31st May

Blacktoft Sands RSPB

Black-tailed Godwits - see below for super patented foolproof hyperpower formula for identifying Bar- and Black-tailed.

I'm always amazed that people have difficulty separating godwits, I mean it's not fucking brain science, you daft cunts. You don't have to be one of those brainiacs like Michael Portillo or those Red Army Faction lunatics to understand it, for fucks sake! The easiest way to identify godwits is to imagine writing their names on the leg above the knee. The longer the name the longer the leg, hence the longer name belongs to the bird with the longer leg, therefore the longer name on the longer leg correlates to the bird whose name has more letters in it than the godwit with the shorter leg, hence the shorter name. So imagine writing "bar" on the upper legs of the birds in the photo above. Obviously writing "bar" on those birds above would leave you with loads of room, well that's unless you've got massive, stupid, big, special needs handwriting and used to chew your tie at school. I knew a lad at school who was so stupid that he had to have his address tattooed on his forehead so that people could help him get home. But anyway... so write "bar" on the legs and you'll see that it doesn't fit properly. But now write "black" on the legs. Good? Excellent. So now you'll never balls them up again. [Hudsonian Godwits don't count. And neither do Marbled Godwits. Are there any others?]

Bar-tailed Godwit

28th May

Spurn

Not a bad few days at Spurn, not bad at all, check out the impressive totals HERE. I went with Menzie for the afternoon and had a decent few hours, however, if I'd listened to him then we would have gone for first light and had an incredible day. What happened was this ...

... Menzie called me on Tuesday afternoon and said, "Do you want to go Spurn tomorrow. It will be another dead good day."  To which I said, "Yes, that sounds like a very good idea. I too agree that it will more than likely be another dead good day." To which he said, "Okay, we shall communicate later this evening and finalise plans to go to Spurn together." To which I said, "Yes, that sounds like a very good idea." Only then I picked up TV Quick and noticed that not only were there two episodes of Jeremy Kyle on back to back tomorrow, but that Diagnosis Murder was also on. And so I phoned Menzie back and told him that I would unfortunately be unable to make it tomorrow due to televisual commitments, and that I also had a family pack of chicken Super Noodles that needed to be eaten. Obviously he understood. Cut to Wednesday morning ...

... my pager had run out of battery and I was adrift in a sea of no rare bird news. Anything could have turned up and I would have been none the wiser, anything like maybe a Thrush Nightingale at Spurn perhaps. So, some three hours too late, when I eventually found out that there had been a Thrush Nightingale at Spurn, the whole stupidity of not going to Spurn for the day suddenly crystallised into crystalline clarity. Thankfully Menzie was still up for a trip over to the far east, albeit after we'd missed the best part of a day. Oh well. Menzie seemed less impressed than I was with the few hours we managed to squeeze in, but 2 Icterine Warblers, Marsh Warbler and Red-backed Shrike were some form of compensation for a) not going to Spurn for the day; b) not seeing/hearing/smelling the Thrush Nightingale, a bird which I've now dipped over zero times, in fact this was the first time I've ever attempted to see a Sprosser (why are they called that?) over here, though I've seen loads and loads and loads of them abroad (one [1] in Cyprus ten [10] years ago).

And so what have I learned from the decisions I made today? Absolutely nothing whatsoever. Will I do things differently next time? Most definitely not.

26th May

***BREAKING NEWS*** (18:27)

White dog shit in South Yorkshire: further details can be found at Pieman Mark's blog. It seems as though Britain is currently being blessed with somewhat of an influx of albino dog eggs!

25th May

Glossop birding rocks!

It does, seriously. I've actually almost been enjoying myself recently out on the windy moors and in the moist woods. Almost, I mean let's not go too mad here, let's not end up all Heather Mills-mad or Mohammed Al Fayed-mental or anything. But in the last week I've seen the following within a short walk of Glossop: Merlin, Tawny Owl, Little Owl, Cuckoo, Tree Pipit, Ring Ouzel, Garden Warbler, Wood Warbler, Spotted Flycatcher and Pied Flycatcher. Obviously I can't say exactly where some of them are as I know you cunts will go out and egg the poor bastards. But I reckon that's not bad going at all. Definite highlight though was stumbling upon a Tawny Owl nest with some very entertaining chicks, but don't expect any photos as I don't want my eyes ripping out by one of the adults.

13th May

More dumb ignorant shit again this week, this time by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/09/wildlife.conservation

But it's not all bad, at least stereotypical Australian men are still alive and well:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/13/australia

9th-11th May

The Northeast

A weekend of luck and jam. Jamming in on some quality birds which obviously requires a degree of luck, hence my opening statement "a weekend of luck and jam", just in case there was any confusion. The first luck came in no more humbler place than a McDonald's car park near Sheffield - but have no fear oh dear and faithful readers, I haven't suddenly become all Max Power on you, I haven't started tucking my tracksuit bottoms into my socks and driving fast over speed bumps to see if it will knacker my suspension. No, just because I was in a McDonald's car park doesn't necessarily mean that I'm now wearing an electronic tag, have five children from five different mothers and drink nothing but either Skol or blue pop from Aldi. It's not only the sub-strata of society that visit McDonald's you know, all sorts of people go there - lawyers, farmers, GPs, MPs, grocers, prostitutes, fish mongers. McDonald's is a veritable melting pot of society. Pity about all of the filthy council house dole-dossing scratchcard-buying illiterate scum in there though. That's why we chose to sit in the car and listen to Radio 4, some programme about Romanian lesbian art presented by Melvyn Bragg. What? No I don't know what I'm talking about either. I'd say a new paragraph is long overdue...

So we were sat in the car with the windows down, and what should drop in just by us - a Whitethroat, first of the year. Basically it's just taken all of that shit above to tell you nothing more than we saw a Whitethroat by a McDonald's car park. Good eh? No, not good at all.

Jump to the next day... and we're in Newcastle. The weather is great, and I'm on my way to Druridge Pools for carefree birdspotting and singing Shakin' Stevens songs to myself. First stop Cresswell Pond, and a quick check of my birdspotting pager says:

NORTHUMBERLAND LESSER YELLOWLEGS DRURIDGE POOLS FROM SOUTH FACING HIDE TILL 9.35AM THEN FLEW SOUTH WITH WOOD SAND

Eh? It was 9.45am and I was just south of Druridge Pools. Well fucking shit me! Only there were no waders on Cresswell Pond. A car pulled up and the driver asked me whether I'd checked Bell's Pond - I'd never even heard of Bell's Pond, so I followed him, and after driving 1/4 mile north to Bell's Pond I was suddenly watching a Lesser Yellowlegs with a few other local birders. Nice! After a few seconds it flew off north back to Druridge Pools, at which point two Yellow Wagtails popped up and whacked themselves onto the 2008 monster year list (I'm going for the big one this year!). A quick drive to Druridge Pools and the Lesser Yellowlegs was again showing from the south facing hide:

There were two Cuckoos fighting, and the Meadow Pipits were going mental over them. Sedge Warbler was another year tick and this close Kestrel was luvverly:

Cut to Sunday... we're still in Newcastle and panicking about whether to drive all the way down to Suffolk for a Spectacled Warbler, sadly the little beauty has gone, though at least we don't have to drive 7,000 miles to stand around on a heath with a load of moronic arsehole clueless twitchers, if you follow me. A drive to St.Mary's Island was pointless in the murky sea mist, with only a few Sand Martins, Swallows and a pied Crow for company. But the long drive south was broken up by a spectacular 1st-summer female Red-footed Falcon at Pugneys Country Park showing amazingly well feeding just overhead. My mega photos are below, but even more mega photos can be found at Green Withens and Pies and Birds. Obviously my photographs are more professional looking. Prints available for £16.50.

So there you go. Jam. Jam on. We jammin'.

8th May

Shire Hill and Ashop Moor

Wooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water... a Tree Pipit was displaying in the summit clearing on Shire Hill. As you all know, Tree and Meadow Pipits can only be identified by what they land on after their display flight: if it lands in a tree it's a Tree Pipit, if it lands on anything else (such as the ground, a wall, a car, the one-armed drummer from Def Leppard) then it's a Meadow Pipit. There are no exceptions to this rule.

The male Pied Flycatcher from yesterday was in the exact same place but somewhat concerned by the people camping below his tree, and when I say "camping" I don't mean sleeping in a tent and cooking off a Trangia stove... err... actually I do mean exactly that. The Wood Warbler was also in the same place - hooray! Oh thank you Jesus!

Another Pied Flycatcher was singing from within the private plantation under the heronry, but that bird is going to have to remain invisible due to the mad landowner often wandering around in jean cut-offs with the buttocks cut out - I aint fooling around with no man with his buttocks out, definitely not since that last time!

After lunch (two eggs with cheese and jam, and a Kipling's apple and mustard slice) we took a walk upon mighty Ashop Moor, first having to rescue someone stranded on the Snake Pass. He was on his way to Sheffield when his car broke down - there's no phone reception up there and apparently he'd been trying to hitch a lift for over an hour before we heroically came to the rescue and drove him to an area with phone signal. "Why didn't you just walk to where there was some reception?" I asked, but he gave me a strange look that suggested I should keep quiet from now on, and then he rummaged about in a Farmfoods carrier bag, at which point I assumed he was going to kill us and probably violate our still warm corpses. He didn't kill us. He did look a bit like Robert Maxwell though. The moor was pretty quiet, with only a Wheatear and a single Golden Plover to partially compensate for both of us having almost certainly developed malignant tumours from the bastard Sun (not the same Sun as the one with breasts on page 3).

7th May

Shire Hill and the misty magical moors

Only an egg in the fridge. One egg. Just one single egg. But breakfast is supposedly the most important meal of the day, so I had just an egg. Washed it down with water, tap water, non sparkling. I managed (somehow) to count thirty-three nests in the Rookery in Old Glossop, but I don't think that figure is very accurate as loads of them are hidden behind the leaves. Still, at least I tried.

In the wood things got off to a great start with a Spotted Flycatcher followed by a singing male Pied Flycatcher. Then my first two Swifts of the year cruised past before another two Spotted Flycatchers had a big fight with each other, and then a Wood Warbler crowned what a truly magnificent trip to Shire Hill. Ten House Martins, another three Swifts and a few Swallows made me frantic with nervous energy, and so the moors beckoned.

No sooner had I walked eleven miles in the murderous May heat, than a giant rabbit with big white ears leapt from out of a ditch - Mountain Hare. I followed it and eventually found it trying to hide in another ditch, and it would have remained completely invisible if it wasn't for its big ears poking over the top. After leaving the hare in peace I flushed a Ring Ouzel on the way back home before passing a small quarry with two Little Owls up to no good. Later that night I watched The Apprentice. It was very good. I especially liked the bit in the boardroom with the two people who got sacked for not being very good at doing business.

3rd May

Somewhere Back In Time

Can't say exactly where these were today as one's a Class-A narcotic rare breeder, but the moors this morning knocked out a pair of Ring Ouzels, 16 billion Curlew, Wheatear, Little Owl and a pair of Canada Geese breeding in the middle of the moor - a new stupidity record. Also two evil lambs, one wearing protective knee pads: