The things twitchers say

Ah fuck. Come to think of it, I will have a bit of a rant about johnny-come-lately twitchers and the twatty jargon they use. I’ve already mentioned the abomination that’s “Icky” and “Melody” (see Blurredforum for a great example of the use of both, and the general arsiness of twitchers), but that’s just the tip of a great big guano-stained iceberg.

“RB Flicker” - you what? Since when was a flycatcher a flicker?

“Dick’s Pipit” - the clue’s in the name, people. Oh, the irony.

“Grotfinch” - yes, I know anything but a spring male Common Rosefinch is basically a bland, beady-eyed brown blob, but it’s still a good bird.

“Glonk” - baffling. Glaucous Gulls really are ugly bastards, but they don’t deserve this level of contempt.

And so on. For a full-on rant about twatty bird abbreviations and jargon, check out Rob Fray’s website. He’s bang on the money. Another thing though - it’s noticeable how many “new” birders and twitchers are doing this jargon-peppered thing. Why is that? Surely not laziness (how hard is it to say Icterine Warbler?). Trying to be cool? Unlikely - let’s be honest, birding isn’t cool - just ask any of a long and distinguished line of disgruntled ex-girlfriends. Trying to sound like one of an exclusive, in-crowd? Ah-ha…

To all of those newly Swarovski’d, digiscoping, RB Flickering birders… this one’s for you:

Killer Whales

Bull

Or should that be Orcas? I never know. “Orcas” sounds a bit cooler, a bit like calling Great Skuas “bonxies”. But anyone calling a bonxie a bonxie outside of Shetland runs the risk of sounding like a bit of a twat. You never hear them calling Eiders “dunters” or Puffins “tammie nories”. But by their logic, they should. They’re the same wazzocks that call Icterine Warblers and Melodious Warblers “ickies” and “melodies” respectively. Someone shoot them, please.

Anyway, this wasn’t meant to be a rant about nouveau twitchers and their try-hard jargon. This is all about a great afternoon at the office. Well, not literally. This was on the way home this afternoon. As you do. I bumped into a pod of Orcas on the east side (thanks to the wonderful local grapevine) - at first mooching around lazily offshore, before motoring north at pace hunting seals.

Orca eyeball

I made it 6 animals - 1 bull, 4 females, and 1 youngster. The bull and 3 females peeled away from the other 2 to hunt more purposefully, and I managed to catch up with them again some miles up the coast. They’re being studied by a team of cetacean researchers, hence the guys in the boat alongside.

boat

Obviously completely unphased by their watchers, they showed the full suite of classic Orca behaviour - spy-hopping, tail-slapping, rolling, and catching juicy seals.

tail slapper

Fabulous to watch them working the fractured coast from the shore - they went into every little bay, swimming along the rocks at the water’s edge, making sure they didn’t miss a lurking seal. Nothing random about these guys.

rolling

All the seals along the coast were heading into shallow water as fast as they could, right up to the beach edges. Seemingly these Orcas don’t do the chucking-themselves-onto-beaches thing their Southern Ocean cousins indulge in. Just as well for the families watching them at the water’s edge at times. Apparantly there are two types of Orca round Shetland - ones that eat fish, and ones that eat seals. These would be the seal-chomping kind - which reminds me of one of my all time favourite jokes…

… this seal walks into a club.

Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been a lovely audience, thank you and goodnight.

Right conditions wrong time

Grr, this is all a little frustrating. It’s pretty much perfect outside as I write - a fresh south-easterly, humid, showery weather… but it’s July. That can mean only one thing - it’s a rare swift sp or nothing now until August when the first Greenish Warblers start filtering through. (NB - not that any have filtered through to here since I moved up here 5 years ago…)

JLI found a Pallid Swift here a few years ago (on my kitchen window list, hoho) in early July, and Spurn scored a resounding double a few days ago with both Pacific and Little Swift within a matter of minutes of one another. What I think I’m trying to say is that there’s clearly some hot swift sp action going on in the UK at the moment, and Shetland can ‘do’ rare swifts in early July, so if at Spurn, why not here? Today, preferably.

Shall go straight to north loch when I finish work anticipating something with a white arse-end hawking over the water.*

* it’ll be a bloody Wheatear flying from the airstrip to the golf course. But I can live in hope…

Lashings of larus

News today from south - Dumfries hosted the world’s first ever Naughty Seagull Conference. Attended by vote-hungry politicians, Sunday car-washers, people who don’t like seagulls honking from rooftops, and shopkeepers from Aberdeen (more of which anon). Yep, it seems that urban gulls have become a bit of a problem, like urban foxes but without the mange. They swoop from above to molest innocent passers-by, stealing their chips and making off with their babies. Or was that White-tailed Eagles? Anyway.

General consensus was that there’s a problem, and something needs to be done. Opinion seems rather more divided as to precisely what. On the one hand, there’s the not-wanting-to-hurt-gully-wully school of thought, that would prefer to see falconers scare the nasty gulls away to bother sometown else. On the other hand, there’s the cull-the-bloody-lot-of-them approach. Faced with this level of crime and disorder, you see where the latter are coming from. Today it’s nicking your cheesy Doritos, tomorrow you’ll come home and find it in bed with your wife:

Still, if the old adage “you are what you eat” is to be believed, this would be gull au gratin in sleepy Totnes in the south-west. There’s a town that knows what to do with surplus Herring Gulls. They eat them. And not just boring old roast gull or gull pie… the inventive folk of Totnes make chillied gull with ginger, and gull veronique. Yum.

 

Badlands

You can tell there’s about as much chance of a final Spring rarity turning up here as Turkey’s likely to make it to the finals of Euro 2008. (err… that might yet happen…) Anyway, you can tell it’s pretty unlikely. It’s the little clues that give it away. The bitterly cold northerly wind. The lack of migrants. The way it’s almost July . And of course, the way this blog has stopped talking about birding.

From here on until the autumn it’s all about me, Songbird Survival, replica egg collectors, and of course Captain Calamity. Tonight… Bitter Bonxie cleans the house. Mrs Bonxie has been away south for the past month, and I may have let things slip a bit around the place. A little dust here. An overflowing bin there. A complete lack of interest in domestic chores in the face of hot and cold running Red-backed Shrikes and Marsh Warblers.

Tomorrow Mrs Bonxie returns, and the place better look spotless, or it’s no birding for me. Ever again. Obviously, I’m taking the situation seriously. Spent the evening drinking beer with JLI and watching the football, and am now working my way through some garlic bread and a glass of rum (an under-rated combination) and watching Fur TV. It’s great. And topical too.

Captain Calamity

A really snorty north-westerly tonight, the sort that sneaks up on you here in a Shetland summer, and catches you unawares and unprepared. Remember my pallets? The ones I spent a long Saturday ferrying here from Lerwick a few weeks ago, to be turned into windproof fencing? Yes, them. The ones that were still stacked on my drive…

…came home this evening to find them casually flipping off their stacks and blowing across the hardstanding. So I spent an uncomfortable hour in stinging rain getting them stacked again in the lee of a drystone wall, soaked to the skin and cursing the wind. Still, there’s nothing like knowing there’s somebody out there more uncomfortable than yourself to make you feel a little better. Someone daft enough to sit on a 2.5 acre island on the west side of Shetland in a gale. In a tent. Others numb their pain with alcohol - tonight, I have Captain Calamity.

He’s a local joke here. A bloke who sailed to Shetland from Essex in a metal rowing boat with a windsurfing sail attached to it with a home-made rig. Not that he was actually coming to stay in Shetland - he was trying to sail around the UK. He’d already had a slew of lifeboat call-outs and attempted helicopter rescues, not to mention a plain fuckwit passage through a naval firing range before he got into difficulties 50 miles from land, and had to be rescued by Oscar Charlie, our local coastguard helicopter. Once here, with allegedly just 30 pence to his name, dumped by his wife who’d left him to make a new life in France, he decided to stay.

He’s been a source of amusement and bemusement ever since. His foray into publishing a free glossy magazine full of leftfield and often frankly deranged opinions failed dismally. Nobody much cared for his publication’s intolerant views on homosexuality, conspiracy theories about pharmaceutical companies, and appalling attempts to write a children’s serial with a thinly veiled and torturous metaphor extolling his views that Shetland should be an independent nation state, or Danish.

Which brings us to why tonight he’s sitting on an island in the Atlantic all on his own, in a tent. He’s got a real thing about how Shetland should declare independence from the UK, and up to now he’s not got anyone to take him seriously. So now he’s landed on a tiny island off the troubled shores of Papa Stour, and declared his new island home an independent state. A crown dependency, no less. Apparently this will allow him to make himself a thorn in the side of the authorities, forcing them to take notice of his loopy theories. I suspect anyone in authority will summarily dismiss him as deluded, and ignore him.

I won’t though - whenever I’m working outside, cold and wet and exhausted, I can think of him spooning baked beans from the tin as his tent snaps and billows wetly in the wind. And feel relieved I’m not there.

http://www.shetland-news.co.uk/news_06_2008/Stuart%20Hill%20declares%20independence.htm

 

Hooded Merganser

What took you so long?

Some well overdue news breaking… Hooded Merganser finally makes it onto the British list. Quite why this particular duck spent so long in limbo is hard to know, as if ever a Nearctic duck was going to be wild, one in the Western Isles in November, arriving at the same time as a host of other Neartic wildfowl was going to be it.

http://newsbou.blogspot.com/2008/06/hooded-merganser-admitted-to-british.html

It’s always struck me as weird that other showy Nearctic ducks seem to get accepted pretty much at face value by the wider birding community. Bufflehead? Blue-winged Teal? Bring ‘em on. Heaven knows, you can even buy Green-winged Teals for a few quid from duck fanciers here in the UK, so god knows how many of the ‘vagrant’ ducks we see are the real deal. Frankly, unless they’re sporting half a wing and a collection of rings on each leg, you’ve got to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Am a little biased though, as this decision bodes well for the Unst bird of a few years ago. One of my more successful outings with the otherwise irritating Coolpix & Kowa combination…

 

 

Citril Finch

Phew. When I said that it felt so good and promising, I had no idea it would be quite this good or promising. Got home last night to check the internet and see to my horror that Fair Isle had done it again - the first latterday British record of Citril Finch. Ouch.

Then of course the usual panic. How the hell am I going to get on there? Even JLI was giving serious consideration to abandoning our home turf and heading south to Fair Isle. Fortunately for me, PE did me a serious favour, and found me a place on the first boat heading into the island this morning. So after a fairly sleepless night, I was up at 5.30 to feed the animals before heading to catch the first ferry off the isle.

The story of the bird’s finding will go into legend, and doubtless will be repeated ad infinitum in coming weeks and bird journals, but by way of a preview… Tommy, an American hat-maker and artist, moved to Fair Isle with his wife Liz a couple of years ago. He’s an observant guy, and when he found a strange bird in his garden, he knew he’d got something out of the ordinary. Rather than just call the Observatory and tell them he’d got an odd bird, Tommy went for his field guides… and then called the Obs to let them know he thought he had a Citril Finch in his garden! I can imagine the tolerant disbelief and low expectations of the Obs staff who went to check it out… and their horror, amazement, delight and joy to find Tommy had nailed the bird in one. What a star!

Our crossing was fast on a mercifully calm sea, and we arrived on Fair Isle to the news the bird was currently showing. All piled into the back of a transit van, and driven at breakneck speed down the isle. To the news the bird had flown a couple of minutes before our van rolled up. Woe.

It seemed the Citril Finch was favouring dandelion seeds rather than any seed scattered by humans, and associating with a trio of Twite. We settled down to wait for them to return. And waited. And waited…

Two hours later, PE spluttered through a sandwich that he’d got the bird. And sure enough, it had come out of nowhere back to it’s dandelions. A mad scramble to see it as it remained largely hidden behind vegetation. Crap views, and then… it flew.

Not far though, and so began 15 minutes of brilliant views as it perched out in the open on fences around the immediate area. I took a few photos, but frustrated by the shit lense, gave up and contented myself to study the bird through bins and drink in a fabulous lifer.

The bird was luminous - far different from how I remember them in Europe. Maybe something to do with the surroundings and island light? The rump in particular was glowing, and even the powder blue/grey nape seemed almost metallic - this was a bird in fabulous condition.

It was waryish with it’s Twite mates, and they soon took off, heading over the school hill and out of sight in the dirction of Tommy and Liz’s house. We left to get back on our charter, a happy band of birders. JLI and BM followed us in on a later charter - and coincided with the bird being trapped. The Whalsay team all skor! 

Told you so

I said there’d be something good here today, and sure enough, there was. Not a BB rarity, but frankly they’re funky enough to be in the same league. Yes, BM was reacting to the weather conditions as a dedicated local birder should - by heading to the shop to buy some potting compost. Who said luck didn’t come into finding rare birds? Certainly not the Red-rumped Swallow he chanced upon.

Meanwhile, I was having a blinding day at work. Obviously would be completely unprofessional to be specific about what was so utterly great, but suffice to say it’s something I’m dead proud of, and will look back in 10, 20, 30 years time and think, “I did that”. That’s about all I can say.

Coming off the ferry to find JLI on the swallow for me was the icing on the cake - a really splendid and confiding bird, feeding low over fields in Symbister in great neutral light. Had never really noticed the different tone on the upperparts of Red-rumped Swallows (more brown than the blue of our conventional Swallow) before. Will go back tomorrow morning and try for some photos.

The cherry on the day’s cake was getting back home, and having a couple of hours to traipse around the patch. First migrant I laid eyes on in the rosa rugosa was a smart Icterine Warbler. Spent a while watching it popping in and out of the foliage, trying to decide if there were one or two birds involved. Two, or one incredibly fast and mobile individual.

Moved on to the loch hoping for hirundines. No joy, but took a dumb moment to realise what I could hear singing - a Sedge Warbler in a ditch. Hot migrant action indeed. On to the plantation, and an easy and showy Marsh Warbler. Will be birding like a man possessed this weekend. There’s such a good feeling in the air…

Perfect conditions

It’s just fabulous weather out there. Briskish south-easterlies during the day, easing off this evening, rain showers… something good this way comes, I can tell.

Two Red-backed Shrikes here this morning, male and female. Presumably JLI’s birds hanging around.

Gotta go - have work to do to prepare for tomorrow. It’s gonna be a big day at the office…