Drown'd, drown'd

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelibear,
And therefore I forbid my tears...


Millais ain't got nuffin' on me.

Weea-choo!

Whilst out bagging Cetti's at Uskmouth, I snuck up on a randy group of Pochard doing their thing (well who wouldn't?), surely the most acoustically entertaining Aythya in the world. If all you expect of Pochard is the 'grrr-grrr-grrr' flight call, click on the snippet below and prepare for 'wi-wi-wi' whistles and nasal wheezes (with and without 'ricochets') courtesy of displaying males; and the odd soft cluck or two (not sure which sex is emitting this, answers on a postcard/comment). As if that's not enough, there is also a pretty picture to show you what you're hearing from roughly second 17 to 20. PS. Apologies for the wind/anthropogenic background rumble, I had to leave it in or lose some low frequency elements of Poch.

Identification pitfalls (part 2)

The second installment of this regular feature (click here for part 1) includes a moth that won't be seen until the summer but, given the trickiness of the identification challenge, I thought I'd bring it up now. First off, you can tell it is a moth because it has six legs, most birds have two. However, quite how you discriminate the pretty little critter from the spherical glass object (shown here on the left) is beyond me.

Cetti's-tastic

The Uskmouth lagoons and grasslands produced a rather impressive count of 50+ singing male Cetti's Warblers this morning. This represents more birds than the entire county population estimate as presented in the just published 'Birds of Gwent',... oops. It's the birds' fault, pesky little exponentially-exploding climate change loving critters. Very little in the way of migrants mind, bordering on the square root of bugger all actually.

Did they sterilise the nails?

Last weekend I spent most of my time dodging the wind, rain, chocolate eggs, hoi polloi and images of a bearded, nappy wearing bloke nailed to a cross,... and my prize? The songs of 27 Cetti's Warblers in the bag; or rather, the songs of 27 Cetti's Warblers eased into a microphone, squeezed down a wire, popped into a recorder and dumped onto a 8GB flash card before being jettisoned via a card reader, shoe-horned onto a hard drive, sloshed through some software and pished out the far end in the form of a spectrogram. And one of them (my favourite so far) looked a bit like this...



Please note the bands of noise between 0 and 1.5 kHz, a mellifluous combination of wind and the goings on at the Uskmouth Power Station, music to anyone's ears I'm sure you'll agree.

No post today

I'm not going to post today as I'd only go into an interminable rant about the recent activity down at Uskmouth. However, if you have any queries regarding the RSPB's objectives/activities and whether these conflict with the primary aim of the reserve (to provide compensatory habitat for the debacle at Cardiff Bay) you should write to the RSPB offices in Cardiff (Sutherland House, Castlebridge, Cowbridge Road East, Cardiff, CF11 9AB) or Sandy (The Lodge, Potton Road, Sandy, Bedfordshire, SG19 2DL).

Something stirring in the sedges

So far this year there have been two reports of Sedge Warbler on the GOS sightings page from the Newport Wetland Reserve (one on 17th at Goldcliff and one on 20th at Uskmouth). These, if not involving [enter smallish streaky/brown/poorly seen passerine here], would constitute the two earliest records for Gwent in the history of the world, EVER. As a result of this, and my continued living of the saddest of existences, I thought I would check to see when Sedgies have appeared over the last ten years for which reports have been published, in the lovely county of Gwentcestershire.

And, in chronological order, the dates are: 2006 - 15th April; 2005 - 16th April; 2004 - 11th April; 2003 - 31st March; 2002 - 13th April; 2001 - 23rd April; 2000 - 20th April; 1999 - 3rd April; 1998 - 13th April; and 1997 - 10th April.

I'm not saying there aren't any Sedge Warblers down at the NWR yet, I'm just suggesting some reports on the GOS sightings page are probably best viewed through the sights of a police marksman's rifle.

A nice flag

There is nothing like a nice flag is there? The only trouble is, your great big fat neighbour might start looking at it in an 'I-wouldn't-mind-owning-that-myself' sort of way. Before you know where you are, they have moved in and are soon settling all and sundry here, there and everywhere and having the bare-arsed cheek to complain when you suggest they have outstayed their welcome. Can't wait to see the torch of peace and goodwill pass through Lhasa on the way to the Olympics. I'm also looking forward to the, always entertaining, looking-the-other-way marathon to be undertaken by all visiting politicians when asked "What the f*** are you doing sitting watching drug-addled athletes trot around a track whilst a superpower destroys another sovereign state?"

M4 corridor

Birding along my second favourite corridor today, on the way to God's county, produced seven Smew and 14 Red-crested Pochard; the M4 itself mustered two Red Kite, a large brownish falcon and a Woodcock. When taken with the fact that both Manchester plc and Chelski got dumped out of the cup today, I think we can all agree that it was worth getting up this morning (and Sidebottom got a hat-trick despite looking an awful lot like Roger Daltrey).

Titles are for wimps

A tour of the Goldcliff vantage points produced both the wintering Spotted Redshank and Greenshank plus all the usual wildfowl. No Sand Martin, LRP or Garganey though. It was so slow I even counted the Wigeon, some of which looked a bit like this...