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27th-30th March, Scotland
- Let's go to Lewis to see the Snowy Owls.
- But what about work and money and stuff?
- Fuck it. We're rebels. We don't follow petty rules and
regulations. We're the MTV generation. We didn't grow up
listening to New Kids on the Block, East 17 and Right Said
Fred only to ignore
the lessons of life that they had to preach. Did the words
to Milli Vanilli's 'Girl you know it's true' mean
absolutely nothing to you? Authority and bureaucracy has no
place in my life - hey Mr Politician, we don't hear your
jive talk, fool!
Fuck all that. And do you know why (we should fuck all
that)? Because there were no Snowy Owls, that's why. Not
one. They were both there showing well on Tuesday but when
we arrived on Wednesday both of the fuckers had fucked off
for good. Bastards. At least there would be a White-billed
Diver or two as compensation - well, you'd think so wouldn't
you? And were there any White-billed Divers? No. Not one
single twat White-billed Diver. So, in essence, it was
basically a complete fucking shit hole waste of time.
Bollocks. And you want some more swearing? Do you? Well I
also lost my fucking bastard fucking mobile twat phone SIM
card as well and now have to pay the cunts at Orange for the
privilege of a fucking new one, even though I've got a piece
of shit fucking contract with the wankers. How's that for swearing, you
fuckers?
Okay, enough of the mindless swearing. It's neither big nor
clever. Back to the intelligent, thought provoking, often
witty and always enlightening style that you're used to.
Loch Venachar
Our first stop on the way to not see the Snowy Owls (and
White-billed Divers) was Loch Venachar to not see the
Barrow's Goldeneye. I didn't care because
I saw a proper wild one in Aberdeen in 2005; Miss Cole has never
seen one but she still didn't give a shit - mindless
anarchy! Nice place though.
***
Aviemore
As our boat wasn't until the next evening we stayed the
night in Aviemore consuming the following junk food on the
way:
The full inventory is two empty
packets of McCoy's salt and vinegar crisps (or potato chips
as everyone else in the world calls them), six empty
Breakaway wrappers, six empty Fox's Classic wrappers and two
empty cartons of battered sausage and chips. We then washed this down in the pub with
a piss poor pint of expensive fizzy continental lager and a healthy
dose of Scottish journalistic cynicism:
***
Abernethy Forest
After such a terrible diet, the next morning I was literally
pulling strips of dead flesh off the inside of my mouth as
we walked into an undisclosed location somewhere near to an
undisclosed town just before sunrise.
Abernethy Forest is filled with invisible Capercaillies, or 'the
horse of the woods' as its ye olde Gaelic translation
supposedly means (that's a pretty strange looking horse if
you ask me), and we were treated to our usual fantastic
0.5 second view of a female smashing through the branches
and vanishing into the forest. No matter how quietly you
walk, no matter how much cunning field craft and stealth you
deploy, you can never get the better of a Caper - they will
always see you coming way, way, way before you see them. I'd
love to be attacked by a rogue male, though I'd probably
regret having wished it if it did actually happen to me. If
anyone ever hears of an insane rogue, like Mad George in
the 80s-90s, please let me know. Here's Attenborough getting
battered by one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xSj5XcByuA
***
Loch Glascarnoch
The drive from Aviemore to Ullapool is the longest in the
world - you see a sign saying 36 miles and then half an hour
later it says 35 miles. Thankfully potential boredom is
alleviated by the scenery - they should have filmed Lord of the Rings here, as
well as persuading Liv Tyler to get them out for the lads.
***
Undisclosed Site
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| A gorgeous full summer adult Black-throated Diver on
an undisclosed loch somewhere in an undisclosed area
of an undisclosed part of a country north of
England. I hadn't seen a full summer bird like this
for years and forgot just how good they look. I was
also happy to see that the bill was quite short and
slender thus confirming what I though all along
about the recent Pacific Divers - namely that the
bills of the Pacific Divers were not so obviously
different as seemed to be the consensus of opinion.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the Pacific
Divers weren't Pacific Divers, just that I didn't
agree when everyone was saying how radically
different they were compared to Black-throated
Divers. But then what do I know? |
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***
Ullapool
When I was at university in Manchester we had a lecturer who
lived in Ullapool and used to commute back and forth every
week - he was known as Dr Stupidtwat. I never understood why
anyone would want to put themselves through an eighteen hour
round trip every week, I suppose the scenery on the way is
pretty spectacular, but surely that's going to wear very
thin after decades of repetition? Maybe not.
The boat across to Lewis. Note gathering
storm clouds and howling gale - clearly a bad omen of things
to come.
***
I can't be bothered to go through the pain, heartache and
suicidal abject misery that we experienced during our
repeated trips to Borve to not see the Snowy Owls. Suffice
to say that we spent a serious amount of time gazing into an
empty field where they had been sat showing well for the previous
few weeks right up until the day before we got there. So
here's what else we did on the Isle of Lewis.
Loch Barvas
For years I've wondered just how much truth there is in those
incredible good luck stories when people find good birds.
Things like, "On the evening of 26th April I was making
myself a brew and dropped the sugar bowl on the floor. My
wife came into the kitchen to berate my clumsiness but
slipped and fell on the spilt sugar. After she picked
herself up off the floor I noticed that the sugar had been
arranged into piles to perfectly spell out 'Tomorrow morning you will
find an Orphean Warbler.' The next morning I went to my
local patch of Dampclit-on-Trent gravel pits and the first
bird I saw by the car park was indeed a fantastic male Orphean
Warbler. Throughout its seven week stay the bird was enjoyed by
upwards of 10,000 enthralled birdwatchers." Shit like
that never happens to me. But today I did have a tiny bit of
luck when I saw a group of Common Gulls from the car and said these exact
words: "I bet there's a Ring-billed Gull in them." And
flip me if the
first bird I saw through my bins wasn't a 2nd year Ring-billed Gull
(ie it was a Ring-billed Gull):
Okay, so it's not exactly rare nowadays, but when you live
where I do and spend time watching the local shit holes that
I do, you milk everything you can out of finding something
fractionally more interesting than a Gadwall:
Some really close Ringed Plovers gave Miss Cole a chance to
do some digiblasting:
Then a quick scan of the big gulls at the back produced
this:
Yep, a fat horrible Glaucous Gull:
Glaucous Gulls are great but sadly seem to becoming
increasingly scarce in Britain nowadays. Back in the day
they used to be far more common than Iceland Gulls but now
the numbers are totally opposite. Must be global warming,
well, that or gonorrhoea.
***
Stornoway Harbour
In Stornoway harbour, by the lifeboat station, we were treated to a 1st winter Herring
Gull which is probably an American Herring Gull. Have a look
at the good pictures
here,
here and
here
to make your own minds up. On balance I'd say this
bird probably is one (an American one that is), but based on
the good old fashioned twitching rule of can't ID it:
can't tick it then, seeing as I probably wouldn't have
identified it myself, I can't tick it. Looking at photos on
Surfbirds in advance and then locating it is one thing, but
I'm 99% certain that I would have overlooked this
bird as an American Herring Gull without prior knowledge of
its presence, and thus bow down to those greater than
myself, of which there are many. I'd tick a textbook, big, horrible, shitty-brown
thing with disgusting shit-brown greater coverts as I reckon
I could find one of them for myself, but I have a feeling that
me trying to do
vagrant birds at the paler
end of the spectrum may be akin to pissing in the wind. Of
course, rules are there to be broken, so I might just tick
it at a later date when I'm feeling less pompous.
1st winter Iceland Gull. Or is it a 2nd
winter? I don't know. Iceland Gulls don't even breed in
Iceland yet it's still a good name - Iceland Gull just seems
appropriate. It's probably appropriate because
they're white and Iceland has snow and ice and stuff, and
they harpoon whales and club baby seals to death... oh no, I
forgot, that's the Canadians. Canadians / Icelandics /
Greeks, they're all the same to me. Of course, it's
easy for us British to criticise other countries for their
poor records of cruelty towards God's creatures because over here we don't kill
anything for fun, except innocent people in Iraq (cutting
edge politics - kapow!).
I can never remember why birds stand on one leg. A teacher
at school once told me that they get a kick out of sticking
their foot up their arse, but he may have been fibbing. I
seem to remember that he
also told an Irish girl called Dara that her Gaelic name is
translated into English as 'twat', and that he once warned me that if I told my
parents about him hitting me then he would make sure that I
was expelled and sent to borstal.
I can never remember why birds sit down on no legs. A
teacher at school once told me...
A Hooded Crow, or is it just a Carrion Crow wearing a gentleman's smoking jacket?
I made up a joke whilst watching it:
- What do you call a corvid that is not allowed to
wear certain teenage clothes in Essex shopping centres?
- A Hoody Crow
***
Loch Stiapavat
Stiapavat - home of Hollywood superstar Kevin Costner (the big house on the brow
of the hill). It used to be the island abattoir before Costner
bought it and converted it into a luxury mansion with its
own private baseball pitch and golf driving range.
Costner loves nothing more than taking a stroll on the
nearby beaches, sipping mojito cocktails from his first floor balcony and
enjoy the spectacular sunsets. On the far right of the
picture you can see the home of Magnum PI star Tom Selleck,
and the big white house in the middle used to be owned by
Naked Gun star Leslie Nielsen, but Nielsen had to sell up
and move to Lytham St.Annes after a knee operation meant he
could no longer climb the spiral staircase to his
helter-skelter slide. It was then bought by the late Rod
Hull who unfortunately fell off the roof trying to adjust
the TV aerial. The house is now rumoured to be owned by
Batman's nemesis The Penguin. There was an adult Kumlien's
Gull here:
Kumlien's Gull. KUMLIEN'S GULL.
kumlien's gull.
Kumlien's Gull. It
doesn't matter how you say it you still can't tick it. Is it
an Iceland Gull? Is it a Thayer's Gull? Is it a bit of both?
Who knows? Certainly not me.
Kumlien's Gulls are real birders' birds, which
usually means they're a bit shit.
They're kind of along similar lines as Caspian Reed Warbler,
Caspian Stonechat, Caspian Gull and Caspian Tit, none of
which really exist even though they do. Anyway, where is Caspia?
Is it anywhere near to Dauria?
***
Port Ness
Nice place is Port Ness. Fuck all birds, but still a nice
place. A small flock of Twite and a few Rock Pipits were
messing about on the grassy cliffs around nesting Fulmars:
One of my birding ambitions in life (as well as getting
attacked by a Capercaillie) is to get thrown up on by a
Fulmar. One of the first birding trips I went on was with
North Staffs RSPB group to South Stack on Anglesey. As an
enthralled child I'd read a few times how Fulmars vomit the
most rancid bile over potential invaders that get too close,
and I got kind of excited by the prospect of it happening to
me. Unfortunately they were all nesting on really high
cliffs and I didn't want to die in the process. But at just
above head height, these Port Ness birds probably
offered me the best chance so far of being vomited on, however, I
pathetically bottled out at the last minute because I only
had one set of clothes with me. Yes, I am lame.
Ringers are always getting vomited on by Fulmars, lucky
bastards, but they can justify getting too close to nests
because they're doing some good by ringing them, whereas I
would just be recklessly disturbing them for the
self-gratification of getting covered in Fulmar vomit. Birds
Britannica describes Fulmar vomit as follows:
...warm, yellow, greasy, foul, fish-smelling vomit
[that] has the consistency and colour of melted butter and
occasionally it contains fine strips of a reddish substance
which looks like cooked tomato peel.
***
The Butt of Lewis
The Butt of fucking Lewis. The fucking Butt of fucking
Lewis. Bastard place. The last time we were here was
September 4th 2004 looking for a Purple Martin and not
seeing it - we're really good at not seeing things on Lewis.
I seem to remember that along with another 75 suicidal twitchers we missed it by just under an hour. Miss Cole was
interviewed for Grampian TV which was amusing.
***
I'm never going to Lewis again. That's it.
Finished. Finito. Never again. Actually, that's
probably a lie.
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