skills-bills.co.uk

2005 Diary

Birds

7th September 2005, Chorlton Water Park and Horwich

Despite the presence of a Wryneck near to Bolton, I forced myself to visit Chorlton first of all to try and record these weird Chiffchaffs I'm always hearing - just to make sure I'm not going mad. But today there was a breeze and passerines of any description were very thin on the ground. I even failed to score a Blue Tit. As such, my plan to record weird Chiffies was almost a total wash out until the very end when one started calling by the play area - it is weird and I'm not going mad! But more of that some other time...

Regardless of getting the Chiffy on record, it was well worth coming down this morning anyway, because just after I saw a pair of Sparrowhawks I looked behind me and saw 2 larger birds soaring over the golf course. Fucking Buzzards! An oft-predicted new personal patch tick - yes!

After a "we really should go shopping today" lunch of salmon quiche and beans (nice!), Miss Cole put off whatever crap she had to do to come along with me and see the Wryneck - a Manchester and year tick for us both as well as being a local bird of extreme rarity value. Just by Bolton's Reebok Stadium a small crowd of assembled birders indicated that we were in the right place, although I would have preferred to have been in the wrong place because I absolutely hate birding on roadsides and despise industrial estates - so this was a winner on both counts! It actually turned out to be very quiet and hassle free with very few people stopping to ask "what the flying fuck are you doing?"

.

The bird was absolutely brilliant. As we arrived it was sat out in the open, completely sprawled out on the floor pecking at ants and certainly not at all bothered about using its complicated cryptic camouflage to disguise its presence as it ran up and down the cycle track and under the bushes amongst the litter - Grimsby Robin deja vu! Looking for too long at all of those interlocking zig-zags and barring that tattooed its body was almost enough to induce an epileptic fit, or at least a migraine. A stupid squabble broke out amongst a couple of people over a photographer being too close to the bird (I bet they all download the photos off Surfbirds later tonight though!), but this outstanding bird clearly didn't give a toss!

Superb piccies of this superb bird can be seen on Sean Gray's website

6th September 2005, Chorlton Water Park

As good as ever! A pair of Great Crested Grebes with two relatively dependant young cramping their style, 2 Gadwall trying to hide in the reeds, 20 Black-headed Gulls and a load of Coot, but otherwise the lake was very quiet. A singing Willow Warbler was a bit odd alongside plenty of Chiffchaff, including some doing that weird call that I keep hearing, only mixing it with the proper hweet call and occasional snatches of song. I presume they are young birds?

The Mistle Thrush flock has already formed, rattling every now and then as they passed overhead, there were still quite a few hirundines around and the Jays were going through their usual September madness. 2 Bullfinches were kindly by the information board depicting them and a single Grey Wagtail was on the Mersey alongside the morning's stars - 2 Kingfishers that were sat still for once!

5th September 2005, Pennington Flash Country Park

Parking here now costs a whole English pound, the thieving bastards. Out on the lake there were big numbers of Coot, two 1st-winter Herring Gulls (which are not all that common in Mancunia - that's how good it is here) and lots more Coot. The walk along to the hides produced only the disappointment of seeing bloody kids all over the place; I thought they were back at school today, the little shits!

The same two birders as always were sat in the corner of Horrock's Hide, fiercely guarding their territory, and I suspect they probably haven't moved since I last visited a month back. They were also just as friendly as ever, the miserable old tossers. But, despite the inevitably hostile reception, this hide is really quite excellent, even with the spit being so overgrown with weeds at the moment. A nice leggy Reeve elegantly picked her way amongst a big mound of shit (which on closer inspection was actually a flock of eclipse Shovelers), a Lapwing was going ballistic over the presence of a very cute Little Ringed Plover, a cracking Little Grebe was diving just below the hide in 50/50 transitional plumage and 8+ Snipe were probing away in the mud before squelching as they took flight.

New Hide was pretty quiet with just loafing brown ducks, and the resident Heron - which I am now absolutely convinced is a model - did absolutely nothing at all whatsoever. Small numbers of Swallows and House Martins remained, as did a single Common Sandpiper from the viewing screen. Teal Hide was pretty poor being extremely overgrown which is a shame as it's often good for Green Sandpiper about now, but a Kingfisher showed exceptionally well on a post for ages allowing it to be sexed as a female, but of course I'd forgotten my bastard camera!

A swift half in the Crown and Anchor was followed by a short drive to Long Bank to see if we could pick up a juvenile Montagu's Harrier that had been in the area for the last couple of days, but no luck. However, a tiny female Ruff with a longish bill put the frighteners on me and Phil for a few seconds as it made short dashes in the long grass, flycatching and generally not behaving all that much like a Ruff. With the sun turning the inside of the car into a kiln by the sea (Kilnsea!!!), we left the turnip fields of Spurn for the spectacular Humber bridge, briefly passing through the turnip fields of Lincolnshire, and then back into more turnip fields in East Yorkshire and to Blacktoft Sands Turnip reserve...

The last time I visited Blacktoft Sands RSPB I almost lost a kidney through laughing so much. In a hide at the west end of the reserve a very nice (but as you will see clearly deranged) woman announced to her husband (and loud enough for a full hide to hear) that she'd found some deer. With things being pretty quiet on the bird front, everyone immediately switched to having a look for them. Her husband told her that he couldn't see any in the area where she had indicated, so she found them in the 'scope for him. After a world weary sigh, he embarrassingly had to correct her and inform her that they were actually rabbits. Rabbits!!! The hide seating soon began to rock back and forth with the muffled hysterics of some bloke sat next to me. Upon seeing this bloke trying to stifle his laugh I could do nothing but join in and rock the hide some more! The woman took it in good cheer, but her husband (or possibly her carer?) was extremely keen to get out of there.

Unfortunately nothing quite so infantile happened today, but there was an excellent selection of birds. In the same hide as the Rabbitgate incident, I scored my first Little Stint of the year, as well as amazing close views of commoner waders, especially Dunlin, but I couldn't find the 2-3 Curlew Sandpipers that had been present earlier in the day. A Barn Owl gave brilliant, if somewhat surreal, views sat in his little Owl house and a very bleached and tatty male Marsh Harrier made the occasional pass over the edge of the reeds to scare the shit out of the sludge-brown mass of feathers known as 'eclipse ducks'. I'm pretty sure the harrier was just bored and a bit lonely as he never once actually bothered to try and kill anything.

Barn Owl

Dunlin

Down at the far west end of the reserve, from the Singleton hide, a Spoonbill had been in residence for quite a while. How a bird so distinctive and gregarious could be so difficult to see is beyond me, but this one was just that. Somehow it repeatedly managed to vanish behind a small island before giving a full hide of birders just enough time to stick their Nikon Coolpix cameras onto their scopes, but then vanishing again before they could depress the shutter. "Bollocks" was uttered all round on a frequent basis. Whilst waiting for these tantalisingly brief views of the Spoonbill there was plenty of other birds to sift through including 8 Spotted Redshank, Green Sandpipers, Avocet and a fair few common waders.

Curlew and Spotted Redshank

As the light began to fade rapidly and the opportunity for good photos passed by, the Spoonbill decided to come out into the open. I managed a few piccies of it surrounded by the horrific image of a flock of eclipse Mallards.

Swan with severely deformed bill

After a night in Scunthorpe, we stopped off at Old Moor RSPB on Tuesday afternoon for a 2 second glimpse of 2 Ruddy Shelduck before they decided to piss off to Broomhill Flash - selfish bastards. Good job they are just escaped, plastic pieces of crap...

Easy pickings, this one! After a leisurely start to the day, and upon reading on the old Birdnet pager that the White-rumped Sandpiper was still on the Wyre Estuary, Miss Cole and Macca (that's me) decided to have a bit of an amble up there. Our last visit to this site was 16/8/04 when we were lucky enough to arrive just in the nick of time to enjoy fabulous views of Britain’s third Great Knot - what a bird that was!

After wandering along the Wyre Way - alongside the treacherously ricketty jetties, burnt-out boats and an unusual sign that said Women Wanted and then listed a whole load of chores that these particular women should be proficient at doing, such as fixing boats and cleaning fish (personally I’d rather she be highly skilled in the performance of fellatio than fish cleaning) - we eventually splashed through shallow, slippery mud and out to a small gathering of birders. Of course, the White-rumped Sandpiper had just gone, but - before it had gone - it had, unsurprisingly, been showing very well and, surprise sur-fucking-prise, we really "should have been here five minutes ago".

It had been associating with Dunlin, so the first task was to find some Dunlin and then surely the rest would be easy. There’s a few Dunlin. And there’s a few more. Some more over there. A big flock just in flight there. Oh, and some more over there. What’s that, Sarah? Oh you’ve got some as well. Fuck me, there’s fucking millions of Dunlin! The light was crap and there was a pain-in-the-arse insect trying to bite us both, but at least the weather was nice, eh?

“Ooh, a Yellow Wagtail” I said. “Ooh, a Greenshank, as well.” Thinking birds like this are a decent pair of ticks shows just how shite it is to live and bird in Manchester. But, after about 20 minutes of looking at very distant brown blobs with black bellies, against a sludge brown background, one bird stood out as being a wee bit different. For a start it lacked a black belly - could be a young Dunlin though. True, but this one was also a colder brown, almost grey, colour. It was also fractionally smaller than its Dunlin pals. With a pointy arse and shorter bill it was looking good. Thankfully, it soon decided to do the decent thing and fly, showing off its sexy white arse that lacked the central black line of Dunlin and its similar sibling Baird’s Sandpiper. Not great views, but at least we’d seen it.

Everything had now flown off towards where we had walked from so we headed back in the hope that we could relocate it. Stopping at a wide slipway, almost the first bird I picked up in my ‘scope was the very one we were after - cheers, mate! Although a bit closer and in slightly better light, these were still hardly crippling views, although we did get to watch it for quite a long time.

Nice birdy, but a bit disappointed with the views.

What’s the best thing about summer? Long days? Summer holidays? Hot afternoons sat outside a pub with a cold beer? Barbeques? Bikinis? Topless sunbathers? Well, it’s none of those things, because the best thing about summer is going up to Cannock Chase to see Nightjars. Nightjars are awesome, and the whole effort and pissing around required to see the awkward little bastards makes eventually seeing them even better.

Firstly, you can only find Nightjars in areas of sexual indiscretion and perversion, because their favoured habitat is heathland. The only other creatures to frequent British heathland are closet homosexuals , doggers, rapists and … err … birders looking for Nightjars. Secondly, Nightjars are nocturnal. This means that they only come out at night when the heaths are crawling with closet homosexuals, doggers and rapists. Also, being nocturnal, this means that you can’t ever see Nightjars. Thirdly, the best way to attract Nightjars, and get just the vaguest glimpse of them, is to allegedly wave a stick with a white rag tied to the end of it above your head like a twat. Apparently, they are attracted to white movement; either that, or they are attracted to people behaving like arseholes.

And so it came to pass that my good self and Miss Sarah Cole ventured forth on our annual sojourn to Cannock Chase, accompanied by Ma and Pa McKinney. Arriving at the Seven Springs car park we noticed two cars parked side by side - what was going on here? A few jokes about Stan Collymore followed, but unfortunately the cars were empty. The owners were obviously either out carrying a hammer in search of lone female joggers, or possibly trying to ‘pick up’.

With Ma McKinney’s best white tea towel tied to the end of a long stick, we made our way through the minefield of dog shit and up to the first clearing at the top of Abraham’s Valley. Yellowhammers and Deer provided some amusement, but I realised it was going to be difficult to hear any Nightjars over the din of Ma, Pa and Sarah discussing the latest events in the Big Brother house. A bat (don’t know what type, but it was a big bat) made a couple of close passes overhead, and then at 9.50pm, in rapidly fading light, I heard the first ‘churr’ of a nearby Nightjar. Soon we were listening to Nightjars in stereo and eventually about five in Dolby surround sound. With just enough light to be able to get reasonable views this had the potential to be a classic Nightjar trip, but suddenly all the excitement ceased as some fucking prick on the other side of the valley decided to fire his shotgun, probably to compensate for his understated manhood. The destruction of the silence obviously pissed off the Nightjars as much as it did us because they immediately stopped calling. Bollocks!

Big Brother came back into the conversation again, as did a reminiscence of our last ‘family’ trip to Cannock Chase, when Ma McKinney had just seen the Blair Witch Project: Pa McKinney and myself decided to scare the shit out of her by deliberately heading back the wrong way and pretending we were completely lost. Strangely, Ma McKinney failed to find this funny even twelve months after the event.

True to Pa McKinney’s prediction the churring started up again at 10.10pm and it was now time for white rag action.

After a few minutes of frantic rag waving Pa McKinney found one sat on the track just a few metres in front of us. “Wave that rag, boy!” Upon seeing me behaving like a twat, the Nightjar came up off the track and obligingly decided to land in a tree right next to us, probably to get a better view of my twattish behaviour. After it got bored of me it upped and kindly gave a few wing-claps above our heads before pissing off into the pitch black. This same sequence of events happened a few more times and, despite the best attempts by the prick with the gun, this did turn out to be a classic Nightjar trip.

After our thirst for Nightjars was quenched we set off back to the McKinney Estate for Norwegian lager (eh?) and Big Brother.

Sooty & Sweep

Holy shit, what a day! Being pretty busy I didn’t think I was going to get a chance to see this bird for quite some time, but then I decided that there are few things in life as important as seeing a Sooty Tern in Britain, so I thought I'd give it a try on the Sunday morning.

Sarah Cole and I left Manchester some time after 1.30am to board a 5am chartered boat out to The Skerries, which are about 45 minutes from the small port at Amlwch (no I don't know how it's pronounced or even if I've spelt it correctly). For some reason (probably based on greed and a lust for extreme cruelty to his fellow man) our fucking bastard boatman decided to leave without us 20 minutes early. Wanker! Well, with that great start to the day I thought we were screwed, but, through begging and sickening grovelling, I managed to get us both onto another boat and we were saved.

I HAD to be back home in Manchester for 12pm at the very latest. This would allow me enough time to get back to Wales and to Llangollen for a rehearsal with the Halle Orchestra in the afternoon and for a concert in the Royal Pavilion later that evening. So, working on the assumption that the boat would be out for 3-4 hours (like all the others), I reckoned that if we got back to dry land by 9am then we could be easily back in Manchester in time for me to get my shit together and get to Llangollen. So imagine how I felt when we’d just left the quay at Amlwch and the skipper told me that this boat was staying out until about 11ish - oh shit!

As the other passengers were all enjoying a great boat trip - on glass calm water, in fantastic weather, with close views of fishing terns, Puffins and Manx Shearwaters, accompanied by a backdrop of dramatic maritime scenery - I was quietly sobbing and choking on diesel fumes, in a right panic at how much of a twat I'd been. If I missed this rehearsal I was seriously in the shit. At least things surely couldn’t get any worse? But miraculously they did, because when we arrived at The Skerries we discovered over the next 2 hours that the bird had done a runner.

It was quite obvious that we weren't going to see the bird today and I resigned myself to the fact that not only had I dipped on the bird of the year, but that I was going to get my bollocks hacked off when I arrived late for my rehearsal. I figured that assertive and positive action was now required - even if I had to swim I was going to get back to dry land. Bollocks to the bird and bollocks to this boat! Upon hearing of my dilemma, our skipper (a nice, kind, considerate man, and not at all like the twat that left us behind) moored up alongside another boat and we began to haggle with other passengers to see if they'd like to swap. Just as Sarah and I were preparing to jump ship I heard someone scream

"Got it!"

Pardon? After five seconds of scanning every square inch of sky I was treated to a few brief views of my first Sooty Tern. There was silence on the boat until the realisation of what had just happened began to sink in and we all suddenly exploded with happiness and did a conga around the boat. The last bit isn't exactly true (infact it's a complete lie), but you get the idea - we were all pretty happy. Punching the air and cheering to the other boats nearby, we zoomed around to the other side of the islands where the bird was now apparently sat on the rocks - and it was. To have simply been crapped on by a bird as good as this would have been fine by me. To have had only the briefest of flight views would have been fine by me. But to see this bird just metres away sat preening and sunning itself amongst Arctic Terns for about 15 minutes in perfect light was, to be quite honest, just taking the piss.

With us all more than satisfied by the views we'd had, our boatman decided to head back to Amlwch earlier than planned and we were the first of the five or six boats to start back. But - being on the slowest boat ever in the entire history of sea travel - we were, rather embarrassingly, the last to get back.

Whilst heading back to Manchester the Sooty Tern decided to do a bunk onto Anglesey mainland and to Cemlyn Bay, where it would obviously have been much easier to twitch, but nowhere near as much fun - if you can call that fun?

Fantastic pictures by George Reszeter & Steve Round

Page 1