NOVEMBER

26th November, North Norfolk (9th-11th November)

Well this isn't the usual we went to X and saw X, *insert swear word*, then we went to X and saw X, Iron Maiden rule, *insert swear word*, then we went to X and saw X, *embed YouTube video*, *insert swear word*, AC/DC rule... etc...

No, this is all about the Cley Bird Bible - the what? The Cley Bird Bible, so if you want to know more about the Cley Bird Bible then skip this bit (it's rubbish) and go to the end...

A Stonechat. Stonechats are birds, and birds live in trees. This particular bird is breaking with tradition and living in a reedbed. One day all birds will live in reedbeds. This is known as Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution was invented by TV celebrity Prof. Richard Dawkins and named after the Australian town of Darwin, his favourite town in the world.

This is an example of how birds evolved from fish. Here you can see how the Stonechat is confused as to whether it should be in the water or on a reed. This species is clearly in a state of evolutionary flux.

This is a curious Kestrel. It was very curious. We saw it at Holkham NNR where we then watched 450,000,000 Pink-footed Geese come to roost at dusk - it was a pretty fantastic thing to see. We also had two Little Auks flying around the freshmarsh, which was a bit weird.

This is a Little Auk. It was showing really well off the shelters at Sheringham. Unfortunately I can't take photographs very well, and so the photo came out crap. Exactly 55 billion Little Auks flew past the British east coast in early November, and we saw 7,537 of them. According to BWP (Birds With Prolapsed-rectums) 99.9999% of all Little Auks end up being eaten by large gulls.

Grey Phalarope. Top bird. Sat on the floods at Salthouse. Top bird. The old English name for Grey Phalarope is Wise-Boy-of-the-Water based on the fact that during the winter they look as though they are wearing spectacles which makes them look wise like an Owl. The old English name for an Owl is Grey Phalarope based on a mutual appreciation of each bird's spectacled appearance.

Dead Teal. Obviously we had completely forgotten all this stuff about Bird Flu (fuck you Daily Express!).

***

The Cley Bird Bible sits on its own altar in the restaurant of The George pub in Cley-next-the-Sea. It's a big fat book, the kind of big fat book that has all nasty yellow page edges and looks as though the damp it has absorbed over the years could easily give you asthma. But, risking a serious chest infection, open the pages and you'll be transported into a magical world of olden times, filled with adventure and wizards and dragons and stuff. Inside the Cley Bird Bible you will find an extensive history of the development of modern British birdspotting and twitchering, the transition from old skool to techno, Run DMC to Snoop Dogg.

Open up the book at a random page and you're more than likely to land on something like this:

click to view massive version (be patient cuz they're so massive)

Tawny Pipit, Long-tailed Skua, Barred Warbler, Spotted Crake and Leach's Petrel all recorded in the Cley area, and most of them brilliantly drawn by Richard Millington.

A beautiful pencil sketch of the 1987 Slender-billed Gulls:

And one time standard spring fodder in the shape of a Bluethroat and Caspian Tern:

Here's another page at random:

An Aquatic Warbler, and one of the only illustrations in the whole book to have a splash of colour. But read the text underneath: 16th October 1994 Song Sparrow in murky Merseyside - a biblical bird.

You'll come across many a famous name in the log book, people who are now birding household names like Ian Lewington, Cannon and Ball, Alicia Silverstone, Fred West and Richard Dunwoody. The bible is rammed full of stuff, there's far too much to read in one go. It's just best to open it up and see what you land on, maybe something like this involving a Collared Flycatcher found by one of the godfathers of twitching Howard Medhurst:

Anything that was to do with twitcherering went into the book, including newspaper articles cut out and glued in.

Twitching rivalry between the top two listers of the day:

Nancy's Cafe features quite a bit. For those of you unaware of what Nancy's Cafe is, you should read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, it won't tell you anything about Nancy's Cafe but it will surely excite you with its wondrous prose and colourful characters. If you want to know about Nancy's Cafe then you should read Mark Cocker's Birders: Tales of a Tribe, which, if you ask me (and I know you didn't), was pretty overrated and far from the author's usual standard (hark at me, the big negative bastard critic!) but it tells you quite a bit about Nancy's Cafe, which was where young twitcherers used to congregate and eat food and make a nuisance of themselves and sell stolen electrical goods... allegedly... Nancy's closed before I started birdspottering. It was the central nervous system of the rare bird news grapevine, and here's someone manning the hotline:

Also the closure of Nancy's Cafe:

And here's a full two pager about the cafe closing down:

According to the article above, it was the emergence of Birdline that hastened Nancy's Cafe's closure. Birdline was a big hit but undeniably killed off the importance of Cley as the hub for young British birdspotters to gather, sleep rough and catch all sorts of strange STDs. After Birdline any tosser could find out bird news simply ringing 0891 666 666. No more grapevine, no more living on rotting seal flesh - the golden age of twitchering was over:

You can also see how the national press gradually developed their standard house styles when writing about eccentric obsessed nut-job twitcherers:

Deeper into the book it becomes pretty much dominated by Birdline, at one point there is even a correction in the logbook and a suggestion that the person who wrote in the mistake should ring Birdline for the latest bird news (we want ALL OF YOUR MONEY!). But there's still some gems in there. Yellow-breasted Bunting:

And the Biblical Waxham Lark Sparrow:

So there you go. The Cley Bird Bible. Next time you visit Cley pop into The George and take a look at it, and then piss off and die you bastards (I don't really know why I just said that).

19th November

So what have I been up to recently? Well, quite a bit, but most of it's top secret, so I can't tell you. And even if I could tell you then I probably wouldn't just to spite you.

What I can tell you is that I've been pretty down (not really, but just go with me here) about missing the Brown Flycatcher, it was just one of those things, but what made it even worse was that two Mourning Doves and a Rose-breasted Grosbeak turned up in Britain during a period when events conspired to deny me any chance whatsoever of going to see them. And just when I grabbed a bit of free time all of them had pissed off. What else? Well, Ex-Miss Cole and I went to Flamborough to see the Red-flanked Bluetail and missed it, but we did have a pretty neat day with some spectacular migration going, including flushing tons of Woodcock (3) and millions of Long-eared Owls (1), as well as literally millions of Blackbirds (a couple of hundred) and hundreds of thousands of Brambling and Siskin (about 40 of each).

So there you go. I've missed pretty much every decent bird of the autumn. Do I care? Not really. Well, yeah, I probably do, but not really, and if I do care then I certainly don't care very much.

An attempt to cheer myself up came in the form of a weekend in Norfolk ('trip report' coming soonish) which got off to truly spectacular form when the Met Office declared that East Anglia was going to suffer its worst flooding since Biblical times, and so we didn't go to the coast and instead went to see the Black Kite at Nocton in Lincolnshire, the Black Kite that wasn't there. It's a recurring theme for me this autumn. Still, the next two days were filled with Little Auks, one of which is pictured below:

So a trip to Norfolk made me feel a lot better about British birdspotting. We also booked our flights for next year's big mega birdspotting foreign trip - destination top secret - which also cheered me up, and then best of all we went to see the greatest guitarist in the universe Tommy Emmanuel, who yet again confirmed that he is indeed the greatest guitarist in the universe. If he is ever even 5,000 miles from your home then sacrifice everything to go and see him. Every person on earth should see Tommy Emmanuel live before they die. Here he is playing and singing Nine Pound Hammer by country/blues/folk legend Merle Travis:

And here he is doing some other stuff that is pretty fucking amazing:

***

Suck my balls!

8th November, You say you want a revolutio-on, we-ell you knooow, we'd all love to change the world

Be warned, it's late, I've drank two bottles of Erdinger, a bottle of red wine and injected 50g of heroin straight into my left eyeball, therefore you cannot hold me responsible for anything I'm about to write. Okay, so really I've only had a Babycham and a Drambuie, but still, like I said above, be warned. Okay, revolution, strap yourselves in, let's go...

Guess what, the police didn't bust Prince Harry and Van Helsing for Hen Harrier murder. Surprised? Dr Collinson wasn't. I don't know what things are coming to, I mean look at all the money the American police spent on investigating and prosecuting Hannibal Lecter. Sometimes you'd be forgiven for thinking that the police prioritise human deaths over raptor massacres - ha!

Now here are some terrifying facts:

* 99.999% of British land is controlled by just 0.000000000000162% of its population. And all of them can stretch their own balls, force their balls up their arse and then shit all over their own balls.

* 147% of the royal family recently confessed that they can stretch their own balls, force their balls up their arse and shit all over their own balls, even the women.

* Shakin' Stevens is undeniably the greatest.

So there we go. At the heart of it all lies a class struggle. Why was dog fighting banned but fox hunting wasn't for ages and still isn't? Simple, because only working-class people enjoy standing around placing bets on dogs tearing each other apart, and working-class people don't have very much money and smell of fish, other than the ones who can't even afford fish and just smell of piss and Ladbrokes. Whereas fox hunting is a much more polite affair, I mean how can you take offence at someone wearing a smart red jacket? And why is it still okay for rich people to shoot stuff, but if you happen to be working-class and have accidentally and totally innocently drank fourteen pints of Stella and then driven home and massacred a minibus filled with kids who were on the way home from an outdoor pursuits weekend in North Wales, then the police come down on you like a ton of bricks? Tell me why? And as for cock fighting, well that's just asking for a VD epidemic.

Personally I hate everyone. Especially people with more money than me - those people really fuck me off. That's why one day, billions of us desperately want to see Prince Harry get a right good kick up the bracket, because at the end of the day he's got more money than us and leads an altogether much more pleasurable life than us, the fucking bastard. Jealous, me? You bet I am.

But imagine making a pact with the Devil, a pact in which you get to have loads and loads of cash, and big houses, and big cars, and diamond toilets, and silk Armani spangle bags, and to have all of that, all you have to do is blast a few birds with a big gun... just imagine... go on imagine... well, let me just say that if the Devil pops up tonight with such an offer then fuck it, I'm straight off up the moors and I'll shoot anything that looks even remotely like a raptor. Goshawks? Fuck 'em. Bats? Destroy! Hen Harriers? BANG! Shit, maybe that's why all rich people and gamekeepers seem to be so evil, they actually are evil. Christ on a fish-slice!

Well I remember a group of lads who once spoke of a mythical place where the grass is green and the girls are pretty - but hey, the surgeon general says it's hazardous to breathe, I'd have another cigarette but I can't see. Tell me who you gonna believe?!? Now I'm exactly not sure what all this has got to do with anything, but I'm still pretty certain that the murdering fucking royal bastard and his murdering fucking bastard pal Van der Sar are guilty of shooting those Hen Harriers. THEY FUCKING DID IT!!!! I'd say they're as guilty as OJ (I mean the man who couldn't put the glove on, not the drink).

And finally, can you possibly imagine getting David Lee Roth to perform Van Halen's classic song Jump with the Boston Pops Orchestra? Of course you can't. Oh holy Jesus...

God damn, after all that we desperately need something to lift our spirits. Come on, Shaky!

1st November, Cucking Funts

Let's go to war! I don't care whether the police find any Hen Harrier carcasses, I don't care whether they prosecute Prince Harry or van Cutsem, the simple truth is that one of them's a fucking ginger and the other one's Dutch (or at least he's got a Dutch name), and, if you ask me, they are two far more serious crimes. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then stop reading the fucking Daily Mail and Daily Express, and get yourself a quality newspaper like The Star or The Sport, and then you'd be clued up on such important issues as a pair of cock sucking aristocrats out at Sandringham Estate, both of them looking for somewhere to suck each other's cocks, and then after completing helmet polishing duties, turning to the skies and shooting blindly at Hen Harriers for no other reason than they're clearly both cunts. Here was The Guardian's authoritative and unbiased take on it:

Bastard Royals in Environmental Catastrophe G8 Summit Hen Harriers Massacred

A ginger member of the Royal family and his rich Dutch friend were yesterday accused of shooting birds. Carbon emissions, widespread flooding from global warming, deforestation, G8, we love Palestine, we hate Israel, evil Tories, fuck privatisation, no one was available for comment from the Royals.

Richard Littlejohn, top paid Daily Mail columnist, had this to say:

So Nu-Labour have taken yet more of our national identity away, Hen Harrier shooting, part of British traditional life, nanny state, hippy Guardianistas, immigration, immigration, immigration, mad mullah Captain Hook, bomb Finsbury mosque, elf-n-safety, we're all going to hell in a handcart.

The BBC and ITV didn't have time to comment as they were too busy conning people with illegal phone voting scams.

Of course, we should obviously all wait until the police finish their investigation into whether Harry and van Damme shot the Hen Harriers, and that one of them is ginger and the other one Dutch (or possibly Belgian? - an equally serious crime). But then again we all know that the police are corrupt, racist, bigoted fascists, whose only role in society is to stamp out individual freedom, victimise ethnic minorities and take the drugs which they confiscate from innocent drug dealing asylum seekers. Therefore the police won't prosecute the Royals. And if the police did prosecute them then the Queen would have them sent over to her new best pals in Saudi Arabia to have their hands cut off. And this is all fact!

So now is the time for action - Monday 5th November, 2.30pm, Downing Street, London. A billion of us march on Downing Street and then have a big bonfire, just like the one Guy Ritchie was burnt on 600 years ago. And then we just smash everywhere up for fun.

Nooooooooo future for yoooooooouuuuuuuuu!

tommckinney1979