No sign of the Amur Falcon. Now there's a surprise.
Since being sussed out on Saturday night, this first for
Britain managed to attract a staggering crowd of about
thirty people. I was told that when the bird used to be
a Red-footed Falcon it was a late riser, usually being
seen after midday, so we arrived after midday and spent
a few hours around the reserve. However, now that the
bird has become an Amur Falcon, it has changed its
habits and become invisible, or perhaps it's just pissed
off somewhere else altogether. Yesterday's strong wind
wasn't ideal for him to feed, but this is just clutching
at straws: let's face it, he's gone. And if not then
I'll eat my cat, or whatever the expression is.
Will there be another in Britain? Probably, there's
always another. It might be after we're all dead and
being sodomised in Hell by Satan, Hitler and Bambi's
mum, but there will be another. Will there be another
that will stay as long as this and be as easy to see?
Who knows, not me.
Having done a search through the amazing
BBi, there were 6 records of Amur Falcon from Italy
over the Straits of Messina between 1995-2000, then
there are some extra records listed on
Netfugl. BBi also pulled up the 1995 Red-footed
Falcon ID paper which has a brief but useful paragraph
towards the end about the possibility of Amur Falcon in
the Western Palearctic, a pretty neat prediction seeing
as the first one was seen in Italy that year.
But here's the problem. When this bird first turned up
at Tophill on 14th September (then vanished until it
returned on 19th) it had dark axillaries/underwng
coverts. By
2nd October it had developed a bit of Amur-ishness,
and by
8th October it was looking good for Amur Khan. So
that's a pretty narrow period of time in which it's
moulted - what if the next male of the same age that
turns up in early autumn doesn't stay as long? Will
anyone be claiming one from the other more subtle
features without the white underwing coverts? Obviously
I won't because I'll be sitting in my new kitchen
drinking tea, this outdoor birding thing's far too cold
for me - I only ever go where the pager tells me to go,
and even then there can't be too far to walk or too much
time required outside the car. And what if the next one
isn't a 2nd calendar year male or an adult male? How
easy are males in their first year, which seems to be
the age most birds turn up as vagrants in autumn? And
what about females? The Swedish and Hungarian records
were in July, and the Italian records are from the huge
spring raptor passage, so maybe the next one won't even
turn up in autumn? Why am I asking so many questions? I
don't even care. Or do I?
18th October
What? Amur Falcon? No fucking way!
My God. Things just got exciting. It would seem that the
long staying Red-footed Falcon at Tophill Low NR wasn't
one. Piccies
HERE. But is it still there? It was definitely still
around on Wednesday, but after that things seem a bit
uncertain. Looks like tomorrow's plans for a trip to
Caerlaverock for the tiny Canadian Goose may have to be
altered. See you there. I'll be the one selling biscuits
and wearing the Batman T-shirt. You can't miss me. Just
look for my distinctive shoes. And the tattoo of
Thatcher on my forehead.
Derbys 1w New Kitchen (pale morph) My House 10.55am
showing well. Please follow all onsite instructions and
mop up any spillages. £5 parking per car. New generation
DSLR users please photograph from a sensible distance.
Strictly no comments allowed about kitchen looking a bit
gay.
Total kitchen annihilation
We are the men, the men in the shed
Sex!
***MEGA-ALERT***
Gtr Man Tickets for AC/DC 21st April 2008 at
MEN Arena now on sale
Pity Bon Scott died choking on his
vomit
15th October
Tom McKinney's Kitchen Diary***4.30pm
update***
No sign Philadelphia Vireo, no sign cupboard doors, no
sign wall units, no sign dual-fuel cooker.
Looks like it's crisp sandwiches again
tonight (which is a good thing, because I LOVE crisp
sandwiches!)
Broken plug socket, but I still
decided to use it anyway. I know no limits -
TOTAL ANARCHY!
And now for some link action. Add these to your
favourites immediately, because if you don't then
I'll... I'll do absolutely nothing about it.
Philadelphia Vireo still present late afternoon, and now
we have a sink:
The walls have been raped!
I had a good chat with the men doing our kitchen about
men things, you know, football, footy, soccer, etc... We
talked about our favourite newspapers, I said mine was
the Sun, because you always get girls with big knockers
on page 3. Then I told them I was having chips for my
tea, because real men only ever eat chips. "And the
fuckin' wife's cookin' 'em!" I said. We all laughed
like proper men. I started
singing a man's song:
We are the men!
We are the men!
The men in the shed!
The men in the shed!
And then I stopped because it didn't make any sense.
Up-close
tap action. And in the background a lantern we
found behind the cupboards - just in
time for Halloween.
Tom McKinney's Kitchen Diary***1pm
update***
Especially for
Colin, because I know he's so interested:
There's an extractor fan. Did we ask for an extractor
fan? Too late now, there's a big fucking hole in the
wall. Hopefully it will be finished within 24 hours, the
Philadelphia Vireo is still at Kilbaha as I type, and
plans are now afoot to head over soonish to have a
squint at it - things are looking up! The word on the
street is that the Vireo is an incredibly rare bird.
13th October
Wake me up when October ends
Little Blue Heron - fluffy!
No, shoot me, put me in a lead box and dump me in the
North Sea. A Philadelphia Vireo in Co.Clare? I absolutely
fucking hate October. You wait all year for some decent
twitchy birds and then they all pour into Western
Europe in the space of three weeks - arse tits! I'm
afraid that this Vireo will have to wait a few weeks for
me to travel over to see it (do you think it will stay?), largely because some men
came into my house this morning and made my kitchen look
like this:
And when they leave tomorrow afternoon my bank balance
will look like this:
But hopefully when it's done the kitchen should, in
theory, look like this:
I can't really complain though - well
yes I can, but fuck it - having been to Ireland last
week to see the Little Blue Heron, which was an
absolutely brilliant bird. I mean it, you might think
it's just another white egret, but no, this was special,
real special, really special. So go and see it.
And as for not going because
it's in Ireland? Come on! There's a lot said about
imperialist British birders ticking Irish birds as if
they're our own, and opening up old wounds about our
historically wank treatment of the Irish, but I really
do think you're crediting a lot of British birders with
quite a bit more intelligence than they actually have.
Take a look at your average British twitcherer. I would
imagine that most Brits who have been over to see the
Heron can't even eat with a knife and fork or spell
their own names, so the whole Michael Collins thing
might go a wee bit over their heads, or more than likely
rocket past about 30,000 feet above their heads.
Bollocks to lists, these birds
are crossing whole oceans for fucks sake, so go and
behold the bewitching wonder that is the miracle of
trans-Atlantic avian vagrancy, and stick the numbers
game up your arse!
Pete Hines and myself flew
from Liverpool to Shannon early Wednesday morning and
got to the bird just after midday. It was so close that
in the end my scope wouldn't focus. The grotesque kink
in the neck is a bit worrying, but it seems perfectly
healthy and it has a great success rate when fishing.
Whilst we were watching it I
got a call to say that there was a facking Empidonax
flycatcher in Cornwall in Nanjizal Valley. Then came
another call saying it was either Alder or Willow. There
was only one thing to do. Drink. We searched around for
somewhere to stay, eventually finding the brilliant
Bard's Den in Letterfrack village, and then spent
the night piling down booze which made the thought of
getting back to Liverpool and heading straight down to
Cornwall seem far more enjoyable than it was probably
going to be.
The next day started with a
call saying that the flycatcher was still there. Opinion
was drifting towards Alder, but according to three
observatories in the States they won't even suggest a
definite identification in the hand, never mind
inaudible field observations. Back to have another look
at the heron and then further news that the flycatcher
had been trapped and was definitely an Alder, a first
for Britain and the rest of the world. "How do they
know it's Alder?" I asked. "I don't know," I
was told. Having got back and looked in my North
American birdspotting identification guides, I can't
even see how they narrowed it down in the field to just
Alder or Willow, why did Acadian not enter the mix?
Reading Kenn Kauffman's Advanced Birding he seems
to be holding his hands in the air and yelling "Fuck
'em! They're too hard!" All Tyrant flycatchers are
an abomination and an affront to the traditional customs
of polite, gentlemanly birdspotting.
Arriving back in Manchester early
evening on Thursday, we found out that the flycatcher
had still been showing up until dusk. Pete decided to
go straight down to Cornwall, I couldn't face it and
decided to wait on news and head down if it was seen
again the next morning. I had a terrible suspicion that
it would do an overnight bunk. Got back to Glossop and
suddenly felt absolutely shit. Now that I hadn't gone
the flycatcher was definitely going to be there, but
thankfully my long suffering wife took me out for
something to eat and then plied me with alcohol in an
attempt to get me to talk about something other than fly,
catchers, Cornwall and dark concepts of regret.
The flycatcher did do an
overnight bunk. Gutted. And now I see that there's a
possible Yellow-rumped Warbler on Scilly. October is
fucking brilliant!!!
I've already been emailed about prints
(seriously!) so if anyone would like any/all of the
above piccies for their own private viewing,
email me
and I'll let you have the full size ones to do with as
you please. And for free as well. How's that for
anti-capitalism? Smash the state!
7th October
A ticky dilemma
Have a look at these:
And please take a moment of your time to study the
better photos
HERE and
HERE.
It's a gull. It's also most definitely a juvenile large
white-headed gull or juv LWHG. Nice. But here's the
ticky dilemma. That bird above was video'd (yeah I know
they're shit) in March 2004 in Stornoway harbour when
the female Harlequin Duck was on Lewis. The bird was
reported as an American Herring Gull (now upgraded by
BTOURC as a big proper bird that you can properly tick
on your birdspotting list) but I had my doubts about it.
I thought that whilst it certainly could have been one,
it wasn't exactly a classic (big ball of shit with a
white head) and so probably not safe to add to my list.
Its absence in the BBRC report for 2004 suggested I'd
been wise to be so cautious, although it hadn't been
rejected either. And then the latest British Birds came
last week with the BBRC's 2007 report, and there in
plain English language right before my eyes, it said
this:
American Herring Gull Larus
smithsonianus (0, 14, 2)
2004 Outer Hebrides
Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, juvenile, 6th March to 17th
April
Well fuck me! You may remember (I doubt it though) that
last year in Stornoway I saw another bird that I thought
looked better than the bird above but still didn't fully
meet my own high standards of acceptance (big ball of
shit with a white head), so what to do? The BBRC is
composed of ten of the wisest birdspotting men (all men, no
women, never any women - shameful!), some of whom have been
studying the dark arts of birdspotting identification
techniques since the dawn of civilisation - they are
trained in dimly lit cellars deep underground with only a copy of Svensson
and the New Approach for sustenance, endlessly chanting
the mystical incantation "emargination equal to tip
of P7, emargination equal to tip of P7" - and they thought
that the 2004 bird met the grade and banged it into the official
stats.
Now you see my dilemma, and what a dilemma! So now it's
up to you. You have to help me, please. I can't
sleep. I can't eat. I can't even face watching Holby
City, and you know things are bad when you can no longer
stomach an hour of the BBC's top medical drama:
2nd October
Leach's Petrels on the Wirral
Mega action, captured fantastically in
these shots (prints available £7.50)
Well it wasn't quite the legendary passage I was hoping
for, in fact on paper it may even come across as a bit
of a damp squib (what's a squib?) It wasn't bad though,
it was actually rather enjoyablous. Here's the log:
2/10/08,
North Wirral Country Park,
1015-1745
Leach's Petrel - 27 (a cautious count
attempting to kick out duplication from ones just
loafing about)
Manx Shearwater - 2
Med Gull - 2 adults
Common Scoter - 6
Arctic Tern - 1
Sandwich Tern - 4
Black Tern - 1 probable but c45 miles out
Guillemot - 2
Great Crested Grebe - 1
So not exactly life changing, but
Menzie and I had some splendidly close
Leach's action, and all in all a decent day sat in the car
for 9.5 hours looking
out at at a filthy brown sloppy sea.
Sand action - sex!
Kite action - sex!
adult Med Gull - sex!
Unfortunately none of us at our vantage point managed to
pick up the Sabine's Gull, Long-tailed Skua or Pom Skua
that came past, but I think a few of us did see this:
Yawn, the most cliched crappy
birdspotting joke in history
Just a few miles west from where we were positioned at
Leasowe is Hilbre Island, and Hilbre managed a nice
total of 120 Leach's yesterday. Hilbre always gets the
biggest totals, as does the Point of Ayr just over the
border in Wales, and I have a theory as to why:
Analysis: the three big messy black arrow things show
all of the Leach's being pushed by strong NW winds into
Liverpool Bay. Presumably most of them just fuck about
offshore and get massacred by Great Black-backed Gulls,
but some of them are foolish enough to venture inshore
and get massacred by kite surfers, wind turbines,
Peregrines and Great Black-backed Gulls. They also get
seen by birdspotters off Formby point. I reckon that
these inshore birds travel down the coast past Formby,
then get to Crosby and Seaforth (roughly the area of
Bootle on the map). Now at Crosby and Seaforth most of
them must be saying to each other:
"what the fuck? where the fuck am I? I liked that bit
up at Formby with the nice dunes, the Red Squirrels and
the rich football players, but this place is a fucking
disaster! What the fuck is all this shit? Why are there
enormous mountains of scrap metal everywhere? We've got
to get out of here like really, really quickly. Look
over there, what's that place? That looks nice. It's got
mountains and castles and the Welsh Mountain Zoo. And
there's beaches and a cable car up to the top of the
Great Orme. I think it's Wales? Let's go there. Now!"
And so, as the map shows fantastically well, I reckon a
lot of them just zoom straight across to Wales passing
Hilbre (the first big red square) and then Point of Ayr
(the second big red square) and get into Wales and then
get massacred by Great Black-backed Gulls. But you'll
notice on the map that there's a curved line from Bootle
to the big red square of Hilbre, and that's because
there are pretty big sand banks out there, and, as is
stated quite clearly in BWP1, most Leach's Petrels hate
flying over sand, as do most Oceanodroma, because
they absolutely hate getting sand in their vaginas.
But there are also some rebel Leach's Petrels, the ones
that say to the others:
"Fuck you all! I'm going to have look at Liverpool
and then fly close along the north Wirral shore past
Leasowe and have a look at the kite surfers. And I don't
care if I get sand in my vagina. So fuck you all!"
And then one of the other older and wiser Petrels says:
"He is young and foolish. But he will learn fast.
Hopefully not with his life or by getting sand in his
vagina. Because once you get sand in your vagina you can
never get it out and it itches like fuck."
But then there are others that are just curious. Like
the conversation between two Leach's Petrels (let's call
them Princess Michael of Kent and King Richard the
Third) which the
Sound Approach team recently recorded for their
Petrels Night and Day book:
King Richard the Third:"Come on, guys, let's
go into Liverpool. It's the European Capital of
Culture!"
Princess Michael of Kent:"No. We are not
going to Liverpool. And that's final."
King Richard the Third:"Oh come on. Stop
being so boring. You only live once."
Princess Michael of Kent:"No."
King Richard the Third:"Pleeeeaaaaasssseee.
They've got a Le Corbusier exhibition in the new
cathedral. It's supposed to be really good."
Princess Michael of Kent:"Who?"
King Richard the Third:"Le Corbusier."
Princess Michael of Kent:"Who's that?"
King Richard the Third:"You don't know? Le
Corbusier, or Charles-Edouard Jeanneret? You've never
heard of him?"
Princess Michael of Kent:"No."
King Richard the Third:"Wow! You really are
pretty shallow. He was like only the most important
architect of the twentieth century. He only like totally
changed the way buildings look. So kind of important
yeah? I'd have thought that most people would knew who
Le Corbusier was. Jesus!"
Princess Michael of Kent:"Were you listening
to Front Row on Radio 4 last night?"
King Richard the Third:"No!"
Princess Michael of Kent:"You were weren't
you."
King Richard the Third:"Maybe."
Princess Michael of Kent:"You fucking twat!
You'd never even heard of Le Corbusier before last night
had you?"
King Richard the Third:"Well fuck you all
then! I'm going to Liverpool! I'm sick of spending all
my life dodging huge waves and eating bits of shit off
the water. Look at me, I'm four years old and I've never
even visited a big city. How can you all live like this?
Fuck you all!"
King Richard the Third was later picked up inland at
Audenshaw Reservoir, completely and lost trying to get a
load of sand out of his vagina.
