Grumpy Old Birder

(This article first appeared in the April 2013 edition of ‘Birdwatching’)

I well remember my first ever Great Egret in high summer many years ago. I know it was high summer as we walked along the shore of a large lake with sun-ripened wheat in the surrounding fields; and I know it was long ago as every fifty meters all the way the reeling of grasshopper warblers serenaded us. The high heat triggered a thunderstorm and we were drenched for our efforts. I do not recall every being so wet before or since. Back in the car the windows steamed up as I replaced a soggy shirt with a scratchy and rather musty jacket.

I have faced directly into a force eight gale blowing from the northeast in midwinter, while watching the waves crashing against cliffs throwing spray thirty feet into the air (and a goodly amount into my freezing face). But that was rewarded by a skua going one way and auks streaming by the other. Such a scene can only be truly appreciated by a birder and such a sentence only appreciated if you are into palindromes and palimpsests.

I have steamed in a Central American jungle in pursuit of antbirds, only pausing to wring the sweat from my shirt and I have baked under an African sun waiting for the fitter birders to return from their scaling of a Kalahari sandhill in search of a Dune Lark

Many is the time I have felt the wind penetrate my bones despite four layers of thermal wear as I scoped gravel pits for Smew and I have felt my very fundament freeze to the seat of a hide while waiting for a winter Bittern to sneak out of hiding from a reedbed.

I have even waded knee-deep along a flooded path to get to a waterlogged viewing ramp, while the penetrating drizzle sent icy fingers down my spine.

But what I have most certainly NOT done is watch birds in the fog!

2012 was my second worst year list since I began birding. Weather, incapacity and indolence all played a part in my dismal performance. So I awaited the dawn of 2013 with determination to make this a better year. In my best ever year I managed 99 species on day one! In my acceptable listing years I know I have to get 100 species in the first month or my increasing capacity for pessimism will make me falter. I know too, that waiting for winter specialties to turn up at the end of the year is often a fruitless exercise. If I haven’t got winter swans and geese, Snow Buntings and Smew under my belt before February arrives they will stubbornly arrive late the following winter and I will dip out entirely for another year.

Thus it was that Hawkeye and I were out locally on the first of Jan ticking up sixty-five species within a five-mile radius. On the third of the month we cranked this up to eighty-nine species by a visit to Dungeness. Moreover, ‘Dunge’ sported no less than seven Great White Egrets that day and, at one time, when the venerated one spotted a Bittern land I managed to get four heron species into the scope at once!

The fourth was spent a mile from the house successfully searching the beach rocks for Purple Sandpiper with some bonuses in the shape of divers and ducks. So we were happily sporting a nice ninety-five when we set off yesterday for Sheppey in the sure and certain knowledge that we would add at least the five needed to get the ‘ton’ up!

Of course mice, men and me should know better than to lay such plans and rely on such sureties.

We set off in the gloom as dawn broke and revealed mist; fog so thick you could knit a chunky jumper with it. We bravely got to the edge of town and barely dared to swing around the roundabout on the dual carriageway, as it was impossible to see across both lanes! We were back home after only an hour as we had stupidly slipped down to the shore in the hope that something would be visible there.

So the mystical Isle Sheppey awaits me still, holding tight to its Rough-legged Buzzard, Avocets and the other necessary birds like the possible four owl species. My next shot is going to be the ninth – so my birding fingers are firmly crossed for gales, snow, sun or storm, anything but the mists of Avalon!

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The post GOB 38 – Play Less Misty for Me appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the March 2013 edition of ‘Birdwatching’)

You may have not noticed but it is already turning into a ‘waxwing winter’ and it promises to be one of epic proportions.

In my corner of the southeast there are reports of flocks ranging from half a dozen to two hundred! Obviously, all I need do is look out of my window and… …and nothing! Not only are they not stripping my Pyracantha – that was polished off by blackbirds months ago – they are not even tempted by the crab apple that I planted just for them a decade ago and, from which, drop rotting crab apples year after untouched year.

Are they flying to my neighbours bushes? Hardly, my neighbours have paved and patio’d, dug up and decked, tarmacked and concreted like demented cowboy builders, leaving only the occasional gap for a light-blighting leylandi or a self-sown sycamore.

In their wisdom my local authority has made the park ‘child and dog friendly’. In effect this means it is close to a wildlife dessert. There are just a few well-groomed trees interspersed with grass. There are no bushes or undergrowth in which pedos might lurk, or drunkards might relieve themselves in the wee small hours. It does provide perches for the ubiquitous collared doves and our local parakeets, but precious little else.

If I drive out of town to my ‘hedge of dreams’ I find blackthorn and hawthorn, sloe and eglantine, which, a month ago, were positively dripping massive red berry puddles. But that was when the marauding fieldfares and redwings found their bounty and took their fill. I watched them one day as several hundred fieldfares pushed on through, probably preparing to go even further south for the winter and try their luck across the channel. Continental blackbirds, redwings, song and mistle thrushes all got stuck in and have stripped the bushes bare leaving mere crumbs at the table for our over-wintering blackcaps and chiffchaffs.

Never one to let such a local lack get me down I listened to reports, read my local birding bloggers and trawled the ornithological society’s website for waxwing words. It seems that they were still to be had so off I set every day for a week but getting not even a sniff of these wandering winter wonders

I did not give up, however, ‘she who must shop’, did require my taxi service.

It seems that her current boot collection is either insufficiently waterproof or stylish, and neither comfortable nor otherwise tolerable and we must buy more. So it was that, over my freshly darned socks, I pulled on the shoes that I inherited from my granddad several decades ago. I donned my army surplus jacket (now back in fashion for the third time) and syphoned off a cup of the neighbour’s diesel. Then I coaxed the car into shopping mode. Like me it reluctantly trundled toward a part of town I hope to mostly avoid.

Under a sign that warns, ‘here be dragons’ life is rife with muggers posing as shopkeepers. There are buildings there which, once entered, do not allow you to leave so long as one brass farthing still clings to a fold of your purse or hides behind a moth in your wallet. The door alarms scream and klaxons clamour madly if you try to pass out through their portals with a credit card still showing less than 10% over-spend on your credit limit.

If sufficient good behaviour has accrued over several months, I am allowed to sit and wait in the car, while the better part of us goes on sorties into the shopping battlefields.

This, of course, leaves me in a typically male quandary. Stay put and pawn everything I own, or join the fray all the while attempting to subvert her buying intentions. I try to achieve this with unflattering comments about ‘the fit’ dresses (whatever that means) and by relating horror stories about the carcinogenic qualities of newly purchased clothes. In the end good sense lost out to my shopping phobia and I delivered myself into the arms of my Kindle while she ran into Debenhams all the while scattering tenners while being beguiled by fashion fever.

Mere hours later I hear the boot open and feel the car settle six inches closer to the tarmac under the weight of her purchases.

(OK, OK, it was actually half an hour later and there was but one slim shopping bag. Now stop reading over my shoulder!)

Exhausted from the fray my beloved then announced that we would not be going in search of waxwings because all this shopping had produced an appetite such that she could consume a small beast of burden and I was thus instructed to head for the local Subway.

We pulled into the sandwich shop carpark behind a local garage just off the bi-pass and the love of my life toddled off inside to get some cheesy Nachos. I declined such indulgence, pleading an inability to afford savoury snacks of my own due to being newly impoverished.

Then this morning of purgatory, spent shedding pounds of the wrong sort, was made sooooo much worse.

An event unfolded that is likely to result in more shopping trips than someone of my nervous disposition can cope with.

I looked up and there in a bare tree, sometimes dropping down to gorge on fruiting bushes were eleven splendidly attired waxwings sparkling in the frosty sunshine glinting off the Texaco sign!

Bloody typical!

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* I’m rather hoping that all this blatant product placement bears fruit!

The post GOB 37 – Waxwing Hysterical appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the February 2013 edition of ‘Birdwatching’)

What do dog walkers and local authority councillors have in common, apart that is, from an unerring ability to get right up the nostrils of yours truly.

In one word – ignorance.

Let me explain.

I do not believe that most dog walkers are selfish and thuggish and care not one whit for the welfare of other creatures. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that, with the exception of a minority of idiots with viscous maltreated dogsm or those fools that pamper literal or figurative poodles, the vast majority of dog owners are, almost tautologically, animal lovers.

Sure, pets can be substitutes for children or significant others, but most people that have a dog, love it for its own sake. They take it on long walks to keep it fit as well as to work off their own surplus of pre-packed meals and sugary snacks. I would go further, I would bet that most dog owners regularly feed their garden birds. Dammit, I have no doubt that a great many dog lovers fret over their feeders with freezing fingers when plummeting temperatures threaten the lives of Robin Redbreast. They scatter their crumbs to the band of Blue Tits that brave the elements trying scrape a living from long dead coconut shells and empty red-net bags whistling in winter winds.

Sixty six percent of households feed their garden birds. Twenty-one percent of households keep one or more pet dogs. It would be beyond the bounds of reason to suppose that there is no overlap.

So, when dog owners allow, indeed in many cases encourage their pet to disturb birds it surely must be through ignorance?

Pet owners generally suffer from what the TV programme QI calls ‘general ignorance’.

Those with cats refuse to believe that their Mr Tibbles eats birds and swear blind that ‘timmy’ would run the other way if he saw a mouse, despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Only in the most enlightened parts of the US and Australia do cat owners realise that such pets should be kept indoors at all times. The average dog owner is quite genuine when he opines that his pet is ‘only being friendly’ when he leaps at you with muddy claws. She is sincere when she says that you need not fear the scowling, growling beast as it ‘wouldn’t hurt a fly’.

Clearly this ignorance extends to walks along the beach and dog owners genuinely do not realise that allowing, indeed often encouraging, their dog to chase waders in winter or terns in spring can be a death warrant. Our beaches are no longer safe for any bird to nest on, only in those least walked by a man and his dog has any hope of allowing little terns to keep a toe-hold on these islands as a breeding place.

Two days ago I sat in my car on the sea front with waves lashing the shore totally mesmerised by a couple of hundred sanderlings chasing the waves in and out in search of storm-tossed tasties.

I counted a dozen rock pipits picking through the stranded seaweed in search of desiccated brine shrimp and sand hoppers clinging to the heat from nature’s compost.

I was searching through the ring-plovers and turnstones in the hope of finding a purple sandpiper when the sanderlings took flight and every other bird on the beach was put up. The culprit was a big black, ‘wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly’, ‘only-being-friendly’ Labrador as it tore through the waders scattering them to the northeast wind. The dog’s owner was spurring him on, waving him toward the next drift of feeding birds. Ten minutes later along came a little old lady who, no doubt, spends her winter evenings threading peanuts on a string to keep the great tits happy. She patted her pug and ruffled the scruff of her spaniel telling them what good boys they were as they ploughed through the pipits and splashed in the surf scattering turnstones.

I was incandescent but swallowed the steam and got out of my cosy hide to explain to the walkers that what they were doing was worse for birds than poisoning their peanuts. To be fair the response was surprise not aggression.

It seems that dog walkers can be encouraged to be more responsible, so I urge you all to tell your dog-owning friends that they should be keeping their curs away from curlews.

The local authority bans dogs from beaches in summer as dog mess make for very unsavoury sand castles. I expect these worthy aldermen would baulk from banning dogs from winter beaches, even if I could banish their ignorance.

After all their ignorance is legion!

My second outburst of outrage has been brought about by a truly inspired policy toward household re-cycling that my local authority is adopting.

I am such a sad and lonely guy that one of my favourite outings is to go to the recycling centre with the stuff that the bin men eschew. I look forward to lugging my big cardboard boxes and small household items out of the back of my car and trying to stop garden waste spilling out of the containers. (The mice that share my birdfeed have, in their generosity, given a number of new exits to these garden tidies. So, I’ve put a fold-up garden bin inside another and put another inside that, so that I can twiddle them around in such a way as to ensure that the new mouse windows do not line up.)

I don’t mind my otherwise pristine vehicle becoming besmirched with rotting leaves, what I am trying to do is not introduce a new spider species to my car. The car already hosts a species that must be new to science as it exclusively resides in wing mirrors. I bet you have them too… have they really only evolved since the invention of electronic wing mirrors?

My garden shed has become home to the only critter that I know of that eats pea-bugs – the ‘false’ black widow spider. Despite their false claim to widowhood they do, apparently, pack a punch and there is only one thing in life that ‘er indoors’ fears more than spiders, and that is a spider with fangs that can inject venom into the human body.

So, we pack the car of a sunny Sunday and join the rest of the saddos who don’t get out much, queuing up to offload our unfashionable bedding, dead socks and empty jam jars.

There is a large sign at the site, proclaiming the readiness of the staff to help if needed. Large and clearly written the signs may be, but experience tells me that those same helpers do not readily read them. Their scowls discourage putting any such invitation to the test.

Parked just outside the main gate, on most of my visits, is a van just too large to pass under the crash bar. From this van there usually emerges a red-faced man who hauls his unwanted fridge to the appropriate bin.

Now to the ‘general ignorance’ that inflicts the local authority. They have recently banned such incursion and post a paid scowler at the gate to dissuade non-compliance. The councillors have further decreed that no van of any size will, henceforth, be allowed to enter the hallowed grounds of the re-cycling centre.

So the bloke who, for a tenner (which is half the local authority fee) would take away your old cooker must now pay twice that in fees to take it to a commercial recycling dump. Such wisdom from our elected members bedazzles me. Just how much does it cost, I wonder, to clear up the fly-tipped fowling the literally litters the countryside forcing farmers to fence off their fields from public access and put padlocked gates across the farm roads?

I bet it is a lot more than the commercial recycling centre extracts from responsible house clearers and benign builders.

This latest decree raises the bar of crassness to a new high…

Back in the days of my youth the bin men would take away anything under a ton for a fiver. Back in the days of my youth I was for a while a bin man myself and would happily drag off a sack of grass cuttings or help carry away a sick spin-drier.

In fact the only thing I would not do was empty the bins of any house with a large unchained dog… but that’s another story!

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The post GOB 36 – Capitalist Running Dogs appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the January 2013 edition of ‘Birdwatching’)

I grew up in the Garden of England in the 1950s.

Autumn days were spent riding our bikes to out of the way orchards where we thought the farmer wouldn’t catch us scrumping. Summer Cherries were best if you could avoid being terrified by ‘cherry cartridges’ going off and deafening you. By August the apples were edible but left you with cheeks pulled in and tummy ache… by mid-September apples and pears dripped with juice when you bit into them, and the only danger was being stung by late and lazy wasps, who were scrumping too.

I moved away from home as a late teenager and, after university worked in Scotland and Lancashire. My family emigrated and my in-laws moved to Norfolk, so I had no reason to go back to my childhood haunts.

When I first came back ‘home’ in the mid-nineteen nineties I was, of course, shocked to see how small my old schoolyard was. That’s normal I suppose. I was shocked too, to find that the village I spent most of my childhood in, had gone ‘upmarket’. The High Street had been newly cobbled and that was not the end of its gentrification. The old newspaper shop around which we hunted as five year olds for old bus tickets (why on earth we collected the stiff cardboard tickets I have no idea), was now called ‘Guns ‘n Saddles’. The colonnade general store, where mum bought broken biscuits for cheapness, had become ‘The Bridal Shower’. Most saddening of all was that ‘Dolly’s Café’ was now ‘Baguettes & Brioche’! Sadly Dolly was no more… she may have succumbed to her liberal smoking (we never saw Dolly without a fag hanging from the corner of her mouth threatening to shed the long grey ash onto the scones), or she may have fallen fowl of her own interpretation of ‘Health & Safety’, which consisted of daily dusting of any unsold cakes and a minor price reduction, making them more attractive to us young lay-a-bouts.

These changes are an age old truism – as you grow up the world around you seems to shrink.

But the one thing you can surely rely upon is that the saplings seen in youth grow into towering trees?

Not a bit of it, the biggest shock of all was finding that all the apple trees had shrunk whilst I was away! They were no longer 20-foot high feeding grounds for Lesser-spotted Woodpeckers all set about with lush grass for the sheep to graze, then dug over in the Autumn by pigs getting drunk on fermenting fruit. Nothing now dared grow above the reach of the apple-picker.

When I was at school you would be set problems such as…

A six-foot tall farmer has an orchard where all the trees are 20 feet high. His ladders extend to 20 feet… at what angle should he lean his ladder for stability and still reach the tops of the trees?

The answer to this poser was decidedly not ‘make the trees smaller’.

How about this one…

The farmer’s wife has six children, every day she bakes a 1lb loaf… she eats twice as much as the children and her husband eats half as much again. How much does each child eat?

Encouraged to ‘think outside the box’ the solution is obvious. The farmer should grow GM wheat designed to resist all disease, and able to survive chemical assault. He should then spray his fields with pesticides and herbicides, so that his yields are higher. At the end of each year he should scour the land with acid to kill everything and plant the same crop year after year. This will mean he can have four more children and their daily bread will be enough to feed them all twice as much as before, so that they can become obese! If, at any stage, the wheat price rises to a level that actually pays the farmer to grow it, cheaper wheat will be imported, thus ensuring its ‘carbon footprint’ is larger than the world can sustain.

Now, as I sniff the spiced early Autumn air, I can see that, at Thanet Earth, the largest area of greenhouses in the country, it is the season of mellow fruitfulness. The vines hang with tomatoes grown without the nuisance of soil; they are big and red and uniformly round – as appetizing to the eye as can be.

Us old farts can, of course, remember trotting off to the local nursery to buy a ‘bag of blues’ (those non-conformist tomatoes that were over large, dwarfed or misshapen with amusing appendages) – and boy did they taste good. It is no co-incident that the most popular tomato grown is called ‘money-maker’ – and it is, to my mind, as tasty as over-boiled rice!

‘Thinking outside the box’ and ‘pushing the envelope’ into ‘blue-sky thinking’, has led us down a literal dead end!

GM crops are, of course, completely safe. The government says so, and all the research sponsored by GM companies confirm it. It has been proven beyond doubt that rape seeds cannot disperse more than a field or two from their source. Noone has told the bees, who may cross-pollinate as much as 12 kilometers away! Not to worry ‘though… we are doing a great job of killing off the honeybees!

The death of bees, from the mite-carried virus, seems to be linked to stress that lowers their natural resistance. How do you stress out bees? Are they easy to tease? No, instead of hives permanently being placed at intervals in food-producing areas, we now move the hives around to order, taking their pollinating proclivities from field to field, over several months, and across many miles, each time disorienting the bees and reducing the size of the swarm.

Its time to stop moving the boxes and think inside them again.

You do not solve out-of-control population growth by increasing yields, any more than you solve traffic problems by building more roads. Anyway, several studies show that GM crop yields are, on average a few percent lower than existing varieties!

You do not lower food prices by bankrupting farmers. Keeping finance in the first world, manufacturing in the second and food production in the third world is just colonialism by the backdoor.

Why did people use crop rotation for centuries? Because it worked! It is a low tech, low cost way of ensuring that pests and disease do not take hold.

When Britain was struggling to stem the tide of Nazis from engulfing us we ‘dug for victory’ – using far less of the land than we do now to grow crops, yet with sustainable production that sustained a more boring, but better, diet.

Back in the box we may have tried to tame nature around us, but we did not try to destroy it as if it were an enemy, and we left the wild corners to themselves.

Back in the day we understood simple arithmetic:

You reap what you sow – one for the rook, one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow.

Great oaks from little acorns grow.

Where the bee sucks there suck I.

You cannot thrive in trade if you expect to sell something for less than it costs.

You cannot force a quart into a pint pot.

10 billion people into one earth doesn’t go, and they cost the earth, and I really do mean that literally!

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The post GOB 35 – Thinking Inside the Box appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the January 2013 edition of ‘Birdwatching’)

Three days of fame is just about as much as I would ever want to cope with… it may be affirming, but it is also exhausting, confusing, deafening and dangerous for the eyeballs…

Let me explain.

I’ve just spent three full-on days at the British Bird Fair – the greatest birding show on earth, where 25,000 birders rampage through a dozen massive marquees in search of optics, bird tours, art work and well-known personalities.

The Oddies, Dilgers, Lindos and Packhams of this birding world are subject to sycophantic assaults and sheer adoration by virtue of their TV appearances. Common birders genuflect or laugh hysterically, if the objects of their desire so much as acknowledge their existence. Us D listers, minor birding celebs, get plenty of affirmation from web fans and grumpy article aficionados, but it generally falls short of stalking or being pelted with warm underwear.

However, I do meet hundreds of people and chat to them, listening to their needs, desires and even, on occasion, praises. While doing so the Public Address system will be red hot with use, as events are advertised and raffle prizewinners are declared. It nearly reaches breaking under the strains of Johnny Kingdom announcing his forthcoming talk. Sandwich sellers will vend their wares loudly and with celestial bells ringing while a host of birders create an unangelic hubbub well above their fighting weight!

I am, in any event, 90% deaf in one ear… by day three I am only able to nod and smile, as I desperately try to read lips, name badges, facial expressions and notes that Maggie hands me in order to get a clue as to what is going on. At the best of times you can confuse me just by asking what I want for dinner, but deafen me beyond my normal disability, and I can barely spell my own name or remember what I scoffed for breakfast.

The confusion is further exacerbated by my in-built inability to recognise anyone I don’t actually live with. As I said at the BBF, one thousand, eight hundred and twenty seven times, I never forget a face, nor a name, but I am rarely able to put the two together. This can, of course, be embarrassing for me and insulting to the person I’m trying to hold a conversation with. Is there anything more galling than a name badge, which is either illegible or turned volte-face? Worse still one, which also covers up the company name on the polo shirt! I managed to turn a BBC Wildlife Cameraman into someone I once arranged a trip for, and the Director of an ornithological society into a ‘Birding For All’ member. I then called someone Anthony throughout a 15-minute conversation, only to find out later that Anthony was his surname!

Despite this, exhibiting at the fair is affirming fun, one of the most enjoyable things you can do that isn’t fattening and is neither illegal nor immoral. However, it is a great deal of hard work, and I find it very physically draining.

I don’t suppose I have ever mentioned my arthritis in any of my articles?  Being so stoic and self-effacing I have probably kept this from the reading public. I bravely soldier on, surprisingly un-rewarded with medals, not even seen on the birthdays honours list, it’s a shame as GOB OBE has such a ring to it.

Where was I?

Oh yes, the arthritis.

I’ve suffered for more than forty years from this disease. However, it was only five years ago that I found out that it has a symptom other than pain, skeletal shrinkage and curvature… apparently it also causes deep fatigue. So it turns out I’m only half as idle as I thought I was!

By the time our stall is all set up on the Thursday I am wiped-out. I can barely manage an early evening pint before crashing out. So, on Friday morning, am I ready to meet all the show-going birders? Most decidedly not! I am exhausted.

There you have it, just call me exhausted, deafened and confused, formerly of Tunbridge Wells.

Ahhhh…, you are probably wondering about the ocular danger I mentioned at the outset?

Well, this is a very sad tale of misunderstood motivation coupled with the overactive and evil mind of ‘she who must be obeyed’.

Sometime on the Saturday the confusion, deafness and exhaustion was showing in my demeanour – I know, you are going to find it hard to believe that I am not always brimming over with bonhomie. My face was ashen and my spirits low, I could barely whisper a plea for a fresh coffee and a blueberry muffin, as I held court in my ‘office’ – that’s a corner of the stand with two canvas seats and a large electric fan.

It was, and I am prepared to say this in court if necessary, purely a co-incidence, that I made the supreme effort to perk up, at the exact moment when I was visited by two young ladies from Sweden. My head was bowed so low with fatigue that I had to be told later how attractive and blond they both were. I became animated for no other reason than that I knew I had to make the effort for my adoring public.

I think that, while this would not have passed unnoticed, it would not have been sufficient for Hawkeye to begin to sharpen a stick, let alone wave it dangerously close to my orbits. That only came about when they asked for a photograph with me. It is my fault that, just make sure they were in the frame, they had to put their arms around my neck, and press their cheeks against my grizzled jowl?

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The post GOB 34 – Bird Fair Blues appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the December 2012 edition of ‘Birdwatching’)

Is it about age?

No, it can’t be as I’ve met twitchers in their sixties and seventies.

Perhaps then, it is about how long you’ve been birding?

No, it can’t be that, as I’ve met rabid twitchers who’ve been at it a lifetime and newbies who wouldn’t look over the hedge at the end of their patch if a Passenger Pigeon had turned up in the next field.

It must be me then… I must be changing.

Fear not dear reader, birding is in my blood and bones and I’ll still thrill to a passing Swift or the call of a midnight owl as I shuffle off this mortal coil. Nevertheless, I am undergoing a profound change.

Yesterday was as dead a birding day as we get… hot, humid and in a summer when heat and rain have turned hedgerows into jungle. In the classic birding parlance there was ‘not a lot about’. That is to say there were no rarities to rattle the pagers, or at least not in my corner of blighty.

A week ago I had walked around a bit of one of my local reserves and, while it was an enjoyable stroll (or as enjoyable as the arthritic hips allow) no Red-footed Falcons or American Coots threatened to enhance the year list. I’ve birded so little this summer that several Garden Warblers were a high point as they did make it to the 2012 list for the first time.

A day or two later I struggled to the viewing ramp at the other end and sat undisturbed on a warm and windy day. No Common Sandpipers or Gargany, which I still ‘need’ for the year.

The thing is that I cared less for these omissions than at any time in all my birding years. During the stroll around the wet woods we had been serenaded by Blackcaps, heard a Great-spotted Woodpecker drum and watched massive spawning carp rolling in the shallows. Sitting on a bench on the viewing ramp I could look heavenwards and watch a Hobby lazily on the hunt and a passing buzzard drift by. Despite the strong breeze I caught sight of a Bearded Tit poorly flying for a few yards across the reedbed and was nearly deafened by a sudden burst of Cetti’s Warbler song. An hour or more passed on that bench with nothing more exciting than a distant Common Tern hovering over a pool and a Swift passing so low it practically parted my hair… and I loved every sedate and serene second of it.

Yesterday I watched a Ring-necked Parakeet clinging to one of my feeders and munching his way through the sunflower seeds. I saw a Blackbird on my shed roof feathers fluffed and wings out letting the sun see to his ticks and panting, beak open to dissipate the heat. Later I pottered among my pots and a young Dunnock hopped up into our lilac bush three feet from my head and I chatted quietly to it. Sitting in the sun with Maggie, catching rays to ensure our daily 15 minutes of vitamin D, a Bluetit family ignored us completely and fed on our feeders inches from us, while less brave Goldfinches twittered at us from the telephone wire into our house, basically telling us to get lost so that they could eat us out of house and home.

The cool change has crept over me and I see that such every day birding; such ordinary ornithology, gives me more pleasure than a barrow load of avian accidentals.

I haven’t managed any overseas birding for well over a year and would love to expand my world list, but I no longer care if UK rarities pass me by. Even the world list has become less of a goal for me and while I want to see new exotic species the manner of the birding will have to change. I cannot contemplate chasing my tail to get every endemic. I want to just enjoy the novelty and entire environment not one bird at a time, but en masse and at leisure.

On one of my first overseas jaunts more than thirty years ago, getting the most out of a round-the-world ticket I pitched up in Fiji right after a hurricane had taken the top off every palm tree on one side of the island. Most birds had been blown off or were hiding and I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of birds I saw in three days!

I had pre-booked an outing to a coral atoll and saw flying fish gliding along our bow wave then beachcombed for coral on sand too hot to stand bare foot on. We had a ‘cook out’ on the beach then took the leftovers in a glass-bottomed boat and fed the fish. I snapped away like a mad tourist trying to capture the exciting novelty on film when I had an epiphany so profound it affected all life thereafter. I put down the camera and stopped making a record of the experience in favour of actually enjoying the experience. In an instant I had realized that, instead of enjoying the moment I was wasting it, being a spectator not a participant.

Well folks, as I gazed from my office window, and when I lolled on the viewing ramp I experienced an epiphany as profound, if rather more drawn out. I don’t care if the grass is greener on the other side of the hill… what’s the point of worrying about that if I can’t even appreciate the colours of everyday life?

Thomas Hobbes said that life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Well, sad to say for half of the world that’s true. But I think for the rest of us Joni Mitchell had it right when she sang: ‘you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til its gone’. I don’t give a flying fig that sitting with Joni watching the sunset is a cliché, I am going to appreciate the birds I do see!

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*’Cool Change’ was a minor hit for the Little River Band; Australia’s answer to the Eagles.

The post GOB 33 – Time for a Cool Change appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the November 2012 edition of ‘Birdwatching’)

Just when you think things cannot get worse life turns around and bites you on the butt… I ranted last month about rich landowners stealing our wildlife out of their selfish desire to kill wild things for sport. The RSPB and others reported that the Hen Harrier is on the brink of complete extirpation from England and yet still they are persecuted, as are Red Kites and Golden Eagles in Scotland. Anything at the top of the food chain seems to be in the sights of these unspeakable people. Hot on the heels of my rant and the dire warnings of conservation groups comes news that DEFRA is going to issue licences allowing pheasant shoots to trap buzzards and destroy their nests.

This is not just immoral and selfish it is, of course, completely bonkers. Buzzards have always held on in good numbers in the north and west and in the last few decades they have managed to regain much of their former range in the south and east. Even Kent and East Anglia now has early colonisers nesting and slowly expanding wherever there are woodlands to nest and rabbits to live on. So, if you eliminate them by whatever means on an estate, all this will do is draw in birds from the surrounding countryside, just in the way that foxes recolonize the country from the towns when populations are wiped out by the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.

Government is not renown for getting things right. Indeed it has a long history of wasting our taxes on projects that are a complete waste of time and squandering our precious resources whether it be on Blue Streak in the 1960s or senseless wars on foreign turf more recently. Why, one might ask, should the current lot be any different.

Well they say they want to be the ‘greenest’ ever regime. They say that the welfare state is safe in their hands. They say that they favour the ordinary working man over City fat cats. It used to be said that the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer. Well, in my view, pheasant shooting parties are city bankers at play. How can it be a source of pride to shoot a bird out of the sky that doesn’t like flying and has been driven towards the guns? If you want to prance about the country in a jacket with leather patches become a geography teacher.

It must be that these buffoons are part of a slow migration that occurs every weekend when all those Chelsea Tractors pine for a country lane to roar down, a pheasant to chase or a peasant to pitch into a ditch.

I have to assume that the Cabinet of Millionaires are, once again, favouring the needs of their rich pals rather than 99% of the population. Most people will be stunned to learn that, apparently, it is a priority to spend £375,000 to catch buzzards to see if this makes any difference to artificially raised non-native poults!

Should we be surprised when the minister responsible inherited a 20,000 acre walled estate, can’t tell a minnow from a kipper, thinks ragwort is an invasive foreign plant and happily created a quarry in the face of considerable opposition from local conservationists… the perfect fellow to be appointed to look after the environment.

There’s no point in me tearing out any more of my greying locks… the Guardian and others can lampoon, us ordinary folk can rant and rave, but this will just fall upon the deaf ears of those who honestly believe that they are destined to rule by virtue of the fact that their ancestors stole half of the nation from the people. Obviously taxation is just a means to avoid spending your inherited wealth on stupid and selfish schemes.

On a lighter note my better half has withdrawn rations from our babies.

Our yard is somewhat smaller than the ministers. It is probably a great deal smaller than his butler’s pantry. Nevertheless, it managed to attract in no less than 50 young starlings and their over taxed parents. It was OK when the marauding hordes just cost us a fortune in fat-balls. Maggie tolerated their early morning cacophony; she even forgave the odd bit of ‘bird lime’ discharged on her newly hung washing. What she could not allow was the destruction of half of our newly planted patio plants. These bully boys sat on anything and everything while they waited for mum or dad to come stuff them with high-energy offerings. After a week of putting up with them, she bade them farewell and withdrew the food for a couple of days forcing them to climb the fence and devour a neighbour’s bird food and squash his petunias and peonies instead of ours.

Tomorrow we will hang up the nyjer and sunflower seeds, put out some peanuts and mealworms and hope that the finches, tits and other passerines will forgive us and return now that they can get a look in.

I cannot see how anyone can derive pleasure from slaughtering game birds, but they clearly do – perhaps they enjoy eating them while trying to avoid cracking a crown on a bit of buckshot. On the other hand, whether I am abroad watching a Steller’s Eider or at home watching a Starling the pleasure I derive from my simple and harmless pastime is endless.

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The post GOB 32 – Just when you thought it was safe… appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the October 2012 edition of ‘Birdwatching’)

We Brits pride ourselves on being at the forefront of conservation with organisations like the RSPB not only preserving habitats and challenging government policy at home, but helping out overseas as well.

We applaud the international stance of the British Trust for Ornithology as it monitors the arrival of cuckoos having tracked them from Cameroon across the deserts of North Africa into southern Europe and finally back to our shores.

I even looked down my own nose recently when I heard about the attempts in the USA to ban lead from fishing weights and gunshot to protect water birds from the lead poisoning caused by its accidental ingestion – we did that here twenty or thirty years ago I inwardly smirked.

Then as I was reading a press release from the American Bird Conservancy I realized that we are not just miles behind on the issue I was reading about, but on half a dozen others as well. On some we haven’t even got started and seem frightened to bring some issues out into the open for fear of upsetting many of the staunchest of conservation supporters.

Its not so much a case of the elephant in the room as a bloody great herd of colossal hairy pachyderms threatening to rend the room asunder!

The article was about an action being brought against a building owner in Canada for doing nothing to prevent migrating songbirds from crashing into the gleaming glass that reflects the sky so perfectly that birds do not even realise that the building is there! An estimated 100 million birds die this way in the US and Canada yet there are some simple deterrents that will mitigate the problem and even specialised glass or glass treatments that can eliminate the problem by slightly altering its reflective properties. So, over the pond the problem has been recognised, solutions determined and now test cases prepared to ensure compliance simply be collecting the corpses of the unfortunate migrants and citing the victims that are protected species to force action from property owners. Builders and owners know that it’s cheaper to comply than to have to pay damages and then pay out to comply anyway.

So where is this campaign in the UK? We may not have the number of tall buildings in London or Birmingham as does Toronto or New York but we certainly have our share of shiny skyscrapers. I have heard of just one effort in London where David Lindo and friends have had permission to monitor in Canary Wharf.

What about wind farms, are we doing our bit there? Certainly not compared to the US. Over there the true extent of the impact on large raptors is well documented and cannot be denied. If one installation in California is known to have despatched fifty Golden Eagles, where is the protest over here? It comes from a few who are, largely, dismissed as cranks. We are so complacently going ‘green’ that we choose to ignore the fact that hundreds, if not thousands of wind turbines will take a toll. The RSPB and others fight a ‘selective’ campaign to try and prevent wind farms from being erected in our most sensitive areas. The truth is that, in this small island, chock full of Nimbies, its is only the distant wild places where people do not picnic that wind farms can go without getting lots of protest. Where the eagles currently do best are the very places most likely to get covered in turbines because so few people have to look at them. Of course we can always stick them in the sea, how can that harm anything? It can be proven to have little or no impact because there are not lots of seabird carcasses at the foot of each tower… doh! How on earth do you monitor this when the sea will carry the corpses away?

The jumbo of all ignored elephants is, of course, the problem of outdoor cats. A few weirdos like me raise this whenever we can as cats do huge amounts of harm and most organisations dare not say a thing as the majority of their members are cat owners and many chose to turn a blind eye to what their moggie drags onto their living room carpet. Even I dare not suggest wholesale culling of cats, but we do not even have a decent campaign to KEEP CATS INDOORS!

In the US there are calls for every city to trap and ‘euthanise’ feral cats and a rigourous campaign to persuade people to keep their felines at home.  In some areas of Australia allowing your cat to roam, even in your own garden, is illegal… you have to erect a cat run if you want them to get fresh air. There is nothing more likely to upset the average Brit than suggesting a ban on allowing their pet the right to roam. People have the right to exclude other people from their property, but do not have the right to trap their neighbour’s cat if it craps on their lawn and systematically decimates the birds at their feeders! In certain circumstances I have the right to use reasonable force to eject a human intruder, but no rights at all to chuck a clod at a cat.

I’m not even going to mention our timorous first steps to try and get darker skies for the sake of amateur astronomers. The conservation nightmare of light pollution is not even on the agenda in a country where we all seem to want to have a security light on our gable ends that can be seen from distant galaxies!

So there we have it, in Cameron’s Big Society we wallow in our collective complacency and choose to ignore millions of avian casualties safe in the knowledge that Britain is Best; we invented conservation and that we are world leaders in ‘doing the right thing’.

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The post GOB 31 – The Mammoths in the Room appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the September 2012 edition of ‘Birdwatching’)

(Apologies to Van Morrison for the misquote above)

I am well beyond grumpy – my irritation has leapt the barrier of vexed and left incandescent far behind… I can find no superlative to convey just how angry I am.

Two different sources have fired my ire, both conveying the very nadir of the most selfish criminality.

Yesterday Radio 4, which, almost unnoticed, whispers to me all day as I scratch and scrape away on my keyboard, suddenly grabbed hold of my consciousness and twisted it like a knife in the kidney. A pigeon fancier, so crass that he saw any threat to his prize birds as a permit to steal from us all, shot a peregrine. The irony is not lost on me that this idiot criminal killed a captive bred bird used to control feral pigeons that was being exercised in the wild. It had the temerity to land in a tree in his garden where it might have then predated one of his domesticated pigeons. He now knows the financial value of such a bird as he has been ordered to pay for one to be trained, but has no clue to the real value of all wild birds.

Clearly, like others who think material wealth actually matters, he knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. What makes me Wilde is that this appears to be increasingly ingrained in our society. One only has to watch an episode of ‘The Antiques Roadshow’, and see that an ugly, but rare, piece of twentieth century tat such as a moth-eaten teddy bear, is ‘valued’ more greatly than, say an exquisite, but commonplace, ancient Egyptian burial sculpture, because it has the right label. Stick a little cloth crocodile on a polo shirt and it suddenly becomes more ‘valuable’ than an identical item produced in the same sweatshop!

Our collective obsession with the material and its ownership undermines real value at every turn. Rainforests are intrinsically valuable, not just worth something to man because they might be hiding the cure to all our ills or might make nice furniture. Plants from plankton to pine trees give us a breathable atmosphere, and birds and butterflies are flying artworks more inspiring than any man made object because they have life. They are valuable to us all; a value not diminished by being restricted by ownership.

This brings me to the second source of so much righteous rage… I just finished reading Dave Dick’s book cataloguing his trials and tribulations as Scotland’s first RSPB wildlife crime fighter. A review will shortly appear on Fatbirder with an author interview on Talking Naturally so I will not big up the book here, its enough to say that it too fuelled the fire in my oversized belly.

The threats to wildlife in general, and raptors in particular seem to have survived all efforts at eradication not out of ignorance; not because they cost to much to curtail; not for the want of trying, but because of the total selfishness of a criminal few that hide behind their privilege and wealth and steal from us all. The majority are champions of the rights of possession. They can skulk in the shadow of a ridiculous feudal fiefdom embodied in our judicial system that has always allowed the upper classes to do what they like on their own land in the unshakeable belief that whatever lives wild on their estate is their property!

If you were to take a wild salmon from the water that runs between banks that they ‘own’ the full force of the law will be brought to bear, with the distinct possibility that you could end up in prison. However, the gamekeeper employed to stop you ‘stealing’ the landlords wild fish seems to be able to steal from us all the beauty of an Osprey that lifts a trout from a loch. You must not ‘poach’ the grouse from his moors, but the owner who encourages his keeper to poison the eagles or stamps on Hen Harrier eggs is more than likely to get away with robbing us all of their natural wonders.

I’ve lost count of the number of times there have been TV debates, or newspaper articles posing the question is the class system dead and buried, and many people seem to think it is. This is the sort of mass delusion, or sycophantic nonsense, that led to an Emperor walking naked down the streets, while his subjects praised his fine attire. If we truly were a classless society then bankers who gamble away billions, are paid millions and get away with fiddling hundreds of thousands in tax avoidance schemes, would not walk free. Meanwhile the benefit claimant who earns a tenner on the side, can face imprisonment, and laws are changed to take away the welfare state from the many that took centuries of political struggle to erect.

Yes, there are many Scottish estates whose owners have publicly condemned poisoning but there are also many others where, it has been estimated a third of Scotland Hen Harrier territories are deliberately voided of birds and over 50 Golden Eagles are killed every year!*

It’s the same the whole world over, ain’t it all a bloody shame? It’s the rich that gets the pleasure and the poor what gets the blame!  It seems that 20 million people who feed the birds in their gardens and tolerate their neighbour’s marauding cat have it all wrong; we live in a nation where, if your garden is big enough you can get away with anything

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*******

I’ve just read this piece to Mrs Grumpy who, true to form, shares my anger. However, she has offered up an idea to those who draft our wildlife protection legislation. She says that part of the punishment that such people should face would hit at the very thing they seek to champion. If a pigeon fancier kills a predator they should be banned from keeping pigeons for life. If a gamekeeper is convicted of poisoning, pole trapping or otherwise destroying raptors they should be banned for life from that profession. Shooting estate owners, on whose land they or their employees commit such crimes should be banned from ever running blood sports on their property.

* See below for a list of estate owners publicly condemning wildlife crime and a list of shooting estates where wildlife crime has been reported.

http://raptorpolitics.org.uk/2011/02/22/scotland’s-shooting-estates-make-‘unprecedented-statement’-on-wildlife-crime/

http://raptorpersecutionscotland.wordpress.com/category/named-estates/

“To suppress a whole population takes a huge amount of organised effort, and that’s what’s happening. It is the grouse industry that is responsible. They simply won’t tolerate birds of prey on grouse moors.” Mark Rafferty 2011

http://tohatchacrow.blogspot.com/2011/01/scottish-shooting-estates-in-slaughter.html

The post GOB 30 – Give me my raptor today… appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.

(This article first appeared in the August 2012 edition of ‘Birdwatching’)

What is listing all about?

A recent ‘listing’ debate on my county internet mailing group was prompted by my revelation that a flyover Lapwing had taken my garden list to 50. Of course, this is pretty poor for watching a coastal county garden for a dozen years until you realize that mine is a patch of patio pots plus a pond in a tiny scrap of urban concrete. My ‘garden’ would, in my youth, have been called a yard – an enclosed outside area too small and shabby to be graced with the title of garden. However, ‘yard’ for our transatlantic cousins, simply means your garden be it a quarter acre or ten hectares.

When I moved into my bungalow most of this small outside space was crazy paving. Just one very narrow border and a pond with a rockery grew anything. Half of the space was taken up by our garage roof, which is sunk into the space slightly downhill from the house. We fenced this in, tiled it and started to cover it with large pots of shrubs and flowers. Over the last decade we have enlarged the pond and pulled up as much of the paving as we can so that it is a pretty space the size of a large sitting room and jam-packed with plants.

We also have a birdbath, trays, a dozen hanging feeders and fat-balls; so, despite its size it is an important feeding station (thanks to Jacobi Jayne) in the winter.

It has taken nearly twelve years to build up the number and variety of bird species from the Feral Pigeons and House Sparrows that we inherited. Sadly, there is half the number of House Sparrows now, never more than six together. But we have had 25 goldfinches vying for the feeders all at once, as many as 20 Collar Doves, and good numbers of Blackbirds, Starlings, Robins and other common garden birds too. Probably around thirty species have visited including those that have been red-letter days for me when such as Redwing, Brambling and Siskin have turned up.

A few species would be the envy of many people with ‘proper’ gardens – like when Maggie spotted four White Storks circling high above the town one hot day when she was sunbathing. Last week, after a lot of snow, Ring-necked Parakeets were at our peanuts and not for the first time.

On another Autumn day we had no less than 5 Firecrests all at once – pretty good seeing that, in 12 years we have had just one Goldcrest! A few years back a tristis race Chiffchaff stayed in my yard for three months making a living from my patio pots and even once sitting two feet from my nose on the office window ledge.

But in all those years I’ve never had a woodpecker, nuthatch or redpoll and only once have we played host to some Long-tailed Tits. Last spring we added another level to the house by converting the loft – from my new office window I can now look down a valley, albeit urban, that is used by migrants so flocks of Fieldfares poured through last autumn – I am hoping from great things now that I have a view.

Of course, watching your garden is something any birder takes for granted and I would be very surprised by any birder who could not remember whether any particular species had turned up in their back yard regardless of whether they keep a list.

And this is how the debate went – wasn’t it good enough to just enjoy what you see, surely listing is just a nerdy activity for the sad anoraks of the birding fraternity?

It is brilliant for me, just for once, to straddle this particular fence.

I really do not feel that strongly about listing as an issue. I keep a garden list, a county list, a UK list and a World List. Whenever I visit another country I create a new list. This practice was defended by some of the mailing group as an aide memoire. This may be true for a minority, but if you are as obsessed with birds as me, then you too will remember every new bird you have seen and where you saw it. Even on those days when the senior moments crowd out memories of anniversaries, what day of the week it I, or even your own name I could still tell you what II saw on a day out in Malaysia two decades ago!

A few people in the group defended listing as a useful tool for measuring the changes in avifauna abundance over time, or some other high blown scientific reason – which I don’t really buy either. Yes there is a point to wader or wildfowl counts or the constant monitoring of particular sites, but that really is a different activity.

Listing was definitely under attack – saddos who can’t see the wood for the trees.

Anal-retentive activity or what?

I leave it to you to decide but, for myself, I don’t really care.

Listing seems to me to be almost hard-wired into the human (or at least male) psyche. I see no harm in it, even when the lists are plain daft like ‘bog birds’ (those seen from your own or any lavatory), or TV lists – birds seen on telly that are incidental to the programme. Mind you, I admit that it was fun one year to compete with a US friend. He saw what he could spot at the Open Golf in Sandwich, and I tried to see what I could spot at the Masters in Augusta (he won by a mile although there were far more birds in Georgia, he managed to ID every song he heard, my tin-ear dipped on them all).

My lists are for my enjoyment, especially on a dark November night when I am going through my world list trying to re-arrange it in line with current taxonomy. I have to say that I do not like competitive listing – for a few years three friends and I regularly compared year lists and I found being in competition, win or lose, actually diminished the joy.

After this discourse you have probably guessed where I was today – out trying to build my year list. I got off to a good start this year getting 100 ticked off before the end of January compared to my total of 150 for the whole of 2011! (I really, really must get out more).

Then the weather and consequent arthritic upsurge intervened. Today was my first non-shopping outing in over a week, but all I managed was to add Skylark for the year – a nice flock of twenty, grubbing through cow churned mud at a spot where I usually see corn buntings.

Why year list? Well, for me it’s a nice focus and hones up ID skills and revitalizes the inherent beauty of even the most mundane birds.

Maggie enjoys the ‘hunting’ aspect of it too. She says it turns the everyday into the ‘stonking’. On December 31st she says, its just another Chaffinch, but see one on January 1st and you can punch the air in triumph.

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The post GOB 29 – Birding By Numbers… appeared first on Grumpy Old Birder.