Yes ... a couple of days ago I was at Grumbling Stumps (our code name for the local nature reserve) and I encountered somebody I hadn't seen for yonks. He's one of the UK's top birders too. So there. We talked of various things for half an hour or so..... and over that 30 minutes he systematically and skillfully managed, bit by bit, to strip away just about every scrap of my (admittedly slight) confidence as any sort of birder at all. In the course of a string of tricky questions about various remote island birding locations,, tricky ID issues, rarity-finding, Fox Sparrows etc my self-built edifice of competence was reduced to a crumbling shack of shit. He was especially scathing about my lack of a smartphone. When he wasn't talking to me, he was talking to his. How bizarre ! As I stumbled homewards I considered my options. Should I do the decent thing and pass on my binoculars, such as they are, to some more deserving upstart? Should I donate my copies of Scottish Birding, Not BB and the Flintshire Bird Club reports 1987-2017 to Oxfam ? Probably that would be the right thing to do. But then I thought .... hang on, I hadn't even seen that bloke for about 12 years ... and I probably won't see him for another 12 ... by which time I'm rather looking forwards to being dead. Being dead is one of my main ambitions. And it's achievable. And from my point of view, cheap. And it might be popular. Come to think of it, it might be very popular. So I thought ... what the hell, I'll just carry on being a twerp in my own tiny way. I did that all day yesterday to see how it felt. It felt OK actually. And I saw my first Comma of the year. And I rescued a tangled-up Coal Tit. I even let a wasp out of the house so it wouldn't just dehydrate into a lump of keratin. And today, I'm almost back to normal. The Twerps Twerp ! At least that's one heap I'm on the top of.
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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