island only to find that a group of rival birders had stuffed the palm of his pilot “with a few extra quid” to take them instead. 

“In America, bird-watching is still mostly a pastime,” said Evans, who is on his fourth marriage and blames his divorces partly on his obsession with twitching. “But in Britain, bird-watching can be bitter. It can be real nasty business.” 

A term coined in the 1960s to describe the jaw-rattling sound of chasing after rare birds on rumbling motorbikes, “twitchers” are narrowly defined as bird-watchers willing to drop everything to chase a sighting.  More broadly, it includes those who make their way to see a bird within a few minutes of an urgent bulletin.

Such bulletins are typically sent out by services such as the Rare Bird Alert, which obtains its information in real time from a vast network of bird-watchers across Britain. Once notified of a sighting, the service issues urgent messages to its 21,000 subscribers via pay-by-the-month pagers and smartphone apps. 

In one of dozens of similar scenes of “twitcher madness” here, local police were forced to cordon off streets after hundreds of desperate bird-watchers descended on a suburban home in Hampshire last year when a rare Spanish Sparrow fluttered into somebody’s garden. 

Spanish Sparrow 

For a mostly male sport with an average age over 50, however, twitching can also tempt fate. In October, a top British twitcher, Tim Lawman, had a heart attack while on the trail of a Radde’s Warbler in Hampshire. “It was a new bird for him, and in all the excitement of rushing to see it, he just keeled over and died,” Evans said. 

A popular smartphone app to help British birders is being advertised as an essential tool when “there have even been recent cases of violent clashes between bird watchers as people desperately try to get the very best spots.” In 2009, Bagnell said, he and other twitchers were aghast when two elderly rivals on the circuit went for each other’s throats. “One was saying he’d seen a bird, and the other said he didn’t believe him,” Bagnell said.

Though most twitchers are bird-lovers, the sport is mostly about the chase.  Bagnell, for instance, drove 90 minutes and searched the ground for a half-hour before he spotted the coy Shorelark in beach scrub. He eyed it for a few moments before tweeting his find, then moved on. “I’ve got another bird to get three hours away,” he said.

The most unfortunate twitchers race many miles to spot a bird only to find that their flighty subjects have flown off - a bummer known in the twitching world as a “dip.” One of the most infamous dips came as Webb pursued a long-tailed shrike in the Outer Hebrides off mainland Scotland. The boat he and 12 others had hired died in choppy waters, forcing a daring rescue by Her Majesty’s Coastguard. “We were worried for our lives for a bit, but we were more worried about not seeing this bird,” he said. 

Within the world of twitching, there are countless rankings; lifetime lists, annual lists, semiofficial lists, slightly more official lists. Such rankings are partly predicated on evidence. When you saw that Velvet Scoter in Wales, were there witnesses? How about photographs? If not, claims all come down to trust. 

Velvet Scoter

Many see twitching as an outcrop of the British fascination with “spotting” things - most notoriously, trainspotting, a hobby that involves the obsessive pursuit of seeing as many locomotives with your own eyes as humanly possible. But others say it may simply be a case of boys who refuse to grow up.

Twitchers 

“Years ago, British boys used to spend their childhoods collecting birds’ eggs or stamps - now you wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing,” said Brian Egan, manager of the Rare Bird Alert. “But what they can do as adults is chase sightings of rare birds. So that’s what they do.” 

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Dear Reader. In 2020 the scene is as mad if not more insane than ever.  Following the decline in even once common birds, almost every species becomes a target for the year lister.  More so for those with little interest in birds but drawn to the British obsession with collecting.

And just like me, here's someone else working from home. Wilson, The Border Collie.

Border Collie

There's more bird watching madness from Another Bird Blog soon. Don't be late.



Monday, September 2, 2019

Wheat’s It All About?

Monday was the last of our child minding for the summer holidays, so I couldn’t make it up to Oakenclough where the long drive there and back makes for half a day’s commitment. 

Instead I made a 15 minute drive to Gulf Lane and grabbed an hour or two ringing at the Linnets with the aim of being home for breakfast. On 24th August there was a count of 160/185 Linnets, but today more like 70/80, an unexpected drop in numbers for this time of year perhaps explained by the current availability of food in the wider countryside. 

At 0900 the sky blackened from the North-West as a downpour arrived and forced an early end to my meagre catch of 6 Linnets, all first years, three of each sex, plus a single first year Reed Bunting. 

Reed Bunting 

Linnet 

A text from Andy advised that the downpour had reached Oakenclough, soaked him to the skin and he was packing in. Did I laugh? - just a little.  But he'd caught a few goodies by way of 1 Tree Pipit, 3 Willow Warblers, a Chiffchaff, a Meadow Pipit and two smart looking Bullfinch. 

Bullfinch 

Meanwhile just half a mile from Gulf Lane the appearance of a rare bird at Fluke Hall this weekend provoked a flood of twitchers to this otherwise quiet, mostly unmolested part of Wyre. 

A wheatear species first spotted along the sea wall on 1st September and identified as an adult female Eastern Black-eared Wheatear continues to create discussion and not a little controversy, even down to birders collecting a faeces sample from the bird’s rocky shore hangout for later DNA analysis. 

Poo sample 

The controversy centres around the fact that the autumnal Pied Wheatear Oenanthe pleschanka and the autumnal Black-eared Wheatear Oenanthe hispanica melanoleuca look remarkably similar, so much so that such occurrences sometimes remain unassigned. 

For what it’s worth, having studied the individual involved, plus a read of the Ringer’s Bible Svensson.  My own thoughts were firstly that the bird was clearly a first summer/juvenile, and not an adult ,and that the mantle colour and fringes, the darkish breast with little hint of colour, the long primary projection coupled with the slight scaling on the back point to a Pied Wheatear. 

Pied Wheatear? 

There is of course a remote possibility that the bird could prove to a hybrid/cross of wheatear sp; but that is another controversy in the waiting should the poo sample not prove a point in someone’s favour. 

This all begs an obvious question. If in error anyone ticked the "wrong" species on the list, once confirmation of the correct species is later agreed by “experts”, must those who ticked the wrong species return to the sea wall, search anew for the new bird, find and ID it, and then eat humble pie? 

All this high-stakes twitching and controversy is too complicated for me. Think I will stick to being a low-key, unsophisticated ringer with nothing to say. 

Linking today with Eileen's Saturday Blog



Monday, April 29, 2019

Comedy Gold

I am grateful to my pal who sent me a catalogue of messages from North West Birding Whatsapp. The messages summarise the fun and otherwise surrounding the appearance of a Hoopoe on 27th April 2019.

Hoopoe

From Wiki - “The Eurasian Hoopoe is widespread in Europe, Asia, and North Africa and northern Sub-Saharan Africa.”

The Hoopoe is indeed very, very common in the region of the Mediterranean Sea in countries like France and Spain where it can be easily seen in towns, villages, gardens and parks. It is also an annual and regular visitor to the UK, mostly in spring and autumn with sporadic breeding records. 

Hoopoe

From Whatsapp: To save any embarrassment, names and phone numbers have been omitted from the messages.

  • 20:50, 4/27/2019 - Reports on RBA (Rare Bird Alert) of Hoopoe in Charnock Richard at 8.20pm 
  • 10:48, 4/28/2019 - Hoopoe Charnock Richard. Mate of mine has some great pics just waiting to see where it is. 
  • 10:50, 4/28/2019 - Location has been taken off the public domain and please not shared due to trespassing on the farmer's land. 
  • 10:50, 4/28/2019 - Church Lane Charnock Richard. 
  • 12:39, 4/28/2019 - Hoopoe still present but being disturbed by photographers!!! 
  • 12:43, 4/28/2019 - Birders or photographers? 
  • 12:50,4/28/2019 - What a surprise... sounds same as the blyths earlier in the year.... 
  • 12:50, 4/28/2019 - Toggers? 
  • 12:52, 4/28/2019 - I posted the comment as advice for anyone else visiting, not for discussion. Remember this is a sightings page which I had posted. Thanks. 
  • 16:01, 4/28/2019 - Any news on hoopoe please 
  • 16:36, 4/28/2019- Hoopoe in fields on north side of church lane with sheep west of church 
  • 16:41, 4/28/2019 - Is there somewhere to view from? 
  • 16:44, 4/28/2019 - There is a small memorial garden. Can be seen by looking through the far trees 
  • 16:44, 4/28/2019 - Thanks 
  • 17:29, 4/28/2019 - Hoopoe showing well from private garden Charnock Richard at 17.15 
  • 17:32, 4/28/2019 - Are we allowed to know where exactly or is that against the owner’s wishes? 
  • 17:59, 4/28/2019 - I spoke to the young lad from the farm and he said that he had to get the police yesterday as people were refusing to land his field until they got a photo. So guess he's not that happy 
  • 18:02, 4/28/2019 - Ok, so best not to report it anymore please. 
  • 18:24, 4/28/2019 - It was the young farmer (Dan) who took me into his garden to see bird. A chap was arrested yesterday for refusing to leave field where pregnant ewes were spooked. His issue is trespassing - not folk birding from footpaths etc. 
  • 18:31 4/28/2019 - That would be aggravated trespass, which has fine of £200-300 for 1st offence, up to 3 months subsequent offence. And a crim record. Just for a pic 
  • 18:33, 4/28/2019 - Name and shame the clown. 
  • 18:34, 4/28/2019 - He's been arrested. That's surely enough? Can we not leave this group for sightings alone? 
  • 18:35, 4/28/2019 - Here here (sic) zap 😴 
  • 18:35, 4/28/2019 - Here here (sic) 
  • 18:38, 4/28/2019 - No further discussion on the Hoopoe in Lancs please. If you decide to go for it please observe the birders (sic) code of conduct the countryside code of conduct and the law.
Hoopoe

April 29th and all seems to be quiet on the Hoopoe front. Welcome to the world of twitching.



Friday, December 23, 2016

Agony Birding. A Christmas Story.

Barbara is heading our way for the weekend.  Looks like the only bird to see for a day or two will be the Christmas Turkey.

Storm Barbara

Meanwhile, I thought Agony Aunts were for the red tops and glossy magazines, not the birding press? Seems I’m mistaken as I found a snippet in this month’s copy of Birding Monthly under the column heading 'Ask Dorothy - Birding problems – Advice about ID, Photography, Birding Gear and Personal'. 

Suitably intrigued, I read more. It's an unhappy tale but a cheerful ending could be in sight.

“HELP! My partner’s lost his birding mojo.” 

"DEAR DOROTHY: I first met my partner 3 years ago on a cross country trip to Spurn to twitch a Red-flanked Bluetail. Frank was stood in a line-up of birders scanning for the bluetail. As people moved around chatting I found myself next to this good-looking guy who carried all the latest birding gear. He didn’t seem to notice little me even though I asked him lots of questions about birds, Spurn and Yorkshire in general. I quizzed him about his brand new top-of-the-range-optics and his life list, but at best I received a mumble or two in grudging recognition of my presence. I was impressed though when after a minute or two Frank latched onto the target bird as all the other dudes around just gossiped away. Eventually we grilled the bluetail together as he slowly loosened up enough to chat for a while. After what seemed an eternity he let me raise his monopod and then to test his Optigrand Super Zoom. That was a very impressive piece of kit, I can tell you. 

Well to cut a long story short Frank and I became best buddies, and pretty soon a pair of inseparable lovebirds. But now three years later and after many a shared tick and twitch all over the UK, Frank has mutated into a birder I don’t recognise. He no longer gazes at Birdforum, has cancelled his subscriptions to Rare Bird Alert and Birdwatch magazine, is reluctant to hit the road for new birds, and has even joined the RSPB.  Just last week I had a plane chartered to fly to Shetland for a First for Britain, a Greener-green Warbler (Phylloscopus borinus), but he said “No thanks chuck, I have a survey to complete, and then I need to enter my Birdtrack records on the PC”. The final straw came yesterday when he 'came out' as being a closet member of the BTO. 

What has happened to my Frank? Have I lost my birding soulmate? Is there life after twitching? 

Betty. Bootle, Merseyside". 

Lovebirds

"DEAR BETTY: My heart goes out to you. Many of us steadfast twitchers are mortified when a valuable member of the birding community is lost to the questionable pursuits you describe. It sounds like your Frank is in danger of becoming something we call an “ornithologist”. It’s a nasty illness that affects the weak-willed and the delusional. Very often such people are loners and less well-adjusted to the social and communal aspects of birding.

Try dialogue and compassion. Be tolerant and persuade him of the errors of his ways through displaying how much you still care for him. Try showing him pictures and videos of all the good birds he’s missed lately: that should bring him to his senses. 

If all of that fails, and as a last resort, I recommend Surveygone™, available from your local chemist. It’s guaranteed to erase all anti-twitching thoughts and to end the compulsion for taking part in bird surveys. It's guaranteed to be successful 99.9 per cent of the time. Just put a few drops in his morning coffee for a week or so. He’ll be right as rain in no time and back to normal by Christmas. 

"Surveygone"

Best wishes and Good Luck. DOROTHY"

Betty and Frank, Birders 

So Dear Friends, you may think that birding is a fun, harmless pursuit, but there are hidden dangers. Birding can result in real tears, broken relationships, and having to seek professional advice from complete strangers. 

A Happy Christmas to all my readers but do take care out there in The World of Birds. It’s a dangerous place. 

Linking today to Anni's Birding.



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