After the usual old guff we plough through at the monthly meetings of the Flintshire Bird Club, we usually have a competition of some sort ... usually a quiz, sometimes identifying slide-show birds, that sort of thing, but this month we had a new one .... we all were wondering why we were asked to bring our optics with us, and here's why. We had what Ted called a "Ring-Wriggling" competition . At one end of the hall, Ted would hold up a stick with a bird-ring on it, and would display it, turn it around, jiggle it a bit etc, for 30 seconds or so and us lot, at the other end of the room, would try to read it using said optics. Interesting, yes, and useful. To add more variety, we started off with them really close up, and we used our bins for those. Then Ted moved back a bit, and the scopes came into their own. At each stage, Ted showed the larger , clearer rings first, then gradually made them smaller and trickier ... it was all very well thought out. He finished up back at the far end. All that time, we were all trying to read as much of each ring as we could. It was amazing how quiet we all were ! We all really got into it, and took it very seriously. Everyone wanted to win !! By the way, The hall isn't big enough to make things like wing-tags and neck-collars small enough to be a challenge..... but in the summer we could try it outside. We won't get the results right away ... there were about 15 of us, and we had a go at about 40 rings .... that's a lot of marking and checking .... and he's giving points for each digit/letter we get right .... sometimes even a partial reading of a ring can be useful. Ted has, apparently, now completed the scores. He's going to email them to all of us quite soon . Assuming we do this again sometime, it would be interesting to see if we "improved" significantly ... I think we would... and I bet some of us are doing a crafty bit of practice of our own ! Mind you, the "jiggling" bit would be tricky. Perhaps you could sellotape the stick to the cat ... or you could fasten it to a metronome ... hey, that would work well, because you can speed them up or slow them down !! Woo ... watch out Ted, you might be superfluous ! I can thoroughly recommend this .... we all enjoyed it, and whatever our scores are, it was an interesting experience. You might say, it was a ringing success. But whatever we do, we musn't let our arch-rivals, the Anti-Flintshire Bird Club hear about any of this. Oh yes .. there is such a thing. In fact, the vast majority of bird clubs like ours has an "anti-" version. But more about that later. .. there's no possible music that could go with that, no way, so I'm just putting this lovely Steely Dan song on here ....
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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