You might not know what the purpose of this picture is now, but you will by the time you've read this post.. I've explained all about the excellent game of " ghostbirds" or whatever you like to call it, many times. for example .... 250-things-to-do-in-the-car-31-ghostsbirds.html Well, yesterday I was parked waiting for, you'll never guess, The Significant Otter and there in front of me were two of them ..... HAN and DNO. They were the 3-letter bits of two car number plates. They're all you need for the "ghostbirding" game. I sat there wondering what birds they were the ghost of for a while, trying to think up obscure species. But without much luck. At this point, just in case you haven't done what I told you and followed that link, I'll give you a couple of for instances.... but not "doing" birds ... just any old words. HAN first ... it is the GHOST of, for example , CHEATING Because you could blast away some letters .... leaving CHEATING = HAN DNO is the "ghost" of, eg, ADENOIDS ......... ADENOIDS = DNO But YOU need to find a bird, not any other pathetic words like those. There was me trying to think up something fancy, but actually they're both easy. I got them eventually. But can you ? Once you've learned what to do, you've got a great new game you can play almost anywhere. But especially in't car, using the three letters on car number plates. ......... now you could go back to that picture up at the top and " do" it. ...easy-peasy . If you're stuck, why not listen to this highly relevant song ....
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Here's a perfectly good footy player who has been promoted into "Avian Reassignment " ............. When you go to Minsmere, if you actually manage to find it that is, you will find just down from reception a wonderful long avenue of Buddleias .... and in the summer it's a wonderful place for butterflies both common and rare. And lots of other insects too. Brilliant. It's a relatively cheap and easy way to get a spectacular start to the Minsmere experience. BUT ...at Grumbling Stumps they've spent oodles of cash "redoing" the post-reception area, but what have they got for it .... crap, that's what. They must have spent a fortune over the months and months it took to do all the stone paths and stone walls, all very slippery and dangerous ( lots of sharp edges for the kiddies to bash their skulls in) and ugly. The planting is very sparse and attracts almost nothing, there's some soggy, gloomy picnic tables, a ridiculously tiny and murky "pond", and some things kids can make a lot of noise with. Basically, it's rubbish. Did I mention it was very expensive and took months and months to get it finished ? That is a classic case of duff management ! And why do we have duff management ? Well, what happens is, people who are good at their job get promoted. And eventually they get promoted into a job they aren't very good at. And that's where they stay. Often for most of their career. So excellent birdwatchers get promoted into management, which isn't their thing. So the organisation loses a good worker, and promotes them into failure. The Peter Principle...... that's what we call it. It's a "thing." And a stupid thing. An unfortunate but ubiquitous thing. Think of Boris Johnson. Actually .... maybe you shouldn't. Here's a totally unrelated spot of music .... Leafing through an ancient copy of "Birding Scotland" .. the very first one actually, Volume 1, #1 , Jan 1998 ..... I found this dinky paragraph ... UK 250 Club There are moves in some birding circles to move away from pure list totals for birds seen ( where the field craft element and identification skill is often minimal) to one that includes only birds found by the observer. This UK 250 Club is currently being set up and those wishing further information should contact Andy Webb, via the Birding Scotland office. ( Birding Scotland, Pica Design, 259 Union Grove, Aberdeen AB10 6SX ) ......................................................... Well .... a smashing idea I reckon. But not all smashing ideas ever lead to anything. I wondered what happened to that one. I had to wade through several 250 clubs of various types. But then I found this ..... Rules of the UK 250 Club The UK 250 Club is a club for people who have found at least 250 bird species in Great Britain and Ireland (GB & I). The Club aims to promote the skill of finding birds in the UK. It is intended as a fun and different way of looking at lists, and must not be seen as excessively competitive. UK 250 Club supports nature conservation by promoting the submission of bird records to local bird recorders. There are many definitions of what constitutes a find. The purpose of these rules is to remove inconsistencies between these definitions and allow comparison between find lists. Inevitably, the situations in which people find birds are complex. Therefore the UK 250 Club must work on the principles of honesty and genuine surprise. In order to become a member of the UK 250 Club, you need to submit the total number of bird species found by the rules listed below. The UK 250 Club Committee will request full lists from members in order to carry out an initial check. These full lists will be made available to any other UK 250 Club member who might request it. The UK 250 Club Committee will adjudicate in the event of disputed finds. 1. The geographical limits all bird finds will be those of the Great Britain and Ireland (GB & I). These are the political entities of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the Isle of Man. The boundary extends offshore to 200 nautical miles, or if closer, the median line between adjacent countries. 2. All bird species found, must be on categories A or C of the British List as determined by the British Ornithologists Union. 3. All birds, if applicable, must have been accepted by the records committee appropriate to the rarity and location of the find. This may require a description of the bird to be submitted to the local records committee, the Irish Rarities Committee, the NI Rarities Committee, the Scottish Birds Records Committee, the Welsh Rarities Committee, the British Birds Rarities Committee or the British Ornithologists Union Records Committee. It is not sufficient to be named as an observer in the relevant rarity report to count a species as a find. 4. The discovery of a bird must be a genuine surprise. Therefore, if your find doesn't constitute an original observation, you must prove that you were completely ignorant of the bird being present at that site. For example, if you find a bird at a particular site, but learn later that someone else had already found the bird there beforehand, you must be able establish that you did not receive any information of the bird's presence there. 5. A re-find must come as a genuine surprise. A re-find will invariably involve a local or national rarity. If there is a sufficient gap in time or place, such that the appropriate rarity report cites the observation complete with the re-finders' names, then it can be counted as a find. 6. All species which breed commonly in GB & I (i.e. not on Schedule 1 of the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act) can be classed as found without the principle of "genuine surprise" applying (Rules 4 & 5). All other rules of the UK 250 Club still apply; in other words, these species must still have been found and identified by yourself. A list of rare breeding birds on Schedule 1 which can also be counted in this way is given in Appendix 1 at the end of the rules. This is due to these species being so sedentary and restricted in their geographical range and habitat that finding them away from their well known breeding areas would be virtually impossible. All other Schedule 1 species have to be found away from known breeding areas by the normal finding rules of the UK 250 Club. 7. Under normal circumstances, the person who finds a bird will have discovered it and correctly identified it. However, more than one person can find a particular bird if any of the conditions in Rules 8, 9 or, 10 are met. 8. If the person who discovers the bird does not identify the bird to the correct species, he or she must have ruled out all but the principal confusion species to count it as a find. The person (or persons - see Rule 10) who, having seen the bird, first correctly identifies it may also count it as a find. 9. More than one person can claim to have identified a bird if they vocalise or otherwise indicate that they have arrived at the correct identification more or less simultaneously. Honesty is paramount when deciding if the utterance given in the excitement of a find constitutes a correct identification. 10. More than one person, but no more than three, can claim to have identified a bird if the identification evolves over a period of time. In these cases, the persons claiming this record as a find must all fully contribute to the identification of the bird. Appendix 1 Species on Schedule 1 of the W & C Act (1981) which can be found without the principles of genuine surprise applying (see Rule 6). Capercaillie Ptarmigan Dartford Warbler Crested Tit Chough Scottish Crossbill Cirl Bunting Rules devised by Andy Webb, Ben Miller and Phil Hansboro UK 250 Club Rules 21/11/97 Copyright (c) UK 250 Club ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Well well ! Those rules are bit complicated . But ...look at that date at the bottom. That's a long time ago. So ..is it still going ? I'm not sure ... I looked at the Surfbirds site, but only found a tiny reference to it describing the bare outlines of what it does. BUT ..surely, if it was still going, it would come up straight away . With lots of lists and latest news and "harticles" and suchlike. I suspect it isn't "going" any more. But that would be such a shame. Does anyone out there in the real world know ? Yes, I know there's a few missing off the bottom .... I couldn't get it all in .... ..and a few missed off that one too ... but what I've been leading up to ..or rather, down to ... is this next bit ... because The King of Bryher and The Flat Controller are both there ! And ...they're a long long way down, are they not !! Oh yes. Fair enough ... it was a long time ago ... but I suspect that they're STILL quite a long way down. In case you don't know, and maybe you don't care, but anyway, here's the magazine all that came from ... That's a huge goldmine of information that is. How many of that lot have "bird"names ? How many of them are called .... [a] Pete [b] Dave [c] Mark [d] Steve [e] Jeff/Geoff [f] Andy [g] Keith [h] Mike ... here's more ... [b] How many of them are female ? [c] How many have hyphenated surnames ? [d] How might all those answers have changed over the years ? .... and here's a little poem I wrote about the King of Bryher, in the truly awful style of "The Worst Poet in the World", William McGonagall ...... well worth a second look ...... The King of Bryher This afternoon I met The King of Bryher and yes ... it is the truth ...I'm not a liar. He wore a crown engraved " The King of Bryher" so there was no need at all at all for me to inquire and throughout the sultry afternoon I called him " sire." Oh how I wish I was The King of Bryher in that role I would never retire from being the The King of Bryher and there's only one way to be The King of Bryher. Your "Bryher list" must be remarkably higher which can take a considerable time to acquire. But to be The King of Bryher is rather grand for Bryher is indeed a lovely land surrounded by the sea on every hand as islands are, as all must understand. He rules the isle, its rocks, its birds, its sand, its hedgerows, outcrops, hilltops, hillocks and some do compare it to fair Samarkand which is truly a remarkable and distant foreign land and undoubtedly surrounded by considerable hinterland. And when I am The King of Bryher when I pass by, the people will inquire who is that man who wears the princely crown ? Surely a man of worldwide reknown who will forever wear his kingly crown till Bryher's sea uprises, whence he'll drown. And on his gravestone, from rock of Bryher made his list of Bryher ticks will be displayed and he, interred beneath with knightly crown flesh gone to dust, resembles most a clown ! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I'd have called it a parody, but you can't really parody a Mcgonagall job ! Hey ..sometimes I put a song on here just because I like it.... strange, but true. I found this picture in a recent newspaper .... it was really an article about nematodes ! But in the meantime, what do you reckon about the ID of those gulls ? Here's the text that went with it .... food for thought I reckon, but it isn't such startling news as you might think. We're awash with the things. The nematodes, that is, not the gulls. That ties in very nicely with the "discovery" ....even though we've known this for decades .... that forests are underpinned ( literally) by a vast ginormous network of fungal hyphae which pervade the soil and without which the forest itself would be considerably less viable. If at all. It seems that the "small stuff" is probably far more important than the "big stuff." Who would have thought it ? But what about that Dominic Cummings , the Evil Genius of Brexit ? He's full of nematodes, I feel quite sorry for them. What have they done to finish up inside him ? In the fullness of time, he will be invaded by fungal hyphae as well. As will we all. No escaping them. And when he gets fungified, for once he might be doing something useful. Here's a bit of relevance .... "Won't Get Fooled Again" But no doubt we will.
A (long ?) while ago I wrote about an extremely short.... but unsuccessful .... twitch. It was, also unfortunately, fictional. But ..... it got me thinking .... what was your shortest twitch ? One of mine was only about 20 yards..... a local birder knocked on my door to tell me there was a Common Crane up there in the sky. I whizzed up the street about 20 yards to his already-positioned scope and there it was .... way up, but totally recognisable .... then I walked backwards until I was in my front "garden", so I could count it on the house list as well. Then I had a look at it through the bins so it would be on the "Zeiss list" ... ace. I think that's the rarest bird on my house list. Another v-close-to-home "twitch" was a Woodchat Shrike just 30 mins walk from my house. I was mighty mad that I didn't find it ..... I go by there quite often. And there was another feeling about it, one that happens to me a lot these days ... it would have been such a disastrous "miss" if I didn't see it that I nearly didn't even bother to have a try. After all, it wasn't a tick anyway. I'd seen them before. But as the day wore on, I snapped ! I trundled down there and "got " it. But I kept a good distance away from the crowd ... didn't go anywhere near the "congregation" but scoped it from a distance. Because I knew full well that there would be all that " how come you didn't find it then" and all that " you're the man on the spot, where were you ? " stuff that would have made things worse. And if you're thinking ..."what an odd attitude that is" ...just wait till you get older. I'm not the only one who gets those " don't want to go and not see it" thoughts. Probably because you know your time above ground is running out and having missed something that'll might have been your last chance. So better just not to try ? The jury's probably out on that one. I'm sure I thought of a "name" for that feeling .... it's on the tips of my fingers ... So! Farewell then ..... Theresa May. You should have been a headmistress at a minor girl's academy in Deepest Dorchester. I'm sure you would have had a rota for the 6th form to replenish the bird feeders. But now we have Doris ! [His real name is not Boris. So I have thought one up myself.] The word PRAT somehow seems inadequate as does he ... in spades. And boy is he busy digging. Let's all hope and pray that it will be his own grave and not ours. ( In the style of E.J.Thribb, 17¼) ( Doris, by the way, is the name of a Sea Slug ... how wonderful !) This next bit is in the "style" of ME ... This seemed to be suitable, the right sort of song and totally singable so please sing along if and when our country's going down the pan we know who's the guilty man he's amazingly like that Donald Lump they both could do with a rocket up the rump but people seem to like those heaps of shit but they might find themselves eating it when the money runs out and the pound's worth zero ..... maybe they're the modern version of that Emperor Nero. This song ,in the circs, is astonishingly cheerful so while there's time, you should get an earful ! I can't help wondering if anyone would notice if they swapped places for a few weeks.
Do you remember .... when nobody had a telescope and if they did, they didn't have a tripod and there were only 4 sorts of binoculars [1] ex-army, [2] ex-navy, [3] too cheap, [4] too expensive there was no such thing as "birding" or twitchers and you learned about rarities by postcard or in a newspaper 3 weeks later but mostly not at all, although ... my first two were in The Daily Telegraph and The Belfast Telegraph and there were only " Collins" or "The Observers Book of Birds" written by the rather forbidding "Severe Benson" and no " phone-up" news services and no pagers and no smartphones and no 400+ listers and the YOC was the Junior Bird Recorders Club which I didn't join because ... I thought you had to have a tape recorder and were recording birds with it and Corncrakes weren't rare. but Little Egrets were and cameras had "film" in them which took weeks to come back from the chemist or didn't come back at all and half of the pictures were crap and there were no computers and therefore no blogs especially ones like this ..... Two posts ago, I wondered how many individual birds there were in the world. A big, deep and probably unknowable thing. One source ( Source C ) suggested we could start by knowing how many individual birds any one person in the world sees in a day. He estimated it to be 100 or so. I don't quite see how that would help, to be honest, but yesterday I tried it for myself. Anything to stave off the infinitely mysterious universe, eh ! Well,by 0840 and I'd seen 287 already .... just by walking along my local waterway Seriously. No kidding. I couldn't carry on like that ! My brain would probably melt down into a little grey pellet of mush. I might have to buy a new pencil. Source C seems to be underestimating things considerably with his/her "100 per day . I didn't "do" much else until mid-afternoon, when I went to the seaside ... if you could call it that. A couple of hours there got me up to 984. That's counting the few extra birds I spotted on the way back. I didn't venture out again until darkness was descending, in the hope of a couple of owls, but they were not to to be. So 984 it is. BUT ..... chance played a big part. For example ..had we turned up at the seaside at a different time, the tide would have been right in, and I wouldn't have "got" that huge 534-strong mixed gull flock, nor the 87 feral pigeons on the salt-marshy bit. Just chance . Ok .... but ..how do I convert that 984 figure into some idea of the number of individual birds in the world ? I've no idea. Source C implies that you just multiply it by the number of people in the world. But that can't be right ! That gull flock would have been seen by hundreds of people. And those swifts and hirundines over my house will have been seen by loads of local people, even if they might not have known which was which. And so will the 7 juv L-T-Tits that were on the feeders first thing. So what do I multiply 984 by to get the number of individual birds in the world ? What was that number that was the key to life, the universe and everything ? 49 I think. 49 x 984 = 50 x 984 - 984 = 98400/2 - 1000 + 16 = 48200 + 16 = 48216 individual birds in the entire world. But 48216 individual birds in the world seems a bit small. Let's stick a few zeros onto the end of it. It's what "scientists" do ...... 4,821,600,000 How many billions that is depends on where you live. The old UK meaning of a billion was a million million, or one followed by twelve noughts (1,000,000,000,000). The USA meaning of a billion is a thousand million, or one followed by nine noughts (1,000,000,000). Increasingly in this country we are using the USA meaning of a billion for these big numbers,... So assuming they're all using US billions these days ..... ..... that's just over 4.8 billions ! Coo ! Crumbs ! Briwsion ! Gott in Himmel ! But to be honest, I still can't see how you can work it out properly from a count like that.... or even hundreds of counts like that. It is probably something we'll never know ... and as I said in the first thing I wrote about it, that's fine by me. These " magic numbers" ... they're all just a shot in the dark .... Shorts ! No binoculars ! !Trainers !!! Smiling !!! A blasted "Nature Lover" !!!!!!!!!! As soon as I had written that thing about the massive infestation in the UK of hordes of blinking blasted " Nature Lovers" I e-mailed the BBRC about setting up a new committee to monitor them, just as they monitor rarities. They immediately created The Nature Lovers Records Committee. They "agreed to the need" for "that sort of thing" straight away ,and not surprisingly, sightings soon came flooding in by the sackload. If you see a Nature Lover in your patch, the NLRC would love to hear from you. Your submission should look much like a rarity submission, with all the usual data including date, time, duration of sighting, any relevant behaviour patterns, such a pick-nicking, not having proper binoculars, or not having any binoculars, carrying a "baby" on "back", pointing at birds, picking up snails from a path and putting it them in a safe place, spending hours in Red Squirrel hides, wearing shorts of any kind at all, especially gaudily patterned ones, or sandals, or "trainers", having a female/male companion, buying bird tea-towels, talking about non-nature-related matters, smiling, and/or any other "softy" stuff. Plus of course your relevant past experiences with "people like that." They don't want any photographs though. Who wants to look at "Nature Lovers ?" The NLRC is dedicated to wiping out all "that sort of thing" within a realistic " time-frame" as yet to be determined. At last "something" is being "done. " And as for " Coach Trippers" ... don't let's start ! ..and here, "The singalong version " ... go on, have ago .... Hey ...I forgot to include those Nature Lovers with big long walking poles.
And maps round their necks in plastic folders. |
AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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