Currently one of many colossal eastern vagrants to
invade the northeast of Britain (retarded BNP-voting
cunts have no fear, this is about birdspotting, not
Bangladeshi immigrants), the Flamborough Brown Shrike
(as it shall now be known because it was at Flamborough
and a Brown Shrike) attracted a number of keen nature
lovers with a particular penchant for rare avian
visitors to Britain (excluding Eire/Isle of Man/Channel
Islands):
Silly people in a field at dawn
After an extremely tense two minute wait at Old Fall
hedge, someone came along and said we had to go and
stand on the road to see it. Cue an exceptionally tense
thirty second walk to the road. Then cue a phenomenally
fraught one minute wait to try and see the bird. Job
done by 7.15am.
Terrible views were enjoyed all round from the road, as
the selfish fuckers at the front sat tight for as long
they could and blocked everyone else's view, and then
moaned if you dared to ask whether you could please have
a look at the lovely bird. Pretty please! Eventually
some bright spark said we could go into the field we
originally weren't supposed to go into but were now
allowed into, and so we took heed of the wise sage's
advice and went to have a look in the other field. There
it was, sat about three miles away sunning itself, and
then it fucked off and never came back to Old Fall for
the rest of the day.
Cue a visit to Old Fall plantation, where a Red-breasted
Flycatcher played rotten-sod and refused to sit still,
accompanied by a chorus of at least 3 Yellow-browed
Warblers. Then cue a trip to the cafe for a heart-buster
fried breakfast followed by another stab at the Shrike.
Only now there were two Shrikes - crikey! A Brown Shrike
and a Red-backed Shrike only a short distance apart, and
everyone was able to see just how more rare the Brown
one was. The views were incredible as it sat about six
miles away in the heat haze, and the views were made
even better by most people not even being able to see
over the hedge by the roadside.
Eventually it was time to leave, and I can honestly say
that considering it involved viewing over a six hour
period, I've never seen a bird quite so badly in all of
my birdspotting adventures. But at least it was a tick
for my British tick list and, at the end of the day,
that's all that matters.
Silly people blocking a road
Amusing moments of the day in no particular order:
1) the bloke who got hit by a van and had to be
airlifted to Leeds
2) the bloke who shouted "Booted Eagle" when a Curlew
came over
3) the pregnant woman being sick and the cat that came
along and lapped her sick up
4) the fight between the one-legged dog walker who was
walking two three-legged dogs and the giant birder
wearing a studded leather jacket and carrying a copy of
Thatcher: The Downing Street Years
5) none of the above happened because it was all
extremely civilised
See you at the next mainland "biggie" that is less than
£30 worth of petrol away. Maybe.
24th September
An adult Brown Shirke at Flamborough Head this evening -
phwoar! And double-phwoar because we'll be there at
dawn. I have bad memories of the last one on Whalsay in
2004. We set off for Scotland and after no sign of the
bird all day we thought fuck it, boarded the ferry at
Aberdeen, got off at Orkney and went to North Ronaldsay
for a week, eschewing the bollocks that is twitching in
favour of old skool obs-based birdspotting. The bird
turned up on Whalsay again the next day - tit bollocks!
Whilst on North Ronaldsay we saw a Bluethroat,
Yellow-browed Warbler, two Lapland Buntings and a couple
of Grey Phalaropes, but elsewhere in the UK there was a
Cream-coloured Courser on Scilly, Western Sandpiper on
Brownsea Island, a probable American Kestrel in Suffolk
and that fucking Curlew at Minsmere (yeah yeah, I
thought it was a Slender-billed - fuck you all!)
Thankfully the then Miss Cole and myself eventually managed to pick
up the Courser and Western Sandpiper, the Kestrel was just a brief fly-over
and that Curlew can suck my nut sack.
So see you all in the morning, bright and early - no
waiting on news, you lazy fuckers.
22nd September
So who'd be stupid enough to go out in that? But you've got
to be in it to win it, I'm not going to find this Snowy
Owl sat on my arse watching Bergerac repeats on
UK Gold. At dusk on your own it's really spooky up on
the moors, add some thick mist and it's shit-your-pants
scary. It was even more spooky than usual last night.
There was a small orange light flashing in the distance,
and considering there's absolutely fuck all for miles
and miles and miles up here, I worried that it might
have been some poor fuck who'd snapped their ankle, so I
went cross country but couldn't find anyone, and then I
got lost myself, eventually working out where I was when
I stumbled upon one of the plane wrecks:
I thought I'd better push on, just in case this Snowy
Owl was waiting for me at the summit, and a fucking good
job I did as well, or else I'd never have seen the 29
Red Grouse, 8 Meadow Pipits, Skylark, 2 Wrens, 3
Mountain Hares (one I almost stood on) and a small wader
sp. Small wader sp? It didn't call, and I hope you'll
forgive me for being unable to ID it when you see what
kind of viewing conditions I ended up with:
An odd night, and it got even more odderer. At home I
read a bit of Ben Okri's Famished Road (great
book) and a bit where all the people living in the
village are vomiting everywhere and even being sick on
each other: it turns out that the powdered milk the
villagers have been given is contaminated. And then
after reading that I watched Amazon on BB2, and
presenter Bruce Parry decided to take some mad
hallucinogenic drug and started throwing up everywhere,
alongside about another twenty puking people in some
weird Peruvian vomit party. And then I watched the news
and saw that 13,000 people are in hospital in China from
drinking tainted milk. Weird. I don't know why told you
any of that.
Yes I do. What a bird - Cretzschmar's Bunting, now we're
talking! And what a place for one. North Ronaldsay has
to be my all time most favouritest birdspotting place in
Britain (after Swindon), about as isolated as you can
get in our part of the world. Our last visit there
finished with a night out in the bar/post office with
the islanders singing Christmas carols (it was
September), drinking cans of Blackthorn cider and then
five of us swigging wine from shared bottles at the
north end under the beams of the lighthouse at 4am. Birding
all day, pub all night - that's how life should be.
I can't recommend staying at the observatory enough. An
island full of birds practically for yourself, demented
seaweed-eating sheep and the potential of annoying 2,753
keen rare bird enthusiasts when the Oriental Plover
turns up at Dennis Head and the weather's so bad that
nobody can get there!
So what actually happened yesterday with this fucking
Great Snipe? Well I don't really care. For a start I have no interest in having my birdspotting
activities marshalled and controlled like living in some
weird kind of totalitarian, pre-glasnost, Stasi
police state. Obviously I'm not being at all hypocritical, like the
time I went to see the Solitary Sand at Rye Meads (wank
queues), or the organised flush of the Bobolink on Hengistbury Head (at least that was free), or last
year's Pacific Diver in Yorkshire (10 quid per fucking
car? You fucking robbing bastards!) - no, that's not
hypocritical, because let's face it, most of you stupid cunts* reading this won't even know what hypocritical
means, or even how you got here, or where you left your
kidneys the last time you took them out for cleaning.
My intention from earlier in the week was always to go
over to the east coast and soak up all this drift
migrant bounty, thus enriching my life and providing me
with the life giving elixir (see Elkins, N., Weather
and Bird Behaviour and How to Live Forever Without
Drinking Your Own Piss, Chapter 2). I reliably heard
(from Jacob who spends all day sat in Glossop square
feeding the Jackdaws) that Thursday could be a
potentially amazing birdspotting day, and that Spurn was
definitely the place to be. And so I decided I'd avoid
the panicked, flailing "where's the Wryneck? It's
just come on the pager, it was supposed to be sat on top
of Post 68. Why haven't they put out that it's gone?"
millions, and go to Flamborough, where you never see
more than a handful of people, unless of course there's
an ADULT Brown Flycatcher there (ha ha ha!
- wild? yeah right - wild my silky, shorn nut bag). Hang
on just one minute...
...
...
... sorry about that, had to tell the prick next door to
shut the fuck up. Shit knows what he's doing, he's
probably got a load of hitch hikers tied up in his
basement. So, what was I saying? Oh yeah, Flamborough...
... (I love this dot dot dot thing, it compensates for
my complete lack of understanding and correct
application of punctuation [see Birdforum for a
masterclass in its usage]).
...
...
... so Flamborough. At Old Fall there was a moderate
selection of typical migranty stuff - Little Egret,
Marsh Harrier, largish Owl sp, 2 Swifts, 7 Whinchats, 3+Redstarts,
Wheatear, Blackcap, 2 Whitethroats, 4 Willow Warblers, Chiffchaff,
Yellow-browed Warbler, Firecrest, Pied Fly, Spotted Fly.
It was nice and sunny and it was a day to be grateful
for the small things in life, like cows and lettuce and
Kanye West and herpes and An Equal Music by
Vikram Seth which is my favourite book ever and Mean
Girls starring Lindsay Lohan which is my all time
favourite film and other things. And then as a bonus,
the birdspotting world was informed that should the Speeton Great Snipe be found
in a search at 11am, then there would be access for all early in
the afternoon - hooray!
But all Hell was to break loose. It was just like the day
Adam opened the gates of the Garden of Sodom and
unleashed the wild Apple Serpent upon the world, leaving
us shameful and living in sin and stuck with Madonna in
the Hit Parade for eternity. So here are the EXACT
events of what happened at yesterday's Great Snipe in Speeton:
Some people entered a field and flushed a bird and the
bird flew off and the farmer killed someone, and because
it was private land the farmer didn't have insurance and
so the dead person's family can't claim any life
insurance and spend it all on scratch cards, but the
farmer won't be sent to prison because he's a landowner
and Tory scum landowners have the courts in their
pockets which is yet another example of the hypocrisy of Nu-Labour and the two tier society they have created,
and everyone is really pissed off and going mental on
Birdforum and Dan Pointon is getting all the grief and
being blamed for everything wrong in the world like the
Russia/Georgia war and Lehman Brothers going tits up,
which isn't true because as far as I know Dan has never
even been to Georgia, and remember that everyone
makes mistakes, only in the past it wasn't recorded for
posterity on the fucking intranet, but now there'll
never be another Great Snipe ever again because HBOS has
merged with LloydsTSB and Tom Cruise definitely isn't
gay, and birding is for geeks and nerds and that's a
fact because someone once shouted "you're a fucking
sad bastard!" at me, but that was my uncle Leonard
and he has suffered with intellectual complications
ever since he got hit on the head by machinery at work
and for a while he thought he was Frankie Dettori, but
now he has to take these red pills and he's a lot
better.
There you go. So forget your bullshit speculation and
rumours because I WAS THERE, and I saw all of it happen
first hand.
* beloved readers and birdspotting brethren
18th September
Anyone hear about problems at a Great Snipe twitch in
Yorkshire today? Thank Christ I don't take this birding
bollocks at all seriously, or else I might have gotten
all teary-eyed and upset at not being able to see the
bird after the fields were closed off behind police
crime scene tape, in order for the Birding World
forensic team to do all taxidermy and tests and stuff.
When the bomb drops I know exactly where I'll be, that's
right, I'll be hiding in Charlize Theron's underpants
drawer. No I won't, I'll be trespassing and kicking down
stone walls.
In future, for anyone unsure about whether you can enter
a private field prior to an official window of entry,
perhaps the great Mr Lemmy Kilminster from the RSPB's
Metal & Intoxicants department can provide you with
some advice:
I can tell, seen before,
I know the way, I know the law.
You can't agree, you can't obey,
I can't agree with all the things I hear
you say.
Oh no, don't ask me why,
I can't go on with all these filthy
white lies.
STAY OUT!
STAY OUT!
STAY OUT!
STAY OUT!
Don't you know, all the time,
You got your bird but I didn't get mine.
Grab your bins, don't let go,
Don't let them rob you of the bird you
came to see.
Oh no, fuck everyone else,
You've got the right to see the birds all
for yourself?
STAY OUT!
STAY OUT!
STAY OUT!
STAY OUT!
So you see, the only proof,
Of what you are is in the way you read
your pager.
Don't be scared, live to win,
Although they're always gonna tell you
it's a sin.
In the end you're on your own,
And there is no-one that can stop you
going in.
STAY OUT!
STAY OUT!
STAY OUT!
STAY OUT!
***
But - and this is a big but (not to be
confused with J-Lo's) - remember that birdspotting is
all about anarchy! ANARCHY! Smash down the walls,
trample the crops, peer into people's back yards,
defecate on their lawns, wank through their letterboxes.
Spread the word:
BIRDING IS CHAOS / CHAOS IS BIRDING
And for those of you that have no idea
what any of this is about, good on you! Because it's gay
gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay ...
11th September
Forsman, Garner, Lewington, Mullarney, Shirihai,
Vinicombe et al...
Whenever there's a dodgy bird knocking about in Britain
you can always guarantee that the above names will be
consulted to sort it out, the bird ID A-Team. But my
name is never featured in that list ("why?"),
well this is EXACTLY why ("why?"):
The moors south of Glossop, early afternoon. Nice
weather, a gentle walk upon the purple moors, a carefree
stride through the heather, flushing Red Grouse(s),
flushing Meadow Pipit(s). Then something catches my eye.
Large. Well largish. Sat on the rocks. Sun making things
tricky, but definitely a raptor. Probably a Buzzard, but
you never know, best to double check. I knew that if I
flushed it it would drop straight down the hill out of
view and never be seen again, so I crouched down, walked
to the stone wall and then crawled along the base of the
wall to a gap by the gate. Light better from here, and
now it had a bluish hue to it. Fucking hell - a male Hen
Harrier! It had to be. Hen Harrier is a shit hot decent
bird around here after the gamekeepers have their annual
raptor massacring party, and then violate the still warm
and twitching corpses of Harriers, Goshawks, Buzzards,
Crows, Ravens, Black-headed Gulls...
So a male Hen Harrier - awesome! Definitely had to get a
better view though - male Hen Harriers are beautiful -
so I crawled even further along the base of the wall to
the stile, and took another look. Shit - the Hen Harrier
had now stood up and revealed itself to be a 6 foot man
in a dark blue waterproof jacket, and he was coming
straight for me, so I made a dash for it down the
hillside and vanished into the valley like a flying
squirrel in the night.
And finally, someone (I guess they'll want to remain
anonymous) sent me this:
Photographed on 12th August in Tenerife. A phenomenal
specimen!
9th September
Two (2) new (not knew) links
How have these passed me by? Phil "Radar Ears" Woollen
has a blog about his birding on the Wirral and beyond.
And so does Archie. And in reading it I discovered that
Archie has been banned from Birdforum. Why don't I ever
know about anything important like this? I only found
out the other day that Stalin was dead.
You know the drill by know: visit them, visit them
regularly, add them to your favourites, fight the power
etc...
If the Isle of Jura was in South America it would
probably be known as La Isla de la Jura (pron: la
eesla day la hoora), but it isn't. I don't have
anything else to say.
I'd better think of something though...
... it's very beautiful. A paradise, if you will, and
I'm sure you would. This wasn't a birdy trip, but
instead a chance to finally coincide a visit when our
Juranian friend Owen was at home. If you haven't been to
Jura then go. Right now. It's amazing. For a start
there's a fantastic looking sycamore copse that must
have had at least 17 firsts for the Western Palearctic
in it over the years. At least.
Swallow (note smudge behind bird's eye
and on collar from filthy optics, thus ruining a
potentially nice piccy)
The wee bit of birdspotting we managed was on Islay,
but it was pretty quiet, with only a Green Sandpiper at
Loch Gruinart fractionally out of the ordinary. The
ferry crossing was on flat calm water each way, and the
only wildlifery were 2 Arctic Skuas massacring a
Kittiwake and 3 Common Dolphins. Of course there was the
usual Islay wonderfulness - a 20+ flock of Twite at
Sanaigmore Bay, scatterings of Chough, smatterings of
Hen Harriers, ???tterings of Merlins and ???tterings of Germans
and Swiss on whisky tours. Having made three trips to
Islay, I'm afraid to say that I'm starting to
become a whisky nerd; I'm beginning to think that I can
taste a subtle hint of creme de menthe in a 15 year old
single malt that leaves a slow warm finish reminiscent
of eating nuts by a fire on Christmas Eve. Have you ever
read the shit that these whisky piss heads write? It's
almost as pathetic as this crap. Almost.
