Grumpy Old Birder

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

Six swifts sped past my office window distracting me from my keyboard slavery. The screen’s hypnotic grasp eluded, I nipped downstairs for some fresh air and fresh thinking. Admiring my own handiwork I surveyed the tiny patch of life in the urban sprawl, glorying in the colourful blooms and buzzing of busy pollinators.

Movement under the feeders caught the corner of my eye and I slowly turned expecting to see a mouse. A fledgling sparrow tried to drag itself under a leaf. Looking more closely my spirit fell as I realised this trembling feather ball was bloody. Close inspecting led to its despatch when it revealed trailed entrails… clearly another neighbourhood cat had overcome my deterrents!

Regular readers will know how much this angers me, but anger is not enough, action is called for.

The cat problem is a symptom of an out of kilter underlying social norm, which, I believe, it is high time we did something about.

Our relationship with animals is the problem. Law and socially acceptable behaviour lie embedded in the mire of our feudal history. In truth the fate of wild animals is not about irresponsible cat owners, callous farmers or greedy landowners, but about our collective and entire way of thinking, which needs to be brought up to date and to reflect our modern social relationships.

Its no good me banging on about irresponsible cat owners. It’s not about campaigning for organic food production nor about shaming estate owners who allow Hen Harriers to be extirpated to protect their grouse shoots. Its about changing law based on land ownership and about responsibility being based on law forged together within a logical framework rather than grown piecemeal.

We need to legislate in favour of wildlife by changing the basis of ownership.

Currently, its all about land. The aristocracy made up laws to suit their privileged position.  So they stopped the peasantry from ruining their sport by tying the ownership of wild things to the land they inhabit. Critters running about on feudal holdings were declared the property of the landowner.  Poaching peasants were deterred by draconian penalties. It went further so that certain animals were declared property even when they roamed free in the wildwood, they could only be hunted by the gentry or, like swans, eaten by kings.

If the hunt tore up the peasants holdings as their horses trampled all in pursuit of a wild boar or hart that was just tough. But if the peasant’s dog chewed into the lord’s pheasants the peasant could be thrown off the land and into a dungeon.

So we have inherited the ridiculous notion that wild things belong to someone who occupies their homeland and that only certain creatures’ behaviour is the responsibility of their owners

So where do we go from here?

First we must establish that no one ‘owns’ wild things. Then we need to specify the detail of any ‘pest’ species and how, by whom and where they can be controlled. Rather than protecting a few, we should protect everything and grant time-limited licences under special circumstances to allow problematic species to be controlled, excluding any locally or internationally endangered species of course.

At present everything can be killed unless protected, this needs turning on its head so that everything is protected unless legislation adds them to the licence list.

Next we need to make owners of all domestic animals, including pets, always responsible for what they do. Owners of wandering pets or stock should compensate AND face penalties too.

Lastly, there should be a duty to protect so that land and building owners make their property useful to the wild world. Like tall buildings having swift boxes and roads having hedgehog or toad tunnels.

Moreover, a new attitude must be solidified into legislation protecting us, and all wild things, from the ravages of the selfish and privileged few.

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The post GOB 69 – Swift Justice appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

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

“I’m not sure, I didn’t look to see if there is anything about”… was my reply to Hawkeye as we drove towards one our favourite local reserves. Her assumption was that my wish to go birding had been prompted by a rarity report or an alert on the mailing group.

It didn’t strike me at the time that this was evidence of a sea change in our birding habits

In the early 1980s I used to go birdwatching. If I had a few days I picked an area of the country where I could guarantee everyday birds that were not on my doorstep always hopeful, of course, that I would also see the unexpected. My in-laws lived in Bournemouth so a weekend there would allow a drive into the New Forest, a day at Arne RSPB reserve or perhaps an evening spent for nightjars.

Early in the year a search for Dartford Warblers might turn up an over-wintering Great Grey Shrike. A spring day in the forest after Redstarts might also turn up Hawfinch and any time of year at Arne could turn up, well, anything… over the years I saw everything from Spoonbills to Wood Warblers. A decade later and our visits coincided with Little Egret colonisation… you could see half a dozen all in one place? An erstwhile rarity has now become commonplace.

Mooching about in likely habitat was how the vast majority of us watched birds then, unless you were a more casual walker just noting what you came across or a perhaps dedicated patch worker covering the same territory every day.

By the late nineteen eighties I had joined thousands of others who had got the twitching bug and my outings were geared to getting to birds I’d never seen before. Nothing made me more aware of my growing disability than my struggle to see a twitchable Red-flanked Bluetail in Dorset or a walk back from a Derbyshire Richard’s Pipit twitch that, frankly, nearly killed me! Who new years later I’d see the former in my local park, and find one of the latter for myself? The thing is, for a while, I was addicted to bird-lines, pagers and rarity reports and never went birding without a rarity targeted

I didn’t twitch for many years, but by then had got into the habit of seeking out birds that other people had found for me… most of us still do. That’s not to say we don’t ever go to places on spec, or even find our own rarities, just that using communications technology has now become built into birding.

Our birding behaviour have been changed in many ways courtesy of bird song ID systems or master-classes in rarity spotting. Wandering about with your bins for the fun of it seems to be becoming a thing of the past.

I’ve just been reading about software developed to ID birds – apparently it gets the right bird in the top three suggested species 90% of the time… no matter how poor the snap. It made me check the calendar to see if it was April 1st!

It made me think… why?

Why would you want to leave ID to a machine any more than you would want to only ever go out to see what someone else found for you? Surely the enjoyment of finding ‘good’ birds and knowing that you have, along with just enjoying their beauty and behaviour is what birding is all about?

Are we draining the pleasure out of the pastime by abandoning field-craft and turning our hobby into a competitive sport with ever improving sports gear to take the physical and mental effort out of it?

When I re-run my sightings past my in-built computer I either know what I saw, or don’t and am content to let them go. I let what’s missed remain a mystery.

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The post GOB 68 – What will they think of next…. appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

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

I was asked to speak at the Scottish Bird Fair – or to give it its proper title ‘Scotland’s Big Nature Festival’, and knowing that there was no way I could take all I needed on a plane, and having picked myself up off the floor when I saw the price of the train, I decided to drive up. Hoping to see some species we don’t get down in the southeast corner… naively as it turned out. So Hawkeye and I loaded up and got going.

It’s a fair old drive so there was plenty of time to watch out for wildlife all the way. The mammals list was extensive. Muntjac, then fox, rabbit, hedgehog, grey squirrel and brown rat were all expected. No less than two polecats was a bigger surprise… although, more than likely they were feral ferrets. Several badgers were inevitable, but as we got further north there were a number of hares and three roe deer. Birds included blackbirds and lots of pheasants with some corvids, two kestrels and various others I could not ID.

Of course the sad truth is, none of these were extant, but each was a squished fur or feather ball on the side of the carriageway.

I assumed that the motorway would be the biggest slaughterhouse, what with plenty of traffic and fast speeds, but not a bit of it. It was the frustrating ‘A’ roads, the ones where you might spend 20 minutes with only the back of a truck to look at. The A1 over the border was carnage with deer in the road or lying barely scratched on the embankments.

You might assume that this is just bad luck… random strikes on critters accidentally crossing the path of an HGV driver. However, looking at the endless English & Scottish fields and the open hillsides en route it dawned on me that wildlife was concentrated on the edges where the habitat was richer. Hedges and verges, motorway banks that the public cannot access, ditches and all were more attractive to bird and beast than the arid agri-businesses and boring monocultures. Its no wonder that animals are drawn to the most dangerous places for them. Pesticides push insects to the fringes, attracted by the warm the areas cars create as they pass through or the weed seeds that are blitzed in the fields left to run riot on the verges. Its as if we magnetise the strips that run between hard surfaces and no-go zones.

It is fortunate that there are still some areas of the UK with huge natural habitats but the more pressure we put on the green world to feed or house us, and the more concrete paves our roads the more wildlife gets marginalised.

The journey north had another profound impact on me. I’ve always thought of the ‘garden of England’ as one of the richest in birdlife and, during migration times or in specific coastal wetlands that may still be the case, but every village I went into in the northern bits of England and the southern bits of Scotland I was struck by how much richer they were than my home county. Swifts, swallows and house martins all seem to be doing well in Yorkshire villages or Scottish towns compared with how thin on the ground they seem to be the southern climes. Warblers, flycatchers and finches seemed to be the norm on village edges, whereas my corner of the world gets skinnier pickings.

Maybe its the intensity of land use in town and country but I am also convinced that the rising sea temperatures are pushing a lot of everyday birds further north and robbing the south of its diversity and abundance.

Johnson said the only good thing about Scotland was the road to England, but I want to emigrate to where the government, the wild places and the wildlife suit my soul.

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The post GOB 67 – Road Rage appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

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

Waiting while Hawkeye found more ways to spend my ‘hard earned’ in ‘George’ at Asda my eye’s corner spied the Herring Gulls on the grass verge and their behaviour held my attention. We had a shower last night so the verges were damp and, despite being less than a mile from an ebbing tide half a dozen gulls were paddling for worms. Clomping up and down on the sward like kids playing in their parents shoes. I can’t remember when I first saw this behaviour, years ago for sure.

It got me thinking about what sort of birder I have slowly become and I realised that birding, not unlike drinking alcohol has followed a ‘career’. You start out unaware of booze, then become fascinated and take a tentative teenage tipple before rushing headlong into the student bar or music club. Similarly birds slowly register as things of grace and beauty that behave in fascinating ways before becoming an obsession. My alcohol use peaked in my late twenties and early thirties when the pub was the focus of my social life. Birding followed a similar path filling my spare time until I began chasing variety like the late night emptying of an hotel room’s minibar.

My work with substance abusers made drinking close to where I worked inappropriate and, when I bought my first car, I found myself going to new pubs, but making half a shandy last several hours or drinking a G&T without the ‘G’. That was when I stopped twitching and turned instead to foreign trips and, some years on, working a patch.

I may slip out and twitch a ‘world lifer’ if it turns up close to home, just as I might have a cold beer on a really hot day or a vodka and tonic at Christmas, but twitching and boozing are fast fading memories.

I may go for a local tick or lifer once a year these days, if that, and have a cupboard full of bottles that I have to dust off if ever I take them out at all. If I do take a drink I savour the flavour and allow its mild intoxication to stay just that, mild.

So, I’ve come full circle and find myself once again birding because of a fascination with what birds do and are, rather than how many new ones I can tick. My ID skills go on improving, but they come a poor second place to general observation.

Before I was a birder my dad took me fishing. When sitting by the edge of a lake with reeds on two sides and trees behind you, you are virtually in a hide. Whatever swam or flew was often close by and I recall seeing Great-crested Grebes in their mating dance and a Cuckoo ousting its Reed Warbler step-siblings. Field mice ate our bread bait and grass snakes swam up to us and rustled by. I realised I had become a nature lover by counting how many bites I missed because my float disappeared without me noticing it as I was pre-occupied with dragonflies buzzing my head or Spotted Flycatchers looping from their perch to bag yet another midge.

I now know I’ve come full circle because I am once again just enjoying what I see rather than looking for new pastures. It pays dividends too. In over fifty years I had never seen a water rail in flight… this year I’ve seen this happen twice in different places a few weeks apart. Yesterday my son told me he had seen a couple of Treecreepers actually perched on a fence post and realised he had only ever seen them work their way up a tree trunk or bough.

I think this circle has turned for many people although the most thumbed birding literature is still about ID rather than bird behaviour as it was in Gilbert White’s day.

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The post GOB 66 – Vintage Birds appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

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

There is something immensely charming about a Blackcap. Their Jet black or red-brown bonnet setting off the subtle grey throat and belly and washed out olive wings, gives them a dapper and elegant look.

This winter I think I provided the lifeline to some of these cuties. I’m not sure how many as I saw two adult males at one time and a redcap… the most regular feeder was a male but its impossible to know if this was just one individual.

He made numerous visits and, starlings permitting, stuffed his face for periods of up to twenty minutes. He got dubbed ‘Fatboy slim’ as he was single-minded in his consumption and at times rooted to our diminutive cherry tree, his slender profile fluffing up to keep out the cold when roosting.

I am lucky enough to live close to the beach with coast on three and a bit sides. In Roman times it was an island, but now the former kilometre wide channel, last navigated by sailing ship in the eighteenth century, is a tiny river an athlete could jump across. Being as far southeast as you can get without having a French accent we are blessed with a very mild climate, which means we get a lot of birds overwintering that might not find a niche even a few miles inland. Firecrests and Chiffchaffs are normal winter birds and occasionally we host vagrants and stragglers. This may also explain the number of Ring-necked Parakeets… now several thousand roost and we have even had double figures in our tiny yard, queuing on the washing line where we string up apples for them.

So blackcaps have graced the garden before in just about any month, but have never hung around to feed. They have poked around my flowerpots and like a long-staying chiffchaff managed to find a few mites and midges, but shunned the fat balls and seed feeders and were not even tempted by the meal worms and suet scattered over my garage roof.

What made the difference to them also led to a garden first, a bird that I am hoping becomes a regular.

An old friend was extolling the virtues of fat-filled coconut shells available on the cheap from the Pound Shop. He assured me that they were firm garden favourites. I admit to some scepticism, as he is a ‘careful’ man and not one to spend top dollar on bird feed. I, on the other hand only offer top class sunflower hearts and nyjer, so thought these old chestnuts, oops, coconuts, were superseded by the high class fare I was tempting them with.

Nevertheless, I decided to give them a go and Mrs Grumpy snaffled some of Asda’s finest (other Supermarket offerings also available). In less than 24 hours the great tits and blue tits were stuck in. Then the garden ‘first’ took a look… a great-spotted woodpecker landed on the shed roof, but was scared away by my shout of surprise. A week later he was not only back, but was pounding the coconut’s interior before flying off to the park. My better half managed to see him on his third visit and we still await more appearances.

Ever since the blackcap found the shell a few days later he has been back every day and manages to shoo off everything other than starlings when he wants to perch on the cherry tree and eat his fill.

Thinking about it, coconuts hung up for the birds goes back beyond my childhood, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that they have been garden bird treats for a century or more. Doubtless they are still going strong in many a non-birder’s backyard and are so familiar a source of nourishment that they are a magnet for birds that haven’t really got the hang of other feeders.

No doubt about it, oldies are still goodies!

Postscript: After visits every day for more than a month it slowly dawned on me that there were (at least) two male blackcaps coming to the feeders… ‘Fatboy’ AND ‘Slim’; whose white-fringed wing feather marked him as a second bird.

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The post GOB 65 – Blackcap… appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the May 2015 edition of Birdwatching Magazine)

Somewhere wreathed in mist and hidden by a time vortex is the schism that divided those who need to note their observations and those who are happy just to observe.

Like loving or hating Manga, musicals and Marmite, you either love to list or are completely unable to understand why people bother. The obsession may be a relative of the collecting bug. There are those whose minimalist lives have no use for old theatre programmes or a stamp album let alone a lawn infested with gnomes or a wall covered in frog-shaped teapots. They would stare open mouthed at a five year-old collecting bus tickets or an anorak-clad cove noting down the number of the train they are taking to work.

I am by inclination on the listing side of one of human nature’s grand canyons. I guess I need to collect sightings just as, when a boy I needed to collect matchbox covers, stamps and coins. I once even had a world-class collection of cigarette packets, which I guess today would be just a series of blank paper adorned with health warnings.

When I started birding ‘seriously’ as a teenager my diaries were full of lists of birds with ‘lifers’ underlined, year records circled and county newbies marked in red. I progressed from RSPB grey-covered printed lists to a series of ‘Birdwatcher’s Logbooks’ replete with every sighting noted, primitively sketched and everything from the weather and the state of the tide, to my sandwich fillings and the books I had just read put down in detail.

I had summer lists and winter lists, year lists and patch lists, county lists and British lists all of which are as useful, in general terms, as last year’s railway timetable. Even the most avid fellow lister would deign only a passing glance. Some are lost in abandoned attics and a few still cram the top shelves in my study, looked at seldom and in private, like a serial killer’s trophies.

Like many things that time passing erodes the urgency of listing wanes. Most of us grow out of binge drinking and obscure music, fashion following and TV soaps. I seem to be growing out of collecting and listing. My stamp album is in some forgotten corner and just about everything else I ever hoarded has been car-booted, charity shopped or chucked in a recycling bin.

However I cannot quite wipe the slate clean. My world list may not be growing much but it is constantly re-shuffled to accommodate taxonomic change. I have resolved to go to Devon this year to look for a Cirl Bunting as its not on my stagnated UK list ignored because it sits somewhere on my world one. My county list will continue to be maintained and might grow as I do very occasionally twitch a world or UK lifer if it turns up in my county.

Nevertheless, I still keep a year list. Year lists are different, an incentive to see the same old same old. Somehow the fact that it is annually renewed remains an incentive and every year I set out to ensure there are 100 species or more on it by the end of January. When a blackbird or blue tit is desperately ‘needed’ for a day or two there seems a point to listing still. Sadly, that need seems to lessen with each month and by the end of February the list may only have been extended by a bird or five after January’s mad dashing. I guess the driving force is novelty. Each January the commonplace is novel for that year.

I may have put listing to one side but the need for novelty, to see something you have never seen before is almost hard wired into the human brain. Knowing what I have seen makes it easier to target seeing what I’ve never seen before!

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The post GOB 64 – Listing to one side… appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the April 2015 edition of Birdwatching magazine)

Hands up who likes furry pets, penguins and Puffins. OK. Now, hands up who likes starlings, snakes and spiders.

A few generations back most people considered the wild world a resource created by their deity for mankind’s benefit; ‘useful’ plants and animals or bad or useless stuff. Good things could be eaten or used as fuel and a few were pretty, medicinal or smelled nice. Bad things tried to eat you, stung, bit or otherwise annoyed although some were just considered too ugly to be allowed to thrive so everything else could be destroyed creating space for us to build on or grow crops.

Around then the balance between town and country tipped. More and more of us became urbanised until in some places, like Australia, 95% of us live in towns and cities. This shift may account for our lack of environmental awareness, but ought to stop us splitting the wild world into the good, the bad and the ugly.

I would argue that the cultural capital carried by citizens of the world actually accounts for the number of people who champion cute and cuddly things and either persecute or fail to protect the rest. When coupled with capitalism it is responsible for completely wrong attitudes.

Foxes are bad as they kill chickens, which are owned. Cats are forgiven killing songbirds that belong to no one. Barn Owls kill rodents, which we think of as bad, so they are good. Hen Harriers are bad as they eat grouse which rich people pay to kill.

We killed off the top predators in this country centuries ago… bears, and wolves remain baddies in fairy tales. Our surviving top predator risks the cash cows of commercial interests so we cull badgers.

But this whole way of thinking is wrongheaded. A few nineteenth century giants of science realised that our ecology was an intricate balance necessary for survival.

Most of us at least pay lip service to this need to keep things in balance. A generation of ecological disaster movies warn us to forgo monoculture, stop using broad-spectrum insecticides and think about organic growing for the health of the world. Yet we have a long way to go when it comes to the detail… and that’s where the devil lives

Put aside commercial interest and you find that predators do not challenge food production, but are just a potential predator of profit. Inoculate livestock against TB rather than kill badgers. Be happy with smaller bags of grouse so Hen Harriers can thrive and stop planting winter wheat so farmland bird numbers recover

But while we struggle with keep the environment healthy without it becoming impossible for farmers and others to make a living, some of those vested interests seem determined to muddy the waters.

Brood management might seem reasonable to prevent predators ruining grouse shoots… until you take into account that grouse moors are about two hundred pairs of Hen Harriers short of what they should hold. Helping songbirds survive is reasonable until you realise that those advocates want to help them by culling other birds, peregrines and the like. Some defend their own actions by saying that even the RSPB culls foxes that threaten Little Tern colonies without pointing out that the current imbalance caused by farmers, shooters and us consumers has to be addressed in the short term to avoid local extinctions and redress the balance. It’s not an easy task to educate us all and make people wary of these commercially motivated responses.

Personally I don’t find cats cuddly and, although snakes scare me I understand their place in the scheme of things. But, damn it, I have a hard time convincing my wife that the starlings are as deserving as the blackbirds or robins of the mealworms she puts out. Don’t even mention spiders; she wants them eliminated from the planet!

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The post GOB 63 – Hands up who like fluffy kittens? appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the February 2015 Edition of Birdwatching)

Popular myth would have it that we used to be a nation of ladies gentlemen… our word was our bond. The great and good had a code of ‘noblesse oblige’ while the hoi polloi knew their place. God was clearly an Englishman and everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Legislation was almost unnecessary except to deter the determinedly evil and a handshake was an unbreakable contract. Voluntary agreements were quite sufficient to regulate commerce and industry, pastime pursuits and internecine un-neighbourliness.

This is, for the most part, rubbish.

Commerce, industry and trade has some gentlemen, just as any other walk of life, but if all controls had remained toothless and voluntary small children would still be cleaning chimneys, drinking water from lead pipes, ingesting loaves cut with arsenic and eating horse offal pies.

Country pursuits are no better. Ladies on horses seem to accidentally kill foxes as often as they used to do it on purpose. Gentlemen fill their Purdeys with lead shot and blast buzzards with impunity and landed gentry are supposedly so incompetent that they are always unaware when their gamekeepers poison peregrines or stomp on Hen Harrier nests.

Farmers chemically scour the land and mechanically trim back hedgerows just when birds are nesting or before they’ve eaten their fill of winter berries while claiming their stewardship subsidies.

Careless anglers discard nylon line that takes years to rot and is a long, slow and painful death sentence to water birds, or fill swims with huge quantities of bait that sours the water.

Even the careful hiker or casual stroller steadily erodes paths and builds unwanted Cairns on hilltops.

In town parks the staff still remove all ground cover and chop out deadwood. It used to be that all ‘parkies’ were professional gardeners filling their grounds with unproductive rhododendrons and blankets of spring bulbs or waves of easily discarded ‘bedding plants’. Despite this dying away through cost savings parks are kept as pet dog toilets not playground let alone the wildlife sanctuaries a little thought could encourage.

Meanwhile homegrown bait-diggers leave their diggings to be back-filled by the tide and crabber’s turn stones over but not back again. Duck hunters stray above the tide lines and delight in potting anything that slips off the reserve that their dogs can surreptitiously recover.

We birders rail against the Mediterraneans for supping on lime-stick caught Ortolans or sportingly blasting anything that flies from a Bee-eater to a Bonelli’s Eagle.

But, like charity, legislation should begin at home. We can no longer scatter stones from our glass-clad domiciles. Its time that the birder’s code of conduct was enshrined in a proper countryside act that tells us ALL how best to behave and sanctions us if we stray.

Voluntary agreements in Fleet Street did nothing to stop trial by the press or phone hacking victims. Self-policing MPs still fiddle their expenses and have wage rises orders of magnitude more than nurses. Voluntary agreements, like verbal contracts they are not worth the paper they are written on.

We need all-encompassing countryside legislation that makes the use of the countryside forever sensitive to the needs of the wild world. Builders, Farmers, Oil Men and Planners cannot be trusted, but nor can casual countryside users. Badgers need saving from Profit Politics, groundwater must come before Fracking and the delicate eco-system has to be protected even from those of us who value it most highly.

If we want to stop hunters and shooters from eliminating predators then we must also agree to culling introduced species. If we stop farmers chemically controlling insects and ploughing in stubble too early, then we need to sanction twitchers who trample crops or invade people’s gardens and over enthusiastic photographers from flushing scarce species. The right to roam is fundamental, but must be coupled with the obligation to do no harm.

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The post GOB 61 – Let’s Shake On It appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the January Edition of Birdwatching)

So asked Heather Small on her album ‘Proud’. Two things led to me asking myself, and you, that question.

The first was something I cannot get out of my mind despite a few donations to ease my conscience. A TV documentary followed an English doctor’s four-week stint in an Ebola Treatment Centre in Sierra Leone. We witnessed people of all ages dying in pain and distress. There was an abiding image of a boy still sat on the edge of his bed where he had died patiently waiting for treatment.

The doctor said: “After thousands of deaths in Africa we have been praying for the world to wake up to this humanitarian crisis… …now they have, because a couple of white people have died in Europe and America.”

The last part of the film took us to a mass grave dug in the jungle that he, rightly, said was now a biohazard site that would have to be left to go back to the wild.

The second trigger came when an old friend was telling me about the trip he had just taken to Madagascar. He saw some wonderful birds, more than half of which were endemics and almost all were lifers for him. But what had struck him most about the whole experience was flying over huge areas of degraded habitat and driving for hours without seeing any birds except for a few egrets. Locals have cut down the forests to plant crops and then have to abandon the poor soils after a couple of growing seasons. In a few years the hillsides are eroded and soils washed to the flood plains, the thick clay clogs the fields so is used to make bricks causing the remaining forest to be plundered for timber to make fuel to fire the bricks.

For a couple of thousand years birding was as innocent as can be. Taking delight in the wonder of flight and feathers did no harm (if you ignore the blip of taking skins for science). Birdwatching revitalised the spirit. Many of us still take delight in this simple pursuit. The thing is this; some of what we do does do harm. It’s hard to get the right balance. Does green tourism do enough good locally to more than justify our contribution to global warming from burning aircraft fuel?

We have to hold up to the light everything we do. We need to be sure that our pastime really is truly green and not ‘Champagne Environmentalism’.

Its not easy… here’s another image from a recent TV series… Sue Perkins on the banks of the upper Mekong releasing hapless finches from a tiny cage that she bought from the market where birds are sold to be released. The more you free, the more will be caught and imprisoned, a real feathery dilemma.

Each one of us has to actively seek out ways to make things better for the wild world, not just avoid doing harm.

The entire world’s habitat is degrading and we cannot wait until the problem laps at our shores to do something positive to turn the tide. If we do not cure Ebola in Africa it will start taking our lives. Maybe not enough people care about innocent African children’s lives, but they deserve our help just like all people in poverty need help.

You might say ‘charity begins at home’, but poverty leads to the vicious cycle of deforestation and erosion that leads to more species extinctions. Devastating forest to plant palm trees for bio-fuel is even worse. Want to feel proud? Then walk the kids to school (its great emission-free exercise) and send the petrol money to conservation charities.

We only have one world, the whole planet is our home and what goes on anywhere on it effects us all sooner or later.

The post GOB 60 – What have you done today to make you feel proud? appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the January 2015 edition of Birdwatching magazine)

I was lying in bed counting diving Gannets. (When you get to my age sleep is like a birding tour, every day you go to bed late, get up early and there are usually a couple of toilet breaks along the way). I got to musing about ‘rubbish birds’ and ‘stonkers’

I think these terms define the ‘sport’ of twitching. A rubbish bird can be virtually anything if you see enough of them like starlings and Wood Pigeons, House Sparrows and Herring Gulls. In the US Grackles and Red-winged Blackbirds, Mockingbirds and Meadowlarks fit the bill… but they would be ‘stonkers’ if they turned up in the UK. A House Crow that bores in Haryana would be a ‘stonker’ in Staffordshire.

For twitchers a glimpsed Lesser short-toed Lark is a ‘crippling’ view but to most birders they are an LBJ; good to have seen, but you wouldn’t need to level the bins at one for several hours. Five minutes sorting out the ID features might be a good investment, but only the first thirty seconds or so will get the pulse racing, and then only if its a ‘lifer’.

Let’s say a juvenile Common Rosefinch turns up around the corner. Yes you’d go see it, but would you set aside the whole day or just turn up for a five-minute gander and make a nice bold tick on your county list.  After all its merely a wing-bar and pink-fringed, black beak away from being a Corn Bunting.

If you don’t twitch, which would you rather see… a Kingfisher or a Richard’s Pipit? Seems to me that those twitchers who can swear to the latter are sportsmen and women not budding birders. They may switch to odonata and coleoptera once they’ve run out of new birds to see, becoming a bugger to satisfy their hunting urge.

On the other hand, if you are a birder whose been building a list then that Kingfisher will stop you in your stride every time and your bins will stay glued to it until it flies and the Richard’s Pipit will be a ‘good find’ or a ‘nice tick’ not the object of hours of adoration.

But what makes a bird make your day?

There is some common ground, but I suspect our sinews strain for different species. I’ve never yet met a birder who could just peek perfunctorily at a woodpecker. Owls and Peregrines always demand our full attention. But we will all also have a special craving, favourite birds that quicken the blood and force our phizogs to grin.

One Swallow may not make a summer, but one Swift does! The first one I see makes me turn the calendar to summer and the last one leaving saddens me. Every screech passed my study window makes me follow their twists and turns of these absolute masters of the sky.

Long-tailed Tits charm us all and its easy to see why Redstarts delight with their smart and colourful clothes, but Blackcaps and Lesser Whitethroats muted yet they thrill me too. You may share the warm glow that a singing Song Thrush engenders and all Brits love Robins; but its their plaintive winter song that would be one of my Desert Island Discs.

I’m willing to bet that I’m alone with my pick of the day makers. I’ve spent more binocular hours with this bird than any other. After everything I’ve just said about the drab dullards that get twitched I have to swallow hard and humbly when I say that Dunnocks do it for me. Their plumage is so subtle that its unappreciated; all wonderfully cryptic patterns in semi tones. As songsters they are disdained… I’ve seen their song described as weak and scratchy… but for me its like a deep but simple Motzart motif gracing my one good ear as I potter among my patio pots.

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