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Tom McKinney's Birding Diary

July 2005 - October 2008

R.I.P

***

Dear readers,

So this is it. My closing post. Many thanks to all of you who have regularly read this fucking shit over the last few years. And to those of you that have just stumbled upon it by Googling rugby players wanking, dogging sites in Stafford or self-fisting helpline, well thanks to all of you as well. Thanks for your emails, stuff you've written in my guestbook, links from your own blogs and of course our exchange of bodily fluids, though not always with consent. It's been great fun, especially the fluids bit. For those of you thinking of starting your own blog, think no more and get typing, it's the best and cheapest fun you can have aside from auto-erotically asphyxiating yourself whilst listening to an INXS album. Go for it. And never forget the advice from Spinal Tap's Viv Savage:

"Have ... a ... good time ... all the time"

I've been Tom McKinney, this has been my birding diary, and you've been a great audience.

Thank you and good night!

Tom

 

For Birds

 

 

For People

 

Foreskins


19th October

Tophill Low

No sign of the Amur Falcon. Now there's a surprise. Since being sussed out on Saturday night, this first for Britain managed to attract a staggering crowd of about thirty people. I was told that when the bird used to be a Red-footed Falcon it was a late riser, usually being seen after midday, so we arrived after midday and spent a few hours around the reserve. However, now that the bird has become an Amur Falcon, it has changed its habits and become invisible, or perhaps it's just pissed off somewhere else altogether. Yesterday's strong wind wasn't ideal for him to feed, but this is just clutching at straws: let's face it, he's gone. And if not then I'll eat my cat, or whatever the expression is.

Will there be another in Britain? Probably, there's always another. It might be after we're all dead and being sodomised in Hell by Satan, Hitler and Bambi's mum, but there will be another. Will there be another that will stay as long as this and be as easy to see? Who knows, not me.

Having done a search through the amazing BBi, there were 6 records of Amur Falcon from Italy over the Straits of Messina between 1995-2000, then there are some extra records listed on Netfugl. BBi also pulled up the 1995 Red-footed Falcon ID paper which has a brief but useful paragraph towards the end about the possibility of Amur Falcon in the Western Palearctic, a pretty neat prediction seeing as the first one was seen in Italy that year.

But here's the problem. When this bird first turned up at Tophill on 14th September (then vanished until it returned on 19th) it had dark axillaries/underwng coverts. By 2nd October it had developed a bit of Amur-ishness, and by 8th October it was looking good for Amur Khan. So that's a pretty narrow period of time in which it's moulted - what if the next male of the same age that turns up in early autumn doesn't stay as long? Will anyone be claiming one from the other more subtle features without the white underwing coverts? Obviously I won't because I'll be sitting in my new kitchen drinking tea, this outdoor birding thing's far too cold for me - I only ever go where the pager tells me to go, and even then there can't be too far to walk or too much time required outside the car. And what if the next one isn't a 2nd calendar year male or an adult male? How easy are males in their first year, which seems to be the age most birds turn up as vagrants in autumn? And what about females? The Swedish and Hungarian records were in July, and the Italian records are from the huge spring raptor passage, so maybe the next one won't even turn up in autumn? Why am I asking so many questions? I don't even care. Or do I?


18th October

What? Amur Falcon? No fucking way!

My God. Things just got exciting. It would seem that the long staying Red-footed Falcon at Tophill Low NR wasn't one. Piccies HERE. But is it still there? It was definitely still around on Wednesday, but after that things seem a bit uncertain. Looks like tomorrow's plans for a trip to Caerlaverock for the tiny Canadian Goose may have to be altered. See you there. I'll be the one selling biscuits and wearing the Batman T-shirt. You can't miss me. Just look for my distinctive shoes. And the tattoo of Thatcher on my forehead.

PS Menzie, you're one lucky bastard!


17th October

***MEGA-ALERT***

Derbys 1w New Kitchen (pale morph) My House 10.55am showing well. Please follow all onsite instructions and mop up any spillages. £5 parking per car. New generation DSLR users please photograph from a sensible distance. Strictly no comments allowed about kitchen looking a bit gay.

Total kitchen annihilation

 

We are the men, the men in the shed

 

Sex!

***MEGA-ALERT***

Gtr Man Tickets for AC/DC 21st April 2008 at MEN Arena now on sale

Pity Bon Scott died choking on his vomit


15th October

Tom McKinney's Kitchen Diary ***4.30pm update***

No sign Philadelphia Vireo, no sign cupboard doors, no sign wall units, no sign dual-fuel cooker.

Looks like it's crisp sandwiches again tonight (which is a good thing, because I LOVE crisp sandwiches!)

Broken plug socket, but I still decided to use it anyway. I know no limits - TOTAL ANARCHY!

And now for some link action. Add these to your favourites immediately, because if you don't then I'll... I'll do absolutely nothing about it.

http://berrienbirder.blogspot.com/ great pictures from Berrien, Michigan. Read and weep. British birding sucks ass in comparison.

http://yapp2607.blogspot.com/ Blurred Birding from Staffordshire and the West Midlands, the birthplace of all the greatest people ever.

http://bitterbonxie.wordpress.com/ a Bitter Bonxie from way up north. Way, way, way up north. Like seriously way up north.

http://www.freewebs.com/garrybagnell/ Garry Bagnell's website. Twitcher paparazzi galore.


14th October

Tom McKinney's Kitchen Diary ***7.15pm update***

Philadelphia Vireo still present late afternoon, and now we have a sink:

The walls have been raped!

I had a good chat with the men doing our kitchen about men things, you know, football, footy, soccer, etc... We talked about our favourite newspapers, I said mine was the Sun, because you always get girls with big knockers on page 3. Then I told them I was having chips for my tea, because real men only ever eat chips. "And the fuckin' wife's cookin' 'em!" I said. We all laughed like proper men. I started singing a man's song:

We are the men!

We are the men!

The men in the shed!

The men in the shed!

And then I stopped because it didn't make any sense.

Up-close tap action. And in the background a lantern we

found behind the cupboards - just in time for Halloween.


Tom McKinney's Kitchen Diary ***1pm update***

Especially for Colin, because I know he's so interested:

There's an extractor fan. Did we ask for an extractor fan? Too late now, there's a big fucking hole in the wall. Hopefully it will be finished within 24 hours, the Philadelphia Vireo is still at Kilbaha as I type, and plans are now afoot to head over soonish to have a squint at it - things are looking up! The word on the street is that the Vireo is an incredibly rare bird.


13th October

Wake me up when October ends

Little Blue Heron - fluffy!

No, shoot me, put me in a lead box and dump me in the North Sea. A Philadelphia Vireo in Co.Clare? I absolutely fucking hate October. You wait all year for some decent twitchy birds and then they all pour into Western Europe in the space of three weeks - arse tits! I'm afraid that this Vireo will have to wait a few weeks for me to travel over to see it (do you think it will stay?), largely because some men came into my house this morning and made my kitchen look like this:

And when they leave tomorrow afternoon my bank balance will look like this:

But hopefully when it's done the kitchen should, in theory, look like this:

I can't really complain though - well yes I can, but fuck it - having been to Ireland last week to see the Little Blue Heron, which was an absolutely brilliant bird. I mean it, you might think it's just another white egret, but no, this was special, real special, really special. So go and see it.

And as for not going because it's in Ireland? Come on! There's a lot said about imperialist British birders ticking Irish birds as if they're our own, and opening up old wounds about our historically wank treatment of the Irish, but I really do think you're crediting a lot of British birders with quite a bit more intelligence than they actually have. Take a look at your average British twitcherer. I would imagine that most Brits who have been over to see the Heron can't even eat with a knife and fork or spell their own names, so the whole Michael Collins thing might go a wee bit over their heads, or more than likely rocket past about 30,000 feet above their heads.

Bollocks to lists, these birds are crossing whole oceans for fucks sake, so go and behold the bewitching wonder that is the miracle of trans-Atlantic avian vagrancy, and stick the numbers game up your arse!

Pete Hines and myself flew from Liverpool to Shannon early Wednesday morning and got to the bird just after midday. It was so close that in the end my scope wouldn't focus. The grotesque kink in the neck is a bit worrying, but it seems perfectly healthy and it has a great success rate when fishing.

Whilst we were watching it I got a call to say that there was a facking Empidonax flycatcher in Cornwall in Nanjizal Valley. Then came another call saying it was either Alder or Willow. There was only one thing to do. Drink. We searched around for somewhere to stay, eventually finding the brilliant Bard's Den in Letterfrack village, and then spent the night piling down booze which made the thought of getting back to Liverpool and heading straight down to Cornwall seem far more enjoyable than it was probably going to be.

The next day started with a call saying that the flycatcher was still there. Opinion was drifting towards Alder, but according to three observatories in the States they won't even suggest a definite identification in the hand, never mind inaudible field observations. Back to have another look at the heron and then further news that the flycatcher had been trapped and was definitely an Alder, a first for Britain and the rest of the world. "How do they know it's Alder?" I asked. "I don't know," I was told. Having got back and looked in my North American birdspotting identification guides, I can't even see how they narrowed it down in the field to just Alder or Willow, why did Acadian not enter the mix? Reading Kenn Kauffman's Advanced Birding he seems to be holding his hands in the air and yelling "Fuck 'em! They're too hard!" All Tyrant flycatchers are an abomination and an affront to the traditional customs of polite, gentlemanly birdspotting.

Arriving back in Manchester early evening on Thursday, we found out that the flycatcher had still been showing up until dusk. Pete decided to go straight down to Cornwall, I couldn't face it and decided to wait on news and head down if it was seen again the next morning. I had a terrible suspicion that it would do an overnight bunk. Got back to Glossop and suddenly felt absolutely shit. Now that I hadn't gone the flycatcher was definitely going to be there, but thankfully my long suffering wife took me out for something to eat and then plied me with alcohol in an attempt to get me to talk about something other than fly, catchers, Cornwall and dark concepts of regret.

The flycatcher did do an overnight bunk. Gutted. And now I see that there's a possible Yellow-rumped Warbler on Scilly. October is fucking brilliant!!!

I've already been emailed about prints (seriously!) so if anyone would like any/all of the above piccies for their own private viewing, email me and I'll let you have the full size ones to do with as you please. And for free as well. How's that for anti-capitalism? Smash the state!


7th October

A ticky dilemma

Have a look at these:

And please take a moment of your time to study the better photos HERE and HERE.

It's a gull. It's also most definitely a juvenile large white-headed gull or juv LWHG. Nice. But here's the ticky dilemma. That bird above was video'd (yeah I know they're shit) in March 2004 in Stornoway harbour when the female Harlequin Duck was on Lewis. The bird was reported as an American Herring Gull (now upgraded by BTOURC as a big proper bird that you can properly tick on your birdspotting list) but I had my doubts about it. I thought that whilst it certainly could have been one, it wasn't exactly a classic (big ball of shit with a white head) and so probably not safe to add to my list. Its absence in the BBRC report for 2004 suggested I'd been wise to be so cautious, although it hadn't been rejected either. And then the latest British Birds came last week with the BBRC's 2007 report, and there in plain English language right before my eyes, it said this:

American Herring Gull Larus smithsonianus (0, 14, 2)

2004 Outer Hebrides Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, juvenile, 6th March to 17th April

Well fuck me! You may remember (I doubt it though) that last year in Stornoway I saw another bird that I thought looked better than the bird above but still didn't fully meet my own high standards of acceptance (big ball of shit with a white head), so what to do? The BBRC is composed of ten of the wisest birdspotting men (all men, no women, never any women - shameful!), some of whom have been studying the dark arts of birdspotting identification techniques since the dawn of civilisation - they are trained in dimly lit cellars deep underground with only a copy of Svensson and the New Approach for sustenance, endlessly chanting the mystical incantation "emargination equal to tip of P7, emargination equal to tip of P7" - and they thought that the 2004 bird met the grade and banged it into the official stats.

Now you see my dilemma, and what a dilemma! So now it's up to you. You have to help me, please. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't even face watching Holby City, and you know things are bad when you can no longer stomach an hour of the BBC's top medical drama:

Should I add American Herring Gull to my British birdspotting tick list?
Yes
No
Perhaps
Maybe
Conscientious objector (filthy hippy)
I would literally kill someone with my own bare hands to spend a day in Kelly Brook's bra
I'd rather die than vote in this shit poll
  
Free polls from Pollhost.com


2nd October

Leach's Petrels on the Wirral

Mega action, captured fantastically in these shots (prints available £7.50)

Well it wasn't quite the legendary passage I was hoping for, in fact on paper it may even come across as a bit of a damp squib (what's a squib?) It wasn't bad though, it was actually rather enjoyablous. Here's the log:

2/10/08, North Wirral Country Park, 1015-1745

Leach's Petrel - 27 (a cautious count attempting to kick out duplication from ones just loafing about)

Manx Shearwater - 2

Med Gull - 2 adults

Common Scoter - 6

Arctic Tern - 1

Sandwich Tern - 4

Black Tern - 1 probable but c45 miles out

Guillemot - 2

Great Crested Grebe - 1

So not exactly life changing, but Menzie and I had some splendidly close Leach's action, and all in all a decent day sat in the car for 9.5 hours looking out at at a filthy brown sloppy sea.

Sand action - sex!

 

Kite action - sex!

 

adult Med Gull - sex!

Unfortunately none of us at our vantage point managed to pick up the Sabine's Gull, Long-tailed Skua or Pom Skua that came past, but I think a few of us did see this:

Yawn, the most cliched crappy birdspotting joke in history

But thankfully, I see that over at Crosby they had an almost identical day to us!

Just a few miles west from where we were positioned at Leasowe is Hilbre Island, and Hilbre managed a nice total of 120 Leach's yesterday. Hilbre always gets the biggest totals, as does the Point of Ayr just over the border in Wales, and I have a theory as to why:

Analysis: the three big messy black arrow things show all of the Leach's being pushed by strong NW winds into Liverpool Bay. Presumably most of them just fuck about offshore and get massacred by Great Black-backed Gulls, but some of them are foolish enough to venture inshore and get massacred by kite surfers, wind turbines, Peregrines and Great Black-backed Gulls. They also get seen by birdspotters off Formby point. I reckon that these inshore birds travel down the coast past Formby, then get to Crosby and Seaforth (roughly the area of Bootle on the map). Now at Crosby and Seaforth most of them must be saying to each other:

"what the fuck? where the fuck am I? I liked that bit up at Formby with the nice dunes, the Red Squirrels and the rich football players, but this place is a fucking disaster! What the fuck is all this shit? Why are there enormous mountains of scrap metal everywhere? We've got to get out of here like really, really quickly. Look over there, what's that place? That looks nice. It's got mountains and castles and the Welsh Mountain Zoo. And there's beaches and a cable car up to the top of the Great Orme. I think it's Wales? Let's go there. Now!"

And so, as the map shows fantastically well, I reckon a lot of them just zoom straight across to Wales passing Hilbre (the first big red square) and then Point of Ayr (the second big red square) and get into Wales and then get massacred by Great Black-backed Gulls. But you'll notice on the map that there's a curved line from Bootle to the big red square of Hilbre, and that's because there are pretty big sand banks out there, and, as is stated quite clearly in BWP1, most Leach's Petrels hate flying over sand, as do most Oceanodroma, because they absolutely hate getting sand in their vaginas.

But there are also some rebel Leach's Petrels, the ones that say to the others:

"Fuck you all! I'm going to have look at Liverpool and then fly close along the north Wirral shore past Leasowe and have a look at the kite surfers. And I don't care if I get sand in my vagina. So fuck you all!"

And then one of the other older and wiser Petrels says:

"He is young and foolish. But he will learn fast. Hopefully not with his life or by getting sand in his vagina. Because once you get sand in your vagina you can never get it out and it itches like fuck."

But then there are others that are just curious. Like the conversation between two Leach's Petrels (let's call them Princess Michael of Kent and King Richard the Third) which the Sound Approach team recently recorded for their Petrels Night and Day book:

King Richard the Third: "Come on, guys, let's go into Liverpool. It's the European Capital of Culture!"

Princess Michael of Kent: "No. We are not going to Liverpool. And that's final."

King Richard the Third: "Oh come on. Stop being so boring. You only live once."

Princess Michael of Kent: "No."

King Richard the Third: "Pleeeeaaaaasssseee. They've got a Le Corbusier exhibition in the new cathedral. It's supposed to be really good."

Princess Michael of Kent: "Who?"

King Richard the Third: "Le Corbusier."

Princess Michael of Kent: "Who's that?"

King Richard the Third: "You don't know? Le Corbusier, or Charles-Edouard Jeanneret? You've never heard of him?"

Princess Michael of Kent: "No."

King Richard the Third: "Wow! You really are pretty shallow. He was like only the most important architect of the twentieth century. He only like totally changed the way buildings look. So kind of important yeah? I'd have thought that most people would knew who Le Corbusier was. Jesus!"

Princess Michael of Kent: "Were you listening to Front Row on Radio 4 last night?"

King Richard the Third: "No!"

Princess Michael of Kent: "You were weren't you."

King Richard the Third: "Maybe."

Princess Michael of Kent: "You fucking twat! You'd never even heard of Le Corbusier before last night had you?"

King Richard the Third: "Well fuck you all then! I'm going to Liverpool! I'm sick of spending all my life dodging huge waves and eating bits of shit off the water. Look at me, I'm four years old and I've never even visited a big city. How can you all live like this? Fuck you all!"

King Richard the Third was later picked up inland at Audenshaw Reservoir, completely and lost trying to get a load of sand out of his vagina.

Etcetera


25th September

Good bird, shit views

Brown Shrike. Possibly

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.


20th September

Wish you were HERE?

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!

http://www.nrbo.co.uk/


19th September

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...

Radar's blog: http://wirralbirders.blogspot.com

Archie's blog: http://www.surfbirds.com/blog/archie69asbo


4th-7th September

Islay and Jura

From Jura looking to Islay

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.

Solitary Brotheeeeeer


28th August

Black Stork

Twitched a Black Stork in Yorkshire, great bird, but I pretty much hated every second of it. The reason? All that great stuff in south-west Ireland that turned up just as we left. Pig sick. And at the moment I'm as broke as Richard Blackwood ("who da bankrupt man?"). Whimsical verse shall suffice:

The valiant Black Stork south of York,

Made the ladies observing all talk.

For whilst dressed in fine fettle,

He showed them his mettle,

And released his vast manhood of pork.


19th-26th August

The Bridges of Madison County

 

Guinness - worth waiting for. And paying for. And then drinking. And then going for a piss. And so forth...

The Bridges of Madison County is the best film ever made. Starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep ("Dingo's got my baby!"), it tells the story of a woman and a man (played by an actress and an actor) and has bits with people crying in it and lots of acting in it as well. It was originally supposed to be called The Bridges of Madison Square Garden, only that made no sense, so then they called it The Bridges of Madison County and the rest, as they say, is history. Film history. Annals of film history. And Oscars too. Good film. Nice to watch with a cup-a-soup and a pack of fig rolls. It's wank really. I fucking hate Meryl Streep.

So, all of that stuff above has been leading to this...

... keep scrolling down ...

... wait for it ...

... almost there ...

... nearly ...

... wahey! You have arrived. Only now I can't remember what it was all leading to. Something to do with Blue Dragon 3 minute chicken and chilli noodles? No, that's for later. Much later. Now is the time for this bit: the Bridges of Madison Square Garden. No, that's wrong, I mean:

The Bridges of Ross

That's right, the Bridges of Ross. THE BRIDGES OF ROSS. Think lighting and thunder, or even thunder and lightning, think horses rising up on their back legs in terror, creaking doors, think castles and sucking blood, and all to the backdrop of a church organ playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue. The Briiidddges of Rossssssssss...

One of the less inclement moments of weather at the Bridges of Madison Ross Square

The Bridges of Ross are widely regarded as one of Europe's premier seawatching sites, which is odd seeing as there's only one bridge, the Bridge of Ross, so there you go. But whatever you do, and I really, really, really mean this - I'm genuinely being serious here, this is serious time, this is like really, really serious, so no fucking about - whatever you do, never ever, EVER, say that the Bridge(s) of Ross is (are) Britain's premier seawatching site. NEVER! And if you do decide to say that, then make sure there are no Irish birders within earshot, because if there are, you will most certainly not be leaving Ireland with as many teeth as you came over with. The Bridge(s) of Ross is (are) in Ireland, Eire, and that isn't Britain, or the UK, or even England. I know, I was just as surprised myself! It was like finding out about that woman in Eurovision a few years ago who was really a man.

The only remaining Bridge of Ross. The other two collapsed under the weight of discarded broken fold-up camping chairs, umbrellas, wind breaks and wrecked tripods

Seven full days of birding at one of Europe's premier seawatching sites surely had to yield a monster tally of sexually arousing maritime beasts? Definitely! Indeed whilst we were there 2 Fea's Petrels and a Little Shearwater came past. And do you know how many of them I managed to see? Take a really wild guess. That's right, all three of them!!! 2 Fea's Petrels and a Little Shearwater - what a fucking week!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Some parts of the above paragraph are not entirely true, namely bits about seeing 2 Fea's Petrels and a Little Shearwater.

The Maginot Line. I don't even know what the Maginot Line is. Sounds good though

On our first night there 11 birders, sitting close together, somehow managed to miss 2 Fea's Petrels (or possibly one doing a loop?), in fact we missed them by nearly 12 hours, not even finding out until the next morning. That's quite some miss! What happened was a classic case of Wank Biscuits, in which two birders (shit hot birders as well - these were no stringy Fea's) were sat by themselves out of view from us, and they were blessed with 2 Fea's that swept by just under our noses. Jesus Titty-fucking Christ!

And the Little Shearwater? Well Sarah and I were 6 miles away eating a ton of fried swine when that fluttered through. What happened there was also another classic case of Wank Biscuits, and after the most convoluted series of knotted Chinese Wh