Here I am still trying to give your Wretched Lockdown Life some meaning and direction in these difficult times. I'm sure you will all have been busy Pyramid-ing your many bird books, getting lots of Radio and TV ticks, doing a few of those " Tick Celebration Dances" and suchlike. BUT .... I know you're relying on me to come up with much much more ..... Well, here's a Very Good And Helpful Thing you could get started on..... I put this on here on Post 20 .... which was quite a long time ago .... but it's a Really Good Thing To Do and it will Bring Order and Sense to your records and ,er, scribblings..... ..... here we go ... Years ago I started to use an old empty diary to keep a record of my best birding exploits, rare birds I'd seen, top birding spots visited, drastic dips, etc. That section there ( February 3rd) reminds me that on that day in 1991 I saw the Marton Mere American Bittern. You can also see that on the same day in 2007 I "got" the remarkable Pacific Diver in Knaresborough. My 371th UK bird. So what does it tell me about yesterday ? 29th April. Well, in 1987 I "got" my first Spotted Crake. And in 2004, I "got" 2 Dotterels near Jubilee Tower ... rather a lowish location for them. I've got a drawing I did of them somewhere. If I can find it, it will appear after the music . Then there's all those days when NOTHING HAS EVER HAPPENED. Today, 30th April is one such day .. but ... who knows ... maybe by the end of the day I'll have something to put there. Anyway, I can thoroughly recommend this idea of keeping a sort of multi-year record book of what you did. Even if some days nothing ever happens ... Here they are ... I hope you are suitably impressed. I can still remember standing up after doing that drawing and discovering my Entire Frontal Regions were soaking wet. ... the drawing was OK though ... well, I like it.
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I've had a hard time trying to "get" Sand Martin onto my dinky 3k list in recent outings .... but two days ago I got one .... amongst a 20-strong flock of Swallows + a few House Martins and Swifts. Ace ... .... but yesterday , at a different ,"outside the 3K" body of water, me and The Significant Otter had the excellent sight of 80+ Sand Martins almost covering the whole lake, flitting inches from the surface ... and a few Swallows .. but no Swifts or House Martins. She was impressed ... well, mildly interested, to put it more accurately. And then the drizzle started. Oddly, we were extremely pleased ... there's been NO rain at all here for 19 days ... and that was a tiny bit of drizzle which left nothing in the rain gauge at all... so it hardly counts. Five days before that, and 24 days before now, we got a measly 4mm, and a massive 43 days before now, 18th March to be precise, we had a wacking 8mm. So .... we didn't mind at all that the drizzle drizzled for the rest of the day... we really needed it. But I bet those Sand Martins were a bit miffed. Meanwhile, I've been thinking about that Wren that sounded like a Gibbon when it was cleverly s l o w e d d o w n...... ( See previous post if you haven't heard about it. ) [a] Would a Gibbon's call sound like a Wren when speeded up ? Does anybody know? Has anybody tried ??? [b] Are there lots of other examples of that in the "slowed-down-bird-universe ?" Or in the "speeded-up-mammal" world ? Here's some suggestions ... Speeded-up lion ....... Raven ? Slowed-down Willow-Warbler ...... expiring Kangaroo ? Where's all those boffins and Scientists when you really need them ? On a completely different tack, in the paper today they showed us a photo "released" by the USA purporting to show a UFO. But they haven't contacted me about "mine." Here it is ..on the end, rather mysteriously, of this link .. 313-my-very-own-ufo.html ... make what you can of that ! ... and this ....... What's going on here ? Something's not right . But what ? Eager viewers could well get the wrong idea , don't you think ? Not us, of course. Nope. No way. But what music could go with that ? This .... ..and here's the words video ... you can sing along with TMBG .. lucky you. ..and talking of bird songs, Tweet of the Day was very interesting this morning .... ... it featured The Mighty Wren .... and he slowed the song right down until it resembled the sound of Gibbons in the distant jungles of somewhere-or-other. But the vital thing he didn't tell us was ... .... if you speed the Gibbons up, do they sound like Wrens ? ... now that's what I call a question !! .... reciprocity. .... or not. ... we might get a clue from this ... There's been a few Swifts over the last three days ..but today they came in thick and fast. And every year we think about putting up a Swift box ... but never have. For many years we had a pair of Swifts nesting above next door's back bedroom window, but when some work was done up there the aperture had disappeared ..a familiar problem. (On several occasions I would have to pick a Swift up off the lawn... they can't take flight from the ground ... you have to launch them from the upstairs window ...but be careful .. they are generally covered in fleas and lice.) Anyhow, I knew I had, somewhere in the murky depths of the "office", a booklet all about making nest-boxes .... and amazingly I found it .... it's rather ancient... 1963. And inside there was indeed instructions for a Swift box ... here they are ... Well, that's all fair enough, but my problem is, how the hell do I fix it on our stone-walled house ? I have tried to drill into it for other purposes, and it has always defied my attempts to make any impression on it. And it would be 20x trickier if I was 20 ft up as well. I'm lucky ... had the house been 30 ft high, it would probably have been 30x trickier. Here's some handy advice about keeping pests away .... using "the bouncer" .... ... and here's how to attract the all-important Swifts to your box .... .... ... but nowadays you can get gadgets that emit Swift Screams for a radius of 8 miles around your house. So ... all is pending. How do we ..or rather, I .. attach the things ? I suppose I will have to google it. Grrrr. Or get " a man" in. There's some smashing adverts in the booklet too .. here's an example ... But after all that merriment, the music .... Here's a question for you .... when I've been typing this recently, when I post it onto the blog it comes out in huge letters .... I've tried making the font smaller and smaller but it still comes out massive once I publish it.
What I want to know is, is that what you see as well ... great big print ? Will someone kindly let me know ..and even better, someone out there might know what's going on and how I can fix it. email me at [email protected] or in a Comment. [later ...strangely, 20 minutes, it isn't doing it now ... but it probably will do it again shortly. ] sure enough ... next morning ... it's reverted back to the GIANT stuff. Bah. Grrrr. Note: it's not the upstairs windows that are covered in fleas and lice ... it's the Swifts. This was triggered by a thing on the radio ... somebody mentioned a book called " A Field Guide to the Clergy" ...which I thought was a brilliant idea. I looked it up .... here it is .. oh .. no it isn't ... it won't download. It was The Times Book of the Year in 2018 ... so there !! I'll put some other picture on here instead ... until I can get the proper one ... So ...as I asked you in the title ... how many Field Guides have you got ? I've got Field Guides about ... British Birds Welsh Birds French Birds The Birds of Argentina American Birds ( Eastern) American Birds ( Western) American Birds ( all of 'em) East and Central Africa German Birds Lithuanian Birds Bulgarian Birds The Birds of Quatar Seabirds of the World Shorebirds Mammals Spiders ( British) Dragonflies Moths Pyralid Moths Isopods ( I'm sure you all subscribe to.... Myriapods .... the Myriapod and Isopod Review) Butterflies Hoverflies ( I hope you all get "Hoverfly News") Slugs British Rotifers Wild Flowers Orchids The Moss Flora of the Britain and Ireland Trees Weather The Night Sky and I've invented one as well ... only the Northern Edition so far ... I hope you like my inspirational cover picture ... You can read all about it at the end of this link, which will take you back into the murky depths of this very blog ... 40-the-book-youve-all-been-waiting-for.html ..and there's another " Lockdown Activity" for you ... get out all your Field Guides from under the settee, dust them off, and get using them .... ..... and you could underline random bits ... to baffle future readers. And here's yet another thing for you to ponder about .. What non-existent Field Guide would you like to own ? And here's the music ... there's a snail in it for you to identify .... maybe other things ... There's a very timely article in today's i .... about the importance of sport as a distraction from "real life." The title sums it all up . And it applies to us birders/birdwatchers/twitchers/nature lovers/bird-spotters just as much. ... and ..well, there's a cheerful start ! But "all this" is having a devastating impact on all of us. It doesn't help that the "rules" of lockdown are rather woolly and ill-defined .... and it seems that the police are at times "enforcing" them in a heavy handed and sometimes erratic way. Plus, the "way out" of all this seems to be more and more vague ..... fitting in well with that popular football chant " You don't know what you're doing !" And this next bit shows you how the rituals of "fandom" are vital to their experience. Just as they are for us. ... and all that stuff in the paper ... it matches remarkably with what us lot do .... as does this next bit ... What I've missed most ... and it has surprised me ... is meeting other birders ... at Grumbling Stumps ( now shut of course) mainly .... and I was very pleased to come across two local birders down at the Flood a few days ago.. I even remembered who they were ! Anyway, I'm off for a stroll around my dinky 3k patch ..... and a Buzzard has circled high up over the house this morning . I've only ventured out of the 3k once since the lockdown . Ouch. First Swift of the year flew high north over the house at 11:24 That's early for them here. And while I was out in the garden, 6 House Martins and 2 Swallows. This full-page advert is to be found in the current issue of Nature's Home.... It looks innocent enough, but let's look closely at that bottom left-hand corner ... "DIGITAL ANIMAL IDENTIFICATION ?" Are they telling us that the contraption will ID birds for you ? Well, it certainly looks like it does. Here's what Swarovski's site has to say about it .. THINK SMART The dG is the first long-range optical device to allow you to identify and document your sightings and share them with other people. THE FUTURE OF ANIMAL IDENTIFICATION From 1,650.00 GBP STAY CURIOUS SWARObright SWAROdur SWAROtop dG 8x25 The full potential of the dG is unlocked when you link it to your smartphone. You need the SWAROVSKI OPTIK dG app to connect your dG to mobile devices. It also allows you to connect to apps like Merlin Bird ID and dG Mammals, which help you to identify and share your sightings. This app is available for all current smartphones from the App Store and Google Play. Well ... a long time ago I made my predictions about " The Death of Birding" .... there were lots of other "threats to birding" in what I wrote, but here's the relevant bit .. But there is a much more imminent danger to birding .... any day now, some dickhead will put a new sort of binoculars on the market ...it will have, tucked away inside its gubbins, bird-recognition software which will ID any bird within seconds and name it onscreen. And a range of telescopes that do the same. ¡ Ouch ! Oh, we'll all say we're not getting one of them, but you know what ... soon there just won't be the old sort. But "we", we happy band of real birders, will hold on to our old bins and scope and keep on using them. Maybe we'll have to do it surreptitiously as they will become valuable collectors items and be worth several Banksies ... that's the new currency that's coming in soon. It's a sort of Craptocurrency that will sweep the world. But we can't hold out for ever. It will be The Death Of Birding. But on the plus side, we can revert to type...wandering round the, er. countryside ( the what ?) enjoying ( what?) watching and hearing the birds. ( ?) ( the what ?) How very odd. But it might catch on. Here's the link to the whole thing... 509-the-death-of-birding-2.html ... and here's the music .... absolutely nothing to do with any of that ... Parce qu'on est tous seulement des hommes
On pense que la vie est trop conne Parce qu'on ne sait plus la regarder On ne sait plus se regarder On pense que la vie ne sera bonne Que si l'on passe à la télé c'est pas si dur à réaliser Parce qu'on tous des stars Parce qu'on est tous des stars Sans télé sans miroir Parce qu'on va tout casser Parce qu'on est tous des stars Un jour où l'autre On abandonne Le simple fait d'être des hommes Toujours chercher à chercher ailleurs Parce qu'on est tous des stars Sans télé sans miroir Parce qu'on est tous des stars parce qu'on va tout casser C'est bien le mieux que l'on puisse faire Etre des hommes de tout son coeur juste essayer, juste essayer parce qu'on est tous des stars In the previous post I mentioned a R3 15-minute programme about one man's take on bird migration/seawatching ... and very interesting it was too. They've been on Radio 3 at 10:45 each night this week. But having listened to the next one, I realised he had a format ..starting with the actual birding bit, then moving on to more general musings .... it worked well. On top of that, I got lots of additions to my Lockdown Radio Bird List. Here's the outline of each episode .... You should be able it listen to those on that Listen Again thing .. but I think it has changed the name ... I'll just have a look ... Yes, it is now called BBC Sounds .... type it in and it'll tell you what to do. And now, the inevitable spot of music ..... For at least the last decade, one Edward Grimshaw, a "birdwatcher" in the Bedford area has bombarded the British Birds Rarities Committee with hundreds of rather unusual sightings. Each week, a neat envelope wafts down onto BBRC's doormat. It is, of course, from the aforementioned E.G. And every time, they open it to find ...... .... Edward himself, surrounded by a rather unlikely array of birds. He doesn't actually write anything ..there's no descriptions, no sketches, just him and a crowd of rarities sometimes mixed in occasionally with ordinary stuff. Over all those years, he's never missed a week. He's always outside what we assume to be his local cafe/pub ? So ...the obvious question has to be ... WHY ? But .... who takes the photographs ? Mrs. Edwards ? The young Edwards ?? It seems unlikely. Is he really expecting to get any of them accepted ? Is he delusional ? Is he having a larf ? Is he completely fictional ? Nobody knows ... the address on his letters was visited once by a BBRC representative, but it doesn't exist. The highest-numbered house in the street is No. 83, but his is 305. And here's another odd thing ..... one... just one .... of those pictures actually did have an acceptable rarity in it. In that ivy-encrusted tree in the background,there was a real Short-Toed Treecreeper ! That picture is now framed and hung up in the BBRC office. But .... as there were no details, no description, no nothing, it never got accepted. Here he is ..well, we assume it's him..... this was the first picture he sent in. ...and all the rest have been in the same style. They have even tracked down which publications he has cut the pictures out of, not that it has led to anything. So ... if you know this bloke, even if it's just " knowing where he goes birding" the BBRC would love to know who he is, and why he does it. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ OK ...that's the main thing done. Last night there was ..amazingly ... a 15-minute programme about "seawatching." You can probably get it on that "Listen Again" thingy. Or whatever they call it nowadays. Well worth a listen. As is this ....... After all the excitement and drama of my " Lockdown TV Bird List" ..... 839-the-long-awaited-tv-list.html ...... I'm now going to show you the current state of my Lockdown Radio List. It may be short, but it is hard-won. Any old twerp can spot Swans and Peregrines on the TV, but with the radio you've got to work and listen a lot harder. Except, of course, with Tweet of the Day ( ToThD) ... sitting ducks, they are. But I m not proud ... I tick'em and stick'em on the list. Anyhow, here's what I've "terned" up so far .... Hoopoe ( that Checkov play) Gannet ( ToThD) Arctic Tern (ToThD) Willow Warbler (Uncle Mort's North Country) Robin Ditto Kestrel ( "mentioned" on the above) Mute Swan (ditto) Whitethroat (ditto) Cockatiel On the News, I think. Gt. Skua ( ToThD) Golden Oriole (ditto) Lesser Whitethroat (ditto) Mute Swans "mentioned" on "The Now Show" Turtle Dove TothD Robin a rather barmy one on " The Mill on the Floss" Tawny Owl Horrible Histories Corncrake ToThD Little Tern ditto Tree Pipit ditto Herring Gull ditto ( he said it had a red-tipped bill, which it doesn't) Spotted Flycatcher ditto Swallows ditto ( Monty Don likes them) ( I'm surprised I haven't "got" any on the Archers) Late yesterday afternoon I strolled down to the Flood .... and looked for, but didn't find ... Wheatears and Sand Martins .... bah and humbug. BUT ... the Flood did turn up 2 Stock Doves and a variety of Wags .... Pied. White, Yellow and Blue-Headed. I happily hobbled homewards, and my 5th Swallow of the year circled around me as I approached the house. It kindly stuck to the Social Distancing Rules, in contrast to the hordes of bloody cyclists and joggers who think they can do what they like. But now ... moody music ... Noir Désir .. A La Longue Je me love dans tes bras Et je n'aimerai que toi A la longue
Je t'aime et dans mes bras Toi si tu ne love que moi On prolonge Ton man'ge m'enchantait Tournoyait Autour du sentiment de S'y noyer Et la terre s'est mise à valser Sûr que le fond des cendriers N'est pas net Toi tu m'appelles au secours Ma chère folie et mon amour Ma planète Et tu veux du silence En veux-tu ? Des années-lumière blanches Par dessus Il y a le bruissement de tes ailes Et les grands souffles qui nous appellent A la longue Toujours des fleuves qui remontent Et des vomissures qui me comptent Parmi elles L'or c'est sûr n'est pas loin Cherche bien Des sutures et des points N'y font rien D'o' vient cette créature en robe longue Et cette fusée encore oblongue Qui se dresse Elle est fière et droite comme un I Qui peut deviner comment lui Dire qu'elle cesse |
AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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