Wouldn't it be brilliant if there was an episode of Springwatch where it all went wrong !? Let's face it folks, when WE go out in search of birds, butterflies, bees, foxes ,whatever turns you on, it doesn't always work out the way we want it to. No ....many a time we'll get back home and realise we've seen almost nowt. But do we think .. " Stuff this for a game of soldiers?" No ... next day, off we go, ever hopeful. And when you come to think about it, programs like Springwatch will give the eager viewers a totally false idea about what birders actually experience. Because we get an artificially exaggerated "engineered" scenario. Ospreys, badgers, wrongly identified seabirds, Treecreeper nests ... it is nothing more than a merry-go-round of crackers. So ... I demand an episode in which they turn to the "presenter in a ditch" but he/she hasn't seen or filmed anything, so they skip across to Skegness for gannets and porpoises which haven't turned up so there's no films to show the eager viewers, so they promptly nip over to The New Forest and yet another dungareed and manic "nature lover" with nothing to show us and nothing to report who has to witter on for the required " 7½ minute slot" about, er, nothing. That would be fun. And it would be "real." Just the once would do. And there's some birds in this too ..
0 Comments
Amazingly, some twitchers are really unscrupulous obsessive sycophants with more money than morals ! Blimey ! Who knew ? And there was me thinking they were all lovely, generous types. But this article from the Guardian has made me see "The Other Side". Read on ... Twitching – British birdwatching goes bad as spotters ramp up competition Hardcore enthusiasts on the UK's birding circuit go to nasty extremes to gain a competitive edge over their rivals Garry Bagnell is cruising down a country road in Great Yarmouth, England, when his beeper lights up with a bulletin. A shorelark – a distinctive bird with yellow and black markings – took a wrong turn somewhere over Norway and is getting its bearings on a beach an hour's drive north. Time to step on the gas. "I need that bird, I need it," said Bagnell, a 46-year-old accountant and hardcore practitioner of British twitching, or extreme – and extremely competitive – birdwatching. "When a bird you haven't seen drops, you've got to chase it. That's going to bring me up to 300 [different species] spotted for the year. You don't understand how competitive this is. For some people, this is life and death." In other countries, the world of birdwatching may be a largely gentle place ruled by calm, binocular-toting souls who patiently wait for their reward. But in Britain, it can be a truly savage domain, a nest of intrigue, fierce rivalries and legal disputes. Fluttering somewhere between sport and passion, it can leave in its path a grim tableau of ruined marriages, traffic chaos and pride, both wounded and stoked. This is the wild, wild world of British twitching. Britain isn't the only place that has hatched a culture of fierce birdwatching. In the United States, book-turned-Hollywood-film The Big Year chronicled the quest of three men vying in long-held American competitions to spot the most species in a single year. Nevertheless, observers say the intensity of the rivalries and the small size of the twitching community – in the thousands – have singled out British birders as some of the world's most relentless. One of the fiercest rivalries, for instance, involves Bagnell's former mentor, now nemesis: bird guide Lee Evans, 53. Evans, who dubs himself the "judge, jury and executioner" of birdwatching in Britain and keeps his own twitcher rankings, has long been challenged by 41-year-old grocer Adrian Webb. To take on the master, Webb took 12 months off from work in 2000, spending $22,000 and driving 140,000km to break Evans's record of 386 species of birds seen on the British Isles in one year. They trash-talk on the birding circuit like prizefighters. Webb is known to drop his grocer's apron to chase a rare bird and claims to have broken Evans's record in 2000. Evans – a polarising figure on the birding circuit – does not recognise Webb's claim to the title. "In America, birdwatching is still mostly a pastime," said Evans, who is on his fourth marriage and blames his divorces partly on his obsession with twitching. "But in Britain, birdwatching can be bitter. It can be real nasty business." Evans also insists he has been the victim of underhand tricks, citing an incident when he was racing to see a rare bird in Scotland. He had lined up a plane to take him to a sighting on a remote island, only to find that a group of rival birders had stuffed the palm of his pilot "with a few extra quid" to take them instead. A term coined in the 1960s to describe the jaw-rattling sound of chasing after rare birds on rumbling motorbikes, "twitchers" are narrowly defined as bird-watchers willing to drop everything to chase a sighting. More broadly, it includes those who see a bird within a few days of an urgent bulletin. These bulletins are typically sent out by services such as the Rare Bird Alert, which obtains its information in real time from a vast network of birdwatchers across Britain. Once notified of a sighting, the service issues urgent messages to its 21,000 subscribers via pay-by-the-month pagers and smartphone apps. In one of dozens of similar scenes of "twitcher madness" in Britain, police were forced to cordon off streets after hundreds of desperate birdwatchers descended on a suburban home in Hampshire in 2012 to see a rare Spanish sparrow. (Garry Bagnell looks for a shorelark at Great Yarmouth. Unsuccessful sightings are known as 'dips') For a mostly male sport with an average age over 50, however, twitching can also tempt fate. Last October, a top British twitcher, Tim Lawman, had a heart attack while on the trail of a Radde's warbler in Hampshire. "It was a new bird for him, and in all the excitement of rushing to see it, he just keeled over and died," Evans said. A smartphone app to help British birders is being advertised as an essential tool when "there have even been recent cases of violent clashes between bird watchers as people desperately try to get the very best spots". In 2009, Bagnell said, he and other twitchers were aghast when two elderly rivals on the circuit went for each other's throats. "One was saying he'd seen a bird, and the other said he didn't believe him," Bagnell said. ( I recommend Post 884 ..just two posts back, dear readers .... highly relevant ) ( OK ... you're back now ... ) Though most twitchers are bird-lovers*, the sport is mostly about the chase. Bagnell, for instance, drove 90 minutes and searched the ground for a half-hour before he spotted the coy shorelark in beach scrub. He eyed it for a few moments before tweeting his find, then moved on. "I've got another bird to get three hours away," he said. The most unfortunate twitchers race many kilometres to spot a bird only to find that their flighty subjects have flown off – a bummer known in the twitching world as a "dip". One of the most infamous dips came as Webb pursued a long-tailed shrike in the Outer Hebrides off mainland Scotland. The boat he and 12 others had hired died in choppy waters, forcing a daring rescue by Her Majesty's Coastguard. "We were worried for our lives for a bit, but we were more worried about not seeing this bird," he said. Within the world of twitching, there are countless rankings – lifetime lists, annual lists, semiofficial lists, slightly more official lists – which are predicated on evidence. When you saw that velvet scoter wading in Wales, were there witnesses? Photographs? If not, claims all come down to trust. Many see twitching as an outcrop of the British fascination with "spotting" things – most notoriously, trainspotting, a hobby that involves the obsessive pursuit of seeing as many locomotives with your own eyes as humanly possible. But others say it may simply be a case of boys who refuse to grow up. "Years ago, British boys used to spend their childhoods collecting birds' eggs – now you wouldn't dream of doing such a thing," said Brian Egan, manager of the Rare Bird Alert. "But what they can do as adults is chase sightings of rare birds. So that's what they do." * Oh no they aren't . Well, mostly. Surely there'll come a time when the bubble bursts ? Eventually he sun will collapse into itself, then expand and snuff us all out. Supernova -ishly More pressingly ...what music could go with that? Ni dan y ser,
Ai a ti i'r hudol le tan y wawr, Chwarae'r nos a bore, Dim ond i ni, Byth yn blino, byth yn colli egni, Ffwrdd a ni! Paid trio gwadu beth sydd o flaen dy lygaid, Dyma'n amser ni nawr, Paid trio gwadu y wen sydd yn dy lygaid, Meddwi ar y swigod ti a fi. O chwytha dy swigod arna i (x 3) Mae fel yfed swigod. Aur yw popeth melyn, Cymryd drosodd yeah yn mynd syth i'm mhen, Dyma'm nerth a'm gwendid, Sdim eira gwyn pan mae'r swigod yn gogleisio fel hyn. So beth os mae'n bwriad ni yw i ddadeni? Dyma'n amser ni nawr, So beth os nag y nhw'n rhannu yr eironi? Meddwi ar y swigod ti a fi. O chwytha dy swigod arna i (x 3) Mae fel yfed swigod. .... or trying to. I've often tried, but without much luck ...they will keep flapping about with no sympathy for us snappers. But there we were, The Significant Otter and Me, sat in the car in a lay-by on a road that does not exist on any map at all. Truly. Not on our OS maps at any scale, nor on any local maps, nowt, zilch and nuffink. I've even asked in the Town Hall to see if they had one, and in the local " Travel Information Office" ... nope. .and it is a proper road, with lorries, vans, cars, motorbikes whizzing along it day and night. Anyway, having discovered that the SO had forgotten to bring the picnic with us, we just sat there like puddings ...and then a kestrel appeared. And I got out my dinky crapsnapping camera and "reeled off" a few "shots" as those in the trade call them. It was flapping about like mad the whole time, so I had no great expectations of success, especially as I'd got the camera from the old curiosity shop on the industrial estate, and I didn't haggle about the price because I could tell he was having hard times.... ..... and this next one wasn't too bad, in the circumstances. I've showed these next two to our mutual friend Boris, well known for his drawing skills, as he has shown in his notable book, Sketches by Boz, mostly featuring his pet House Martin, "Chuzzlewit". .but what the dickens is this last one ? At first glance I took it to be a startled squirrel .. but I showed it to an acquaintance of mine I met last Christmas ,Carol, and she confirmed that is was indeed a kestrel, although a rather odd-looking one. But enough of this rambling old rubbish, Master Humphrey's clock is ticking away our tiny lives .... so on with the music .. the time to snap the wily kestrel is to wait for the " points of suspension" which give you the best chances of getting a sharp-snap of it .... So ... I'm with my lifelong " birding buddy" and we're looking at a distant "little brown job" in a faraway hedge. You're thinking " Ooh , it has to be a Velvety Scrublover ... a first for Flintshire. And I'm thinking " Cripes, it has to be a Purplish Leafcreeper, a first for Britain. And after 15 or so tense minutes, we turn to each other and simultaneously say .. It's It's a a Velvety Purplish Scrublover Leafcreeper " And then an argument breaks out. It goes on and on. It gets more and more heated. And nasty. And personal. And we each get into our cars, slam the doors, vowing never to meet again. And neither of us even suggests the concept that they might BOTH be wrong. It didn't get a look-in. Not a whisper. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Hmmm ... I wonder if something similar .... but maybe not quite so vitriolic ... has ever happened to you. And think about this ... I suspect that the BBRC has sometimes had two descriptions of the same bird, in the same place, and the same time and date, but identified as different species. Well, I'm sure it must have happened many times. Sometimes it might be the " two-bird" scenario. But not always. But now, the music ... I've found another beautiful performance of " Valiente" .... (=brave) ... and you have to be brave to admit that you might be wrong. Tras de mí,
Yes, this is certainly a crapsnap ... which I snapped 3 days ago with a tiny keep-in-the-car crapcam which I keep in the car just in case I need to take said crapsnaps. So .. what's on there ? There's more than first meets the eye. Here's the same scene a minute later .... ... and later still .... Nearly all the bird photos we see are feather-sharp telephoto-lens whizzers . |
AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
|