Quick to be slow, to be ready to be quick

It's 1991, four fresh-faced whipper-snappers zoom north in the comfort of a Mark II Vauxhall Astra. Halfway up the M6, one member of the team, a little hungover and decidedly grey-faced, winds down the window and, despite squeals of "Don't throw up out the front of the window!", proceeds to pebble-dash himself and a sizeable proportion of the inside of the car (including much of the ceiling) with a fine aerosol of diced carrots and partially digested whiskey. Those of us in the back cower behind seats and below hastily grabbed jackets and Rhino shirts (remember those? [Oh my! You can still get them! Click here]). A brief stop and we're off again, front seat passenger miserably dabbing at stubborn bile-coloured concretions with newly acquired mineral water and mansize tissues. Then we're into Lancashire, Blackpool looms on signpost then horizon and a screech of brakes announces our arrival at Marton Mere. In freezing conditions, three of us enjoyed excellent views of American Bittern, one of us, despite getting the same views, probably didn't revel in the experience quite as gleefully.

I knew that puke-stained trip would pay off one day. And today was the day. No early start for me, no need to waste a Saturday stood plotting the untimely demise of red Goretex-wearing, arse-gravy spouting, NerdForum regulars. No, for me, a leisurely rise, a polite "No thanks" to the offer of a lift to Cornwall and a relaxing cuppa and bowl of porridge.

But then it all went MENTAL! A phone call from the field, a report of untold ornithological riches just down the road. Mug and bowl flew, spoon described graceful arc towards sink, missed, and ended up in the dog's bowl. Cameras, bins, gubbins grabbed and, with a crash of front door, the house was silent. Fine motes slowly sink down sunbeams onto carpet and mantelpiece, dustily echoing the eddies of the recently exited.

Anyhoo, VVVRRROOOOOOM! EEEEEEEEEK! And I tumble onto the tarmac at Fourteen Locks. A laden jog down the lane and it's Ynys-y-Fro to the left of me, Ynys-y-fro to the right of me, a frantic scan,... there! Not one, not two, but three of the most beautiful apparitions of anatidae you could possibly hope to gaze on.

The, now regular, Pochard x something (personally, I'm not convinced on Scaup), or even Pochard x something x Pochard? More on this bird, including better pictures, can be seen here, here, here and here.

Pochard x Ferruginous Duck, presumably the same bird as that which appeared on Wentwood Reservoir last winter and possibly from various locations in earlier years (see here).

The star of the show, Red-crested Pochard x aythya hybrid, a hybrid tick for me, have seen Red-crested Pochard x Mallard before though, as illustrated earlier in the year here (though seen and photographed many moons previous to the post).

I will endeavour to get much better pictures when I get some midweek spare time,... they deserve it. I wonder what the life expectancy for an aythya hybrid might be? We might have decades of this sort of stuff to look forward to,... yay!

PS. 1 Crossbill, 4 Skylark and plenty of Siskins overhead between 12:00 and 13:00, and two Great Black-backed Gulls on the lower basin too.

After years of waiting,... nothing came

Actually, something did come today. Back here, on 'Gropper Day', I mentioned a colour-ringed Icelandic Black-tailed Godwit sighting at Goldcliff. Got the details through the magic of an electronic mail today.

The bird was ringed at Farlington Marshes LNR, Hants, on 29 October 2009 as an adult female, then seen at Pagham Harbour, West Sussex, on 17 February 2010, then Goldcliff on 25 April 2010 and, in the evening of the following day, on Islay, Inner Hebrides.

That last leg is about 325 miles (as calculated, probably in a very rough and ready fashion, here) in, at most, a little over 24 hours. Not bad, and a great choice of stopover site too.

Everything I know is right

A morning at Magor and Redwick produced very little to tootle one's trumpet about, and absolutely nothing to merit the term 'highlight'. I guess Water Rail and Cetti's Warbler were the best at Magor Marsh and Coal Tit [Yes, really?!] at Redwick. It. Was. Dire.

Despite the above, and countless other mornings at Magor seeing absolutely nothing of note, I always think this scrap of fen is going to produce; I always convince myself that a bit of habitat that good, however small, will have a gem of a phyllosc flitting amongst the willows or something secretive skulking down a ditch. It never happens but the conviction persists.

It is this sort of thing that is slowly leading me to the conclusion that, once a human has an idea lodged in some deep recess of an inner fold of their temporal lobe, it is nigh impossible to extract or replace. There the oh-so-resistant factoid sits, nestled in the grey goo, perhaps as wrong as wrong can be, but clung to, nurtured, and slowly woven into all the other, oftentimes quite unrelated, truths, half-truths and downright falsehoods. Once embedded and the mind closed around it, the belief will not be dislodged by any external force; no amount of contrary experience, evidence or carefully presented counter-argument will make an iota of difference. Perhaps opinions are complex parasites, insidious little barbed globules, exuding a complex brew of neurotoxins, to mask their irrationality and blind or instigate avoidance behaviour in the host when presented with conflicting information; and oozing neuro-relaxants to enable the host to partake of the mental gymnastics required to maintain their position. When greatly magnified, I bet they look like squidgy, stalkless purple strawberries, every seed a hair-triggered micro-harpoon with which to gain attachment and render it all but immovable.

Get out, stay out. I'll thank you not to come round here with your new-fangled theories about the likelihood of finding rares at MaMa.

"They just seemed interested in finding the next American rare"

Cor! This blogging lark is getting harder and harder. It's almost as competitive as birding on Corvo. I was just penning one of my standard pieces, dripping with nigh inexplicable vitriol, regarding a self-publicising, sanctimonious, Robin-tickler, when I noticed somebody had beaten me to it. I do believe I have just wasted the entire gilded contents of one whole slop bucket of scorn. Well, it isn't worth publishing now. Unless I can locate another free-loading, "bird guider" [Ed. WTF?!] with a penchant for the word vibe who moans about being stuck on an Atlantic island during fast moving depressions instead of talking peanut feeders to the Prestatyn Women's Guild, all my literary effort will go to waste. Is there anyone else out there who, due to being totally bereft of a sense of humour, and lacking an appreciation of the finer nuances of English as a second language, bleats about how nasty and competitive WP rarity finders can be? No,... thought not,... bugger.

On a totally unrelated note, does it annoy you that people who spend half their lives working in ecology/taxonomy/conservation talk little of conservation when on holiday looking for rares? On finding Northern Flicker, why didn't the Corvo birders huddle together to knock up a quick habitat management plan or population viability analysis? It's enough to make you want to make a laughable attempt to look cool and save the world by writing another pile of inconsequential shite for the benefit of Waxwing-loving housewives everywhere.

And lo, it came to pass, that St Franny of Lee missed all the rares because he was too busy talking, but not doing anything, about the conservation of species he knew bugger all about on an island to which he'd never return (Manuel's guesthouse can just be seen in the background).

Colour-ringed Curlews

Perhaps I've been slow on the uptake, but there's a new game in Severnland. Yesterday I bumped into a colour-ringed Curlew, it turns out that birds are being colour-ringed along the Severn Estuary in Glos, e.g. at Wibdon Warth, near Lydney (see here). The ultimate goal is to study the survival and turnover of Curlew on the estuary, however, with a bit of luck any findings will also underline the importance of the estuary and help fend off any future hair-brained 'development' schemes cooked up by middle-aged men in shiny shoes/cars who have nothing better to do due to the fact their cocks stopped working years ago and the wife is off shagging their golfing partner.

Birds have been marked with a combination of five colour-rings and a metal ring. All have a yellow ring over a white ring on the lower left leg (NB. I noticed on 'my' bird the lower, white, ring was discoloured/muddied and difficult to see), a metal on the lower right leg, a single colour on the upper left leg (the tarsus) and two colours on the upper right leg.

Any sightings should be sent directly to Dr. Niall Burton (Head of Wetland & Marine Research at the BTO) at niall.burton@bto.org. In addition to the combination and positions of colour-rings, they would also like date, time and location (ideally a six-figure grid reference). In addition to these details, they would also like to get data on the proportions of colour-ringed birds in flocks, i.e. the numbers of birds colour-ringed and the numbers of birds checked for rings (not necessarily the total flock size) and even data for flocks that had no colour-ringed birds.

The colour-ringed birds are, of course, most likely to be seen in the part of the estuary near where they were caught, but surely a few will filter Gwentwards.

This blog post has been brought to you by the letters O, T and B and the number 1 and fulfills part of Gwentbirding's annual public broadcast/non-sweary remit.

Communication ends.

What a tart!

What? Whaaaaat?

Specklebelly

Turned my back on the Richard's Pipit and pointed the car towards the patch and the unshunnable European White-fronted Goose - Gwent and patch tick! Boat Lane also produced Golden Plover and Red Kite plus odds 'n' sods overhead (and, obviously, the Barnacle Goose). Saltmarsh Lane was fairly quiet: a Swallow, the odd Blackcap and Chiffchaff amongst the tits, and a Clouded Yellow along the sea-wall at the far end.

Red Kite and friends over Goldcliff Pill. It flopped around the pools and pill before settling on the grassy saltmarsh. Later on, presumably the same bird, was seen over Rumney Great Wharf.

Right bunting, wrong county

My colleague (who I shall refer to as 'RM', largely due to the fact that his parents gave him names that begin with the aforementioned letters) and I found four Lapland Buntings today (two each, which was uncharacteristically fair of the birding gods). 'My' two headed over NE at 10:00, announcing themselves with the ringing 'tyu', this and the dry rattling call (which pretty much defies transcription) were then alternated as they carried on up the seawall,... lovely. The mysterious RM's were much the more settled, found at lunchtime and still present when we left mid afternoon, they were initially seen on the upper saltmarsh near the noisy kissing gate (between the Power Station and Thornbury Yacht Club) but then went back and forth between here and the adjacent 'sprayed/brown' field just inland,... also lovely.

The only slight fly in the ointment, was the fact that I was in Gloucestershire and not Gwent, ever so slightly taking the gloss (Geddit? Ho-ho,... ho) off an otherwise pleasant birding moment or two. Mind you, had I been in Gwent, the views would have been very distant indeed.

[NB. Actually 'the mysterious RM' would be better referred to as the 'not-that-mysterious RM' but I don't want to run the risk of having all those hysterical squeaming (yes, I do mean 'squeaming') girly Punkbirder groupies reading this and then nipping over to NerdForum to gush to their fellow fans about how they once caught a glimpse of someone who looked quite like [enter Punkbirder here] in their local chippy and then emailing their favourite ornithological knickers to Norwich before fainting onto their keyboards and adding to their post count with the, original yet indecipherable, message "higezcx/'aeihguszzzcnxm,eghswghuuehgstijhsbnjgjhnshjtshbsjhjjhbjtbgbhnshjs;hjij". I mean, nobody wants that to happen do they? And it will,... it will.]

I woke up this morning but I’m still in the dark

Did two lengths of 'The Mighty V' this morning with very little to show for it. 'Highlights' included: Brambling and Hobby (this one?) at either end of Farmfield, five Golden Plover heading east, and a Wheatear at the bottom of Saltmarsh. Pretty steady passage overhead included: 15 Skylark, 80+ Swallow, 5 House Martin, 25+ Siskin and 2 Redpoll amongst larger numbers of other finches and Mipits.

Having pootled around for four hours or so, I headed back to Castle Aberquimcum and, just five minutes from the door, received news that a Lapland Bunting had been seen at Goldcliff Pill,... why I oughta!

Meanwhile, whilst peering over the fence at the blog next door, I noticed one of the "Cossy Tits" seems to be bearing a ring of Gwentish origin. Unfortunately, due to Beardies, frankly annoying, habit of a complete post-juvenile moult, we might not be able to individually identify the bird but stay tuned, hopefully, all the other birds on that string were female.

[Addendum: it transpires that we have only ringed four Bearded Tits on the 'L57****' sequence: an adult female, two first year females and an adult male, all caught on 12th September 2010. As a result, the Cosmeston bird becomes our first recovery,... thanks to Mr. Mitchell.]

I decided to quit and get a zero

Another morning at Uskmouth with one eye on the nets and the other on the sky. The easterly trickle of birds overhead included 20 Swallow, 5 House Martin, 6 Redwing, 30 Siskin and 10 Redpoll; in the scrub, semi-interest was maintained by 5 Blackcap, 5 Chiffchaff plus a few Goldcrest and Treecreeper. However, the really-annoying-bastard-bird-of-the-day was the locustella which flushed from under someone else's boot and instantly disapoofed into a bleeding great swathe of inaccessible (and impenetrable) scrub. I'm assuming it was a Gropper, largely due to the infinitesimally tiny chance of it being anything else, well,... that,... and the fact that just considering the alternatives would likely cause me to experience some form of mental trauma after which purple goo would issue from my ears and I'd never be the same again.