Grumpy Old Birder

(This article first appeared in the July 2016 edition of ‘Birdwatching’ magazine)

How enamoured are you of today’s birding scene? Do you relish the technological advantages today’s birders have or miss the old ‘anything about mate?’ days?

Like the famous Curate’s Egg… birding today is good in part, but not everything has got better. Yes, I know I am an aging curmudgeon pining for the ‘blue remembered hills’ of yesterday’s birdwatching, but I’m also a bit of a techno-bitch, slavering to stay apace with ever-changing upgrades and envelope bursting ‘progress’.

There are plenty of changes I can enthuse about but some things get my goat so bad I want them assigned to the fabled Room 101!

Here are my three candidates:

Birding Jargon

“I spent the morning watching viz mig, but it was mostly mipits and by the time I got the call for PGTips a spawk had it, so I dipped on another stonker”.

This is an example of deliberately esoteric language to eliminate communication with normal mortals. Does it really tax these poor souls too much to say ‘visible migration’, or is all that energy saved a necessary boost for twitching? Meadow Pipits and Sparrowhawks may be common, but contracting their name to a single brief word hardly makes them more or less exciting. As for the truncated Pallas’s Grasshopper Warbler, turning it into a commercial cuppa makes just no sense at all. These guy’s notebooks must be as hard to read as Pepys’ diary!

Stonker is another word that irritates me no end… because it is not a measure of loveliness, but of rarity. I’ve twitched with the best of them, but nothing will lead me to spend hour upon hour watching one LBJ simply because it had a bad sense of direction or go caught out in a storm. I appreciate the cryptic splendour of a common pipit or wren no more or less than a rare one. Rarity does not render anything more beautiful, and a tick is a tick whether you take ten minutes or ten hours to watch it. An adult rose-coloured starling or a lesser grey shrike are stonking birds, olive-backed pipits and juvenile rose-colored starlings are great ticks, but Miss World they ain’t!

Competitiveness

I’m a lister; keeping year, county and country lists, but really do not see this as any sort of competition with anyone other than me. There is nothing on earth that will convince my oldest birding buddy that he and I are not competing! This might, of course, be due to the fact that his UK and world life lists are both longer than mine… but I really, really don’t mind! What I hate most is that some birders feel triumphant when their friends miss out… I mourn other people’s dips. Sit alone watching the funniest movie ever made (Bridesmaids) and you will smile a lot, watch it with friends and you will all be crying with laughter… birding like laughter is best shared.

The Fieldcraft Void

Because of the ‘sport’ of twitching lots of new birders have no experience of how the environment works, no grounding on common birds and other fauna and flora and often no understanding of how to view wildlife with little impact on its wellbeing. Their ID skills may be very well developed, but they may have no clue about what impact they have on avian life, let alone the livelihood of landowners or wider conservation concerns. If all you want to do is get a sight of a new bird with no care for others, the bird itself or the habitat its appeared in, then you need not bother to learn to tread quietly, respect others and put the welfare of wildlife above all else.

I’m not attacking twitching here, only some of the mindlessness that spoils too many twitches. With luck twitchers become birders become conservationists, but until they do I’m for isolating them in cell number 101.

Hear the Podcast:

The post GOB 79 – Birding 101 appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the June 2016 edition of ‘Birdwatching’ magazine)

In 1872 President Ulysses S. Grant created the world’s first National Park, Yellowstone. Between 1905 and 1909, several European countries also established them, more as symbols of national pride than of conservation. In 1914 Lenin established several parks in the Soviet Union. Britain had none until after the WWII.

In 1928 Stalin implemented his first ‘five-year plan’, a set of economic and social goals for the state and its populace to aspire too. As his grip tightened and his rule increasingly relied upon fear plans were fulfilled to the letter often against the spirit they embodied. If the plan required a certain ‘tonnage’ of production, and you were falling short sheer terror led you to start making beds out of lead rather than steel! So it was that ‘state planning’ got its bad name. It seems to have consequences nearly a century later, as UK politicians seem incapable of agreeing long term goals and play politics with sticking plaster solutions to more and more problems.

We NEED some integrated national plans to save peoples lives and livelihoods let alone protect our biodiversity.

Several years of flooding has led to knee-jerk plans to dredge waterways. A drop in the price of oil has led to delays in creating long-term energy solutions, just as the hike in prices let to primary forest being ripped up to plant oil palms.

Why do we need plans? Because the problems we face are complex and so are the solutions, what may help solve one problem can banjax another unless things are looked at together.

Take flooding as an example.  Rather than build ever-higher walls to protect lowland property we need to slow the flow of water. To do this we need to enable highland to retain more water and let it flow out slower by re-cladding the hillsides with woodland or scrub. We must stop draining wetlands but see them as sponges that can soak up excesses and supplement shortages when there is drought. We have to stop building on floodplains and manage them to flood in a controlled way by planting retaining hedges and increasing the number of seasonal ponds.

All well and good until you look at farming subsidies, planning permissions, etc. ALL subsidies should depend on signing up to stewardship agreements that reward hedge planting and upland deciduous forestry. Flood plains need national designation and planning permissions need to be subject to overall national aims.

If we had created proper long-term house building plans a few decades ago with tough insulation rules we would not need to create ever more power. Even now it is not too late to impose new building regulations to save energy and include in it all refurbishment too.

Farming should, once again, be about the nation feeding itself and protecting the land and wildlife. Organic farming should no longer be seen as a health or fringe issue but as integrated into the national plan to conserve and in some places re-wild this land.

Power production should be integrated so that harnessing the power of our rivers, wind and the sea is wildlife-friendly.

Concepts like ‘environmentalism’ are about the complex and integrated nature of, well, nature, which we fiddle with at our peril.

As a nation we need the guts to say, loud and clear, we should grow what we can, not import it because its cheap. To say, there are too many of us and we need to champion childlessness and anything else that stops the population growing. Our plan must start putting right what we have been getting wrong for two generations. Short term profit is creating long term poverty.

Hear the Podcast:

The post GOB 78 – Plan Ahead appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the May 2016 edition of ‘Birdwatching’ magazine)

The thing about ageing is that you tend to look backward at things with more than a hint of roseate tern to your specs. ‘The Good Old Days’ of birding are no exception. The ‘blue remembered hills’ of youth were full of redstart’s song, hunting red-backed shrikes and red squirrels, red skies blessed every evening and every birding day was a red-lettered day.

The other thing about ageing is, of course, an ever-declining memory. We tend to remember the good times and consign the bad to a cobwebbed corner of our minds.

Anyone of pensionable age who grew up in the countryside probably collected bird’s eggs. Most of us were half-hearted (thank goodness) and after an unlucky few blackbirds had to re-count their clutch, we moved on to building dams across streams or playing endless games of marbles, or whatever fad was in vogue at the time. Back in the 1950s and early 1960s gamekeepers still set pole traps galore and farmers would think nothing of discharging their shotguns at the retreating backsides of us scrumping lads. So it was not all a bed of roses.

Nevertheless, one thing is certain, habitat was under less pressure from all of todays ills, whether it be too many people tramping over it, too many chemicals polluting it, too much of it under concrete or too much agri-business degrading it with monoculture and mixed flora- and fauna-cide.

Another aspect of ageing is that time dilates. When you are nine years old one summer break from school seems and endless age of freedom. When you get as grey as me years slip by quicker than a peregrine can stoop.

But it is not just my elderly impression that the pace of change has quickened; it’s a bare fact. Fifty years ago our local paper mill had a computer, just to work out the wage bill for 150 staff. It had its own temperature controlled room the size of my bungalow. Now my phone has a billion times more processing power. But my last phone, scrapped all of a year ago, seems as archaic and anachronistic as typists and bus conductors.

I moved to my current house seventeen years ago. I was overjoyed by the new birding opportunities afforded by a seaside patch. I found myself within half an hour of every habitat bar mountains. Reedbeds, marshland, seashore, woodland, scrubby hillsides and duck-filled lakes were all on my doorstep.

Most are still there but now the houses have moved ever closer and that which is not deliberately managed for wildlife is impoverished.

My right to roam has not only been curtailed by increasingly annoying arthritis, but by my birding nooks and crannies fast disappearing. Where once I could pull my car off the road to look over saltmarsh to the sea there are concrete barriers and ‘residents parking only’.

The woodland carparks where I used need not wander more than a few yards to see woodpeckers and hear nightjars are now litter-strewn and frequented by a million dog walkers by day and dozens of steamed up cars at night. Every quiet beach seems to have half a dozen dog owners, all of whom are intent on encouraging their mutts to chase waders.

Every grasshopper warbler’ish ditch has been drained or dredged or filled with plastic. Where once I could drive a concrete farmers road there are now impassable barriers erected to stop the ever-growing hoard of selfish idiots who think their old mattresses and fridges should grace the hedgerows… if they haven’t already been grubbed out or mechanically shorn to a tattered shadow of their former bird rich glory.

Fifty or sixty years ago we roamed across the British countryside and watched birds in its rich, quiet corners. Now the corners are ploughed up and fenced off and we are discouraged from entering these agribusiness units.

Hear the Podcast:

The post GOB 77 – Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the April 2016 edition of ‘Birdwatching’ magazine)

Today I bought what I thought was an ordinary box of tissues at the supermarket. I’m an old-fashioned red-spotted handkerchief man really, but Hawkeye finds 101 uses for these throwaway um-necessities. It turned out, when unpacked from my ‘bag for life’ that there were in fact two smaller boxes with a plastic wrapper holding them together, presumably for some bog-off. When unwrapped with the lid punched in to get at the tissue I found that the hole is surrounded by a redundant soft plastic inset.

While at the supermarket the post had come including a padded package with a book in for me to review. The book had been bubble-wrapped despite the fact that the envelope was padded with plastic bubbles too. [Note to all book stores and publishers of, in particular natural history books, post books out in cardboard or ‘Jiffy Bags’ that are padded with flocking].

Why would a birding magazine column be taken up with a rant about packaging you may well ask?

Because we are squandering the future and today’s wealth on unnecessary and potentially dangerous packaging. Canned drinks in sixes or dozens are apparently ‘convenient’. Are we really incapable of counting off to six to put in the trolley. Instead they are clad in cardboard, shrink-wrapped in plastic or held together by half a dozen lethal plastic loops that I have seen strangling gulls.

Plastics now line the alimentary canals of half the creatures swimming in or under the ocean, or those flying above it. Nylon cord, fishing nets and fishing line may make quite good nesting material but it is equally good for slowly sawing through an entangled leg or gill.

A recent news story covered thousands of bright pink bottles being washed up on a West Country beach as if this was unusual in anything but the neon colouring. Fishermen and other voyagers have always thrown their waste into the sea… but in the past that waste was either biodegradable or incapable of being ingested. Amphora from classic times may litter the Aegean seabed but they do no harm. Polystyrene cups, plastic bottles and a myriad of assorted plastic junk is, when intact, a hazard for thousands of years and an unwanted dietary supplement when it finally disintegrates.

We treated ourselves to a new ‘smart’ TV for Christmas, and recycled our old TV to the wall of a relative. The box for the new one went with it, including huge polystyrene packing, plastic ties and baggies. But it doesn’t have to be like that, the last electrical item I bought used nothing but cleverly folded cardboard to do the job

None of the above is really for my, or your convenience… its all about storage and display. Oranges used to come in crates with tissue paper or nothing at all… now they are presented in Styrofoam bras plastic shrink-wrapping. Every cabbage has a plastic bag of its own.

New is now the virtual opposite of improved. How does putting mushrooms in a plastic box and wrapping it with polythene make it better than being in a cardboard trug as they used to be? Fish and chips were perfectly healthy when wrapped in recycled newsprint.

Where do we start to fight back? The obvious answer is birdfeed. I buy my seed in paper sacks, but fat-balls seem now only to be sold in a plastic sleeve, a plastic bucket or a plastic tub. Get your fountain pens out, fill them with ink from a bottle and put pen to paper (better yet send an email) and demand less packaging in birdfeed and refuse to buy anything unless it is in non-plastic, recyclable containers.

We do not have to be slaves to packaging any more than we have to put up with wonderful wildlife TV having to be completely ruined by unnecessary and over loud background music…. But that’s another story.

Hear the Podcast:

The post GOB 76 – Good Things Come In Less Packaging appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the March 2016 edition of ‘Birdwatching’ magazine)

Regular readers will know how genuine my affection is for undisciplined dog walkers. They will also know how I believe that our over-romanticised idea of the countryside coupled with the idea that nature should be tamed, is leading to habitat loss and eviction of wildlife.

Capability Brown looked at the farm fields and forest of aristocratic estates and, in the words of the film industry ‘re-imagined’ them. Not content with nature or agricultural patterns he, and subsequently, we, wanted an idealised picaresque landscape. Like an artist ignoring a tree if it spoils their composition, Mr Brown removed anything that interfered with his idea of how nature should be, and added in anything that nature had forgotten. And so, dear readers, the concept of the ‘park’ was born.

It was not, of course, meant for the hoi polloi. The highborn and high-handed demolished villages, turfed tilth toilers from their tenant farms and ripped up trees in the wrong place to add them in the ‘right’ place. Dry valleys were dammed and streams re-routed for their own viewing pleasure and to show off to other highborn environmental hooligans! This was good news for roe deer, game birds and fountain makers. It was not so good for nature. Unfortunately, we have retained this ideal ever since.

Upper middle-class Victorian ladies sublimated their passions by creating more ‘natural’ borders and turned the cottage garden from a veg patch to a profusion of delightful colours made possible by introducing plants from around the world. Colour caught on and the Himalayas were plundered for Rhododendrons, which now form vast wildlife-free swathes across Albion’s hillsides.

When the stench of horse manure and inadequate sewers offended the noses of the city dwelling nouveau riche, green ‘lungs’ were created. Those who need not toil could promenade these city ‘parks’ knowing that hemlines need not be raised to avoid the ordure, nor their peace shattered by working men and women. For their viewing pleasure flowerbeds were created with planting in neat rows and shade afforded by exotic foliage.

If you’ve not nodded off you may be wondering where all this is going… well, its going down the high road to my local park. When I moved here the park was a well-known Autumn hotspot for firecrests and yellow-browed warblers, Pallas’s warblers and even collared flycatchers. For three year’s running I found firecrests in the same bush on the same day of the year! Being one of the few areas of trees and shrubs on an almost island it was a natural migrant magnet. An almost hidden garden was surrounded be a fence covered in ivy. The playing fields were surrounded by shrubby borders and copses of trees, through which winter flocks fiddled in the foliage with maybe an overwintering chiffchaff and a blackcap or two.

A fenced and wardened ‘safe’ garden had been created so that kids could enjoy the fresh air without constant parental oversight. While I, and other town bound nature appreciators could see redstarts and flycatchers on their way to Africa or redwings and fieldfares avoiding the frigid north. Admittedly, every now and again a person walking by holding their dog’s lead would interrupt our tranquil birding.

But then Capability Brown’s descendants decided that the hidden garden should be viewable from a path that no one uses and the ivy was stripped from its perimeter. Offended by cow parsley and elderberries, ground ivy and dogwood every nook and cranny was cleared of ground cover. NOTHING is now allowed to live under the trees except clipped grass. So, now the off-lead dogs can run through every sheltered corner, and the passing motorists have unobstructed views of stark trunks and bare fences.

Thanks Mr Park-keeper for tidying up the rampant ‘weeds’ and unnecessary under-storey so favoured by skulking warblers and for raking up all that leaf litter that the winter thrushes loved to scratch through!

Hear the Podcast:

The post GOB 75 – Clear Fell appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the February 2016 edition of ‘Birdwatching’ magazine)

Have I banged on lately about sexism in birding?

It’s still as prevalent as feral pigeons in Trafalgar Square. It doesn’t matter that ten years after her passing one of the world’s top ten listers is female, nor that many top wildlife writers, bloggers, film makers, conservationists and ornithologists are women.

Birding is blokey. It’s as oriented towards male values as motor racing, football and hiding from the wife in the shed. Women and girls are, of course an increasing proportion of enthusiasts for sport in general. Look along the terraces at Twickenham, Wembley or your local side’s sports ground and female faces are far more familiar than in my youth, or even a decade or so ago. Blokeyness is no longer confined to blokes, but that hasn’t shifted the paradigm. Lads may not be the only ones necking too much beer or getting fighting drunk in Ipswich or Ibiza; the ladies in their lives have become laddish, rather than their boyfriends becoming less boorish.

Disabled people, youngsters and ethnic minorities are still less likely to be birders than white males in their twenties and thirties. And if they, like women, bird, they often adopt the out-dated and outrageous attitudes that define male dominated pastimes.

I’ve noticed that many middle-aged birdwatchers drift away from ‘twitching’. It could be they want to find their own rarities, or that they love the solitude of patch working or the joy of seeing new behaviours rather than new species. But my money is on them no longer enjoying the competitiveness of the ‘sport’ of birding. How long your list is, is, after all, a more or less exclusively male obsession. Ticks equate to notches on the bedpost or the number of cow seals a big fat male can corral into his harem.

A quarter century ago my young teenage son found and announced a rare wader we were searching for. He was ignored and the group of twitchers moved on until they found it for themselves! Women are still assumed to be ‘along for the ride’ rather than equal to male birders in every respect.

I know this to be true….

Last December, Hawkeye and I went down to look at our hometown sea. Storms had been raging (albeit from the west) and I was hoping some interesting birds might take shelter along the cliff-shadowed bays of this southeast resort. Dozens of ships had anchored offshore sitting out the bad weather but little seemed to be moving. A few grebes bobbed among the waves including a nice Slavonian, but no auks, skuas, or even distant shearwaters. There were close in gannets and, unusual for this part of the world many were loafing in the water. I scoped the few gannets that were diving for food in water dotted with the heads of seals.

My wife sheltered from the wind in the car, occasionally tapping the window to point out the growing number of Brent Geese on the tide line and a couple of Rock Pipits hopping along the car park fence. Then, in an almost unprecedented sally she came forth and shook me to say… ‘Did you see the Swift?’

‘A Swift?’ I half admonished’, …in December, are you sure? Describe it’. ‘Well’ the patient lady said ‘it had dark scimitar wings’ and dived rapidly over the cliff edge… she held her hands apart to demonstrate that it was too small to be a Peregrine. ‘I’m sorry’ I said ‘Its just not…’

It was at this point that the Swift nearly parted my hair. We watched it for ten minutes going so fast and close I could hardly get my bins on it. The next day’s crowd were of the collective opinion that it was a Pallid Swift… although I thought it too dark on the back. But, given my display of sexism, what do I know?

Hear the Podcast:

The post GOB 74 – The Little Lady Will Have A Sherry appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the January 2016 edition of ‘Birdwatching’ magazine)

I’ve eaten Chicken Kiev in Kiev; bought Moroccan leather in Marrakesh and sat listening to the Beach Boys sing Californian Girls in Long Beach with a Californian Girl. Each of which, along with a Tuna sandwich in Tunisia represent lost opportunities.

The thing is that my interest in birds was sparked in my early childhood and the embers were fanned in my youth, but then there was the almost inevitable gap, shared I’ve found by most ‘lifelong’ birders.

Ian Drury sang, “Sex and drugs and rock and roll, are all my brain and body need”. During our young adulthood we tend to spend time chasing the opposite sex, getting on down to the sound and over indulging in alcohol.

Many of us get coupled up and form families, money is short and time even shorter, so hobbies slide to the smallest back burner, barely kept warm for future use.

My travelling days started when I visited family in New Zealand, being routed through Singapore and back via California… all without optics let alone a field guide. On another occasion I went via Fiji on the coat tails of a hurricane, which took the tops off most of the palm trees and blew the birds into hiding. I recall seeing one cormorant, one tropicbird and a strange hook-beaked bird delving into the banana flowers outside my hotel room. I eventually identified what it was, but not until over thirty years later!

I’ve racked my ageing brain, but still cannot remember seeing any birds on a trip to Russia, except for the feral pigeons in Red Square. I must have seen birds in Morocco… particularly as I recall wandering around a fish market on the edge of a harbour. How is it that I can remember Ribbon Fish and Hammerhead Sharks being there for sale, but not what gulls were around the harbour? At the camel market I definitely remember being offered several camels in exchange for my girlfriend, but surely there would have been some birds knocking about the camel pens? The blank spots are so frustrating.

Being a bit of a ‘lister’ makes it worse. On a trip to Poland I managed to create a list of one for Belarus, as I watched a Common Buzzard fly over the border post. I have several species on my Angola list even although I’ve never been there… just watched from the other side of the river separating it from Namibia. I never stepped outside of the airport grounds in the Cayman Isle en route from Jamaica to Cuba, but managed half a dozen birds including an Island endemic and the famed Blue Iguana.

I never lost my love of birds, wild places and nature in general, so how come my bird ticker got turned off for a few years during my salad days?

I remember the point at which it began to come back… it was in Tunisia on my one and only ‘beach holiday’. After a night watching the most incredible light show when noiseless lightening lit up the Mediterranean I was turning lobster red on a sun bed when a beautiful swallow-tailed butterfly got up close and personal with my sun tan cream. Too hot to burn more I had a wander around the hotel grounds to find we were within viewing distance of some saltpans. They were behind chain link and I had no binoculars but the distant, heat haze disrupted pans were alive with waders. I could make out stilts but the rest were obscured… that feeling of frustration marks the beginning of finding my way back into birding.

It was further peaked on our last outing before the flight home… when the guide announced that, if we turned to our left and looked at the salt pans we would be able to see a large flock of ‘Pink Floyds’! Whoever knew about those songbirds?

Hear the Podcast:

The post GOB 73 – Missed Opportunities appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the December 2015 edition of ‘Birdwatching’ magazine)

Not so long ago I told you the tale of my overwintering Blackcaps… well it turns out I will not have been alone. Blackcaps are not it seems, just overwintering here on the warmer coast. They are actually the first proof that man can affect the evolution of other species. It turns out that these winter warblers are not our local lads hanging about to sun themselves by the sea, but central and eastern European chaps who have decided to shun the Costas in favour of Albion’s shores purely because of our generous attitude towards immigrants. Twenty million households feed their garden birds. Moreover, over the last few years we make sure that there are plenty of fat balls out all winter and we’ve gone over from peanuts to sunflower hearts. Whereas tits coped with peanuts and fiches de-husk just about anything, sunflower hearts can be coped with by many species that normally stick to insects or soft fruit.

I have to say that the Blackcaps are not the only ones who favour high fat treats that are easy to break into mouth-sized morsels. Since we started using huskless seed Robins, Dunocks and passing warblers have taken to using our feeders. (Mind you, Hawkeye still spends my hard-earned on mealworms for the robin and has been know to stand guard to stop the starlings cleaning up before the robins get a look in.) Mind you, any bird wanting a go at the sunflower hearts have to wait until the goldfinches are so full they fall asleep on the perches.

It makes me wonder how much you people are responsible for the resurgence of house sparrows too. Our local lads were down to less than half a dozen regulars but, especially over the last two or three seasons, they have really bounced back. Late summer has seen family parties queuing on the shed roof waiting for their turn at the feeders…. On one day a combined force of twenty-two arrived and six parents got busy at the feeders to sustain the sixteen youngsters who stayed on the warm shed roof and tweeted like mad to get their share. My gutters got cleared and re-positioned when we extended into the loft, luckily one of my neighbour’s maintenance is sufficiently lax as to allow sparrows and starlings lots of nooks and crannies to nest in. My neat row of nest-boxes is distained in favour of his broken airbrick and unused flue.

At the end of last September I took a couple of hours to view my favourite hedgerow… it was alive with migrating Chiffchffs, Goldcrests and Blackcaps. Being a bountiful resource the birds hardly knew what to stuff their beaks with first, but the Blackcaps definitely had two favourites, blackberries and elderberries. Despite a slight chill in the air the bright sun and blue sky was equally alive with hirundines swooping into a nice fly supply.

The hedgerow teemed with bees and wasps of several varieties all drawn to the last ivy flowers. Migrant Hawker dragonflies were also very evident and I saw a lifetime first… a dragonfly taking a midge out of the air as neatly as any warbler.

Despite the all round entertainment I admit to spending most optic time on the Blackcaps. If something else worked along the edge I took a look so as not to miss any year ticks or surprises, but as soon as the warblers were identified and the crests proved to be gold I was back watching a nice fat Blackcap risking inebriation on the over ripe fruit. About the only other birds that would distracted me would have been a late swift or a smart male redstart… but none graced the bushes that morning. Mind you, a smart Lesser Whitethroat can keep me glued to it too.

It would be good to hear from readers what their favourite migrants are. Anyone else a blackcap-a-holic?

Hear the Podcast:

The post GOB 72 – Blackcaps & Spadgers appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the October 2015 edition of ‘Birdwatching’ magazine)

I blame Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Hardy, Brontë, Burns & Tolkein, Turner, Landseer & Constable. Between them they have led us to believe in a unique British countryside of bare rolling hills, blasted heaths, heather-clad glens and friendly farmers in a pastoral heaven. If only we had been brought up on the brothers Grimm we might be into vast forests tended by heroic woodsmen. Instead we favour barren hillsides and fields worked by Farmer Giles.

Our cultural memory is beset with ‘blue remembered hills’ where sheep can safely graze. Well folks, the sheep should be safely grazing in the valley not on those heavily government subsidised hillsides. They should be re-wilding from pasture, to scrub to hanging woodland.

Monarchs of the glen roaming in the gloaming are all very pretty, but the predator-free deer in artificially high numbers are stopping the Caledonian forest from re-generating. The upland heaths are only blasted because grouse shooting interests burn them off to encourage new shoots for the farm-bred grouse to multiply in front of their guns

Our picaresque past is peppered with the wholesale slaughter of predators and the decimation of forest for pasture, then shipbuilding, pit props and railway sleepers. Bears, Lynx and wolves were assigned to history until we only have the foxes left for sport and the badgers left to eliminate instead of inoculating cattle against TB.

What are we doing to restore the land to how it was before we decided that every thing the swims, flies, walks or wriggles is bad unless its fit for human use? Almost sweet FA… A handful of beavers are still making their case whereas the rest of Europe numbers have recovered into many thousands due to conservation efforts. The several hundred feral boar are seen as a threat to crops rather than welcome returnees.

Wild goats, chamois et al across much of Europe have gone from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands. The last remnants of Bison have been carefully nurtured back to flourishing herds expanding across international boundaries.

We loudly and rightly condemn European hunters and the mass slaughter of songbirds but we don’t even whisper about the re-introduction of lynx and bears and wolves across their former range.

A few brave souls try to overcome our romanticised concepts to suggest that the rest of Europe can live with lynx, withstand wolves and are not bothered by bears. Yet we hang on to our delusion that we are animal lovers and pioneers of conservation. We don’t love animals we pamper pets, we do not conserve so much as set up tiny sanctuaries for the rightful users of the land to hide in.

Back in the day a handful of the great and good ladies got together to denounce the feather trade. They were the suffragettes of conservation. What we have now is not conservation but conservatism. The National Trust preserves the monuments of past feudalism and lets the heirs chase foxes across their lands. Our government talks about the environment being safe in their hands, but will allow fracking beneath SSSIs. Where are the conservation charities that should be on the front lines? What is the point of re-introducing hairy bumblebees if the honeybees are being killed off wholesale with pesticides?

I don’t eat meat. Not because I am sentimental but because meat production is an inefficient way to grow protein and the cost is rainforest destruction and third world hunger.

I have never had sympathy for those animal rights campaigners stupid enough to release mink into the English countryside. Nor have I saluted rich old ladies who leave their fortunes to the cats home. Its time to stop putting pets on a pedestal and thinking that cows are more important than badgers. We need a radical movement dedicated to the rights of or wild animals over human self-interest. Making Nature’s Home People Proof!

Hear the Podcast:

The post GOB 71 – I wandered lonely as a cloud… appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the November 2015 edition of ‘Birdwatching’ magazine)

I suffer from progressive hearing loss; I am profoundly deaf in one ear, and get periods of complete deafness in the other. I share this not to evoke sympathy, or excuse my rubbish call recognition, but to urge you to lay down some internal audio tracts for the future, because most people’s hearing fades somewhat as they age.

Despite my audio illiteracy some of my most cherished memories are of wild sounds. Just as aromas can unexpectedly transport you to a past time and distant place, so my inner ear evokes recall of deeply embedded, joyous occasions.

You would rightly expect that some of these memory-captured sounds are bird song. While, by and large, I may not be able to distinguish a tit from a ptarmigan on call alone, there are, nevertheless, some bird sounds I do know… less for the singer, more for what they recall.

The sudden fly-by screams of swifts announce summer. A burst of wren song in the garden lifts your spirits. A deafening Cetti’s call takes you to the waterside and a raptors’ ‘keeing’ takes you to rolling hills and crags. Every curlew call reminds one of Scottish moorlands and lowland marshes. A wood pigeon on a summer evening transports me to a childhood fishing lake.

If I get a distant snatch of newly arrived nightingales, I am taken back to nights spent in a caravan in an ancient Kent wood where I lay listening in the early hours of a summer night, trying to see if this vocal maestro ever repeated a phrase.

I can replay my first African dawn chorus at will. Competing doves like croupiers calling ‘rien ne va plus’ and ‘place your bets’ from two species and a third repeatedly announcing his name ‘I am the red-eyed dove’. A deep oop-oop-oop of a hoopoe mingled with harsh metallic starlings. Kop-kop, kop-kop from a coucal every two seconds echoed over dew-laden grass. A woodpecker probing for grubs in the rotten tree outside my room; the sound that got me from bed to balcony, to see twittering firefinches and cordon blues, their colourful garb muted by a misty morning.

Oddly my most deeply ingrained sound memories of foreign travel are not of bird song but other species.

Driving ‘home’ as dusk fell in a Kenyan national park we stopped by a puddle of a pond, more marsh than mere, and were assailed by a frog chorus. We sat enthralled by the bubbles and croaks, rising in pitch and volume as fast as the sun sank. On that same trip, as we walked back from dinner at our lodge at the foot of Mount Kenya, the trees were suddenly full of the most terrifying screaming banshees which, we later learned were the calls of tree hyrax, a diminutive, arboreal relative of elephants, looking like a cross between a guinea pig and a koala bear with fangs!

Most wonderful and evocative of all was the sound that filled the dawn deep in a Thailand forest clearing… white-handed gibbons’ whooping calls. What a privilege that was, a truly enchanting serenade.

There are songs and sounds for everyone. Just as you can be a fan of Dvorak or Dylan, Mozart or Morrissey so wild sounds and bird songs mean different things to different people.

I would be willing to bet though, that there are two bird songs that top the charts of most UK bird lovers. They are loved not for their versatility, nor their rarity. Indeed the fact that they are so every day is part of the charm. Walk into your garden on a winter day and the robin will faithfully voice his scratchy, mournful song to reassure you that all is well with the world. But top of the pops for so many of us is the plaintive, yet haunting beauty of the evening summer song of our beloved Blackbirds.

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