Bird Art & Photography
'Bird Art & Photography' is the imtellegent alternative to monthly magazines, with in-depth, but not high-brow articles about birds, wildlife art and photography. It includes the Phoenix that is the 'Grumpy Old Birder' resurected from the ashes of 'Birds Illustrated'.
Grumpy OId Birder Column
Below I reproduce all the articles that have appeared in past issues of Bird Art & Photography - I may even slip in some new ones...
1. For Birds, For People, For Goodness Sake!
I hold these things to be self-evident - to conserve wild birds and wild places the whole population must learn to love them. If you want people to share our fascination with, and awe for nature, then they must be encouraged to experience that wonder.
In the tiny island of Majorca every school child must visit their premier nature reserve every year as part of their education.
If the UK adopted this practice what would youngsters remember most about their visit? Well some, like you and I, would rave about rapacious raptors or hardly hide their emotion when describing the thrill of seeing two thousand geese take to the air together. Sadly, however, many more would recall the cold mud, the long boring walk across barren fields or the spectacularly smelly toilets with leaky cisterns wetting the floors.
I doubt they would experience the sheer luxury of a WWT centre – the entry fees would be off-putting and, anyway, the centres are few and far between. Most kids would be hauled along to their local RSPB reserve or one barely managed by English Nature or a local conservation group. Pick one of these at random and you may find a nice centre with good facilities but more likely they will have no facilities at all or will have a terrific shop and terrible toilets!
Of course most conserved countryside is under-financed and organisations have to choose between spending money to save birds or to make people comfortable. However, unless more is spent making conservation a comfortable experience for the yet-to-be-converted it will remain irrelevant to them.
I was only recently enlightened that the ‘World Series’ of baseball was not named from US chauvinism, but after its sponsor ‘The World’ magazine. So perhaps the ‘World Birding Centre’ in Texas does not warrant the wry smile it invokes in out-of-state visitors. No matter, as its people facilities are superb. Every effort is made to make a visit comfortable, safe and positive.
Hawkeye [my wife] and I recently visited McAllen, Texas (12th safest out of 379 cities in the US!) We visited the ‘World Birding Centre’ at Estero Llano Grande on an unseasonably cold, wet day, shivering in our summer clothes. We chatted to centre staff on the deck overlooking the Ibis Pond full of wildfowl and waders, with migrants lingering in the surrounding scrub. I was excited by a close encounter with a Cooper’s Hawk and the stunning colour of my second ever Vermillion Flycatcher when Maggie joined me on the deck with a smile beaming from beneath her plastic hood and excitedly announced “they have heated toilets!”
Maggie has travelled the world with me to fulfill my craving for new birds and even braves places where there might be close encounters of the arachnid kind – such is her love of birds that she battles even this ultimate phobia. Yet, rather than be impressed with a Cinnamon Teal or a Green Jay, the highlight of her WBC visit was a short sojourn in a spotlessly clean, sweet-smelling and above all warm ‘restroom’.
Texan conservationists do not rely on government money or National Lottery handouts to create or conserve places for the birds. Every cent has to be raised whether it be for a wetland or a dry visitor centre, and not from exorbitant entry fees.
On a recent visit to an independent reserve in the UK (i.e. not an outpost of a large national conservation body but one man’s dream made reality through fund-raising by local volunteers) I found that they too had created first class toilets and visitor facilities. Moreover, they heated the place with solar panels and their wind turbine met their power needs.
If Texans can budget for first-class people facilities as well as turning what was an agribusiness wasteland back into a wonderful wild wetland then so can we all! If a bunch of amateur birders can get it into their heads that you have to attract visitors if you want to spread the word then surely the big national bodies can too!
Potential birders do not have to paddle in accidental wetrooms, nor freeze in unheated visitor centres. Fledgling conservationists can be comfortable without bankrupting voluntary organizations! To promote birds we need to see to people’s needs. Wake up English Nature, heads up RSPB, come on you county clubs and local initiatives – you HAVE to look after the visitors if you want to make conservation a higher priority for the nation.
2. The Culling Fields …
Years ago, as I sat with my back against a pine tree, gazing at a crystal clear lake in the Serbian mountains, I heard scratching from the tree next to me. I slowly turned to be eyeball to eyeball with a beautiful chocolate brown ‘Red’ Squirrel.
“Hello fellah” I said.
The squirrel spat and hissed back at me.
I know how he must have felt. He was about his business on his home patch when a stranger broke the sacred silence. I was the alien, more liable to damage his habitat than enhance it.
Humanity has spread over the world like a locust swarm, stripping the land bare as it goes. We have abandoned all hope of reducing our numbers, trying instead to sustain our swarm’s exponential growth. When will we realize that our species must downsize in population. Fir if we do not we will overwhelm the planet wiping ourselves out through famines or plagues of biblical proportion.
As we wandered the world our sentimental attachment to the familiar resulted in many species being exported, often to the detriment of native species. Few places remain truly natural. Through the hand of man, some species spread everywhere, like rats, Rock Doves, Cane Toads and Japanese Knotweed. Colonists wanted to hear familiar birdsong, or thought the antipodes should afford British gentry the opportunity to chase foxes. We have deliberately introduced species to ‘control’ others, only to find they became plagues. Some such species create their own niche wherever they go – cities as far apart as London and Los Angeles have colonies of African parrots.
Lack of predation or competition has resulted in some ‘new’ populations outnumber the folks back home. Britain has more Sitka deer than China, New Zealand more Brush-tailed Possum than Australia and the US more House Sparrows than the UK! We paved over paradise with parking lots and replacing ripped out rain forest with palms for bio-fuels, now we encourage other species to follow our rapacious example.
Enlightened conservationists are trying to stem the flow. The trouble is that it mostly goes unnoticed, is often opposed by bunny huggers or constrained by the ‘bottom line’.
Sentimentality seems to be an extremely myopic emotion. I do not understand how ‘animal lovers’ can release farmed Mink without seeing that this results in Mink slaughtering ducks and displacing native otters. How can those opposing culling feral cats reconcile the consequent loss of millions of songbirds, reptiles and small mammals? Why do they confer unwanted pets with more rights than the natural world?
A few scattered attempts are underway to remove alien species that threaten native ones. For a decade in the UK America Ruddy Ducks have been culled as it is claimed that they fly to Spain and interbreed with threatened White-headed Ducks. Despite this costing millions of pounds; few ‘ruddies’ reaching Spain and that reduction in White-headed Duck hunting has reversed the decline, the plug has not been pulled. Why do UK conservation organizations champion the cull of this low impact species, but do not call stridently for a Grey Squirrel cull? Are these conservationists inexpertly playing politics… hoping that if we support one EEC partner maybe other EEC members will stop killing millions of ‘our’ migrating songbirds each year? I believe a poll of members would show most are opposed to the action! It’s enough to make this grumpy old member considered resigning!
Grey Squirrels are a perfect example of a species that should be culled in the UK. Charming and appropriate to North American woodland they have no place here. Greys rob nests, damage trees and carry a disease that kills our disappearing native Red Squirrels. We do not tackle them because they are cuddly critters that feed from your hand in the park. The refrain is that their numbers are legion and they are so well established, that we could never eliminate them all.
New Zealand, a country with around 6% of the population of the UK and proportionately far less wealthy, is taking on the Polynesian Rat and Brush-tailed Possum, Feral goats, pigs and introduced deer. They have cleared their outlying islands of aliens creating havens for native plants, birds and reptiles. Now they are working on the mainland, restoring native forests and controlling predators and competitors by poisoning or trapping rats, stoats, weasels, possum et al. It’s working to the extent that they are confidentally re-introducing vulnerable species like Kiwis from their island refuges.
In the southern Evergreen Beech woods deer eat the same buds as a critically endangered bird; the Yellowhead so a cull of deer was initiated. Hunters, fearing being deprived of their ‘sport’, burnt down a building and several vehicles and threatened conservation workers with guns! But the work goes on. Educating people and saving the planet is neither easy nor cheap.
Our antipodean cousins, with a relatively small economy drowning in a sea of species introduced by the ‘old country’, put us to shame. Why are we playing politics, wasting £500 a head culling low impact Ruddy Ducks instead of taking the fight to really damaging invaders?
3. Doing the right thing …
Why isn’t doing the right thing easy?
I am a friend to all things feathered; I feed fistfuls of the finest food (courtesy of Jacobi Jayne™) to every finch within sniffing distance of my nyjer seed. I hang out fat balls for fat starlings, dammit, I even tolerate the posse of feral pigeons that vacuum up my offerings and snatch food from the mouths of more worthy thrushes and blackbirds.
What happens? I’ll tell you what happens my friends. The doves destroy my feeders, convincing themselves that they can plonk onto a perch designed for spadgers and blue tits. Then the wood pigeons fill their guts in my yard seemingly in order to empty them all over my car windscreen! My generosity re-paid, and from a great height!
Take my corner of the world, the Isle of Thanet… Planet Thanet as the locals call it, an island only in Roman times, it is now home to a spreading conurbation. Kiss-me-quick Margate meets Bingo-wings Broadstairs, and Palm-fringed Pegwell cuddles up to Re-born Ramsgate. The intervening fields are Cabbage City.
I always know when I am nearing home after a foray into the wider world, not because of the evocative air of ozone pricking at memories of my bucket & spade youth, but the pungent smell of cauliflowers rotting in the dying embers of September sun.
If local farmers were doing the right thing they would be rotating the crops and producing organic fruit and veg, but most choose to farm with acid and accountants. A crop is planted, grows to maturity and migrant workers pick only those cauliflowers that fit the supermarket yardstick, the rest rot and are ploughed back into a soil that is scoured with chemicals and just weeks later planted with the same seeds, thus the cycle moves on.
Now Planet Thanet is home to ‘Thanet Earth’ a massive greenhouse project set to grow 15% of the nations needs for tomatoes, peppers and the like. These ‘agricultural buildings’ were not even subject to the planning consents needed to extend a loft or knock down a folly. Acre upon acre now covers ancient fields where Celts once held off the Roman invasion.
Is this the right thing? Should I buy their cheap-as-chips packed peppers? Surely, the carbon footprint is low; it stops all those shipments of tomatoes from Holland or Peppers from Spain, which has to be a good thing? Surely an eyesore is worth having if we become more self-sufficient? This land was not very productive before and hardly a wildlife magnet?
But… look at the fine detail and you see that virtually soilless production means massive demand for water. They may pride themselves that 40% of their needs is met by collected rainwater, but where does the rest come from? In Roman times the River Wantsum was a Kilometer wide channel separating Thanet from Kent, now it is a trickle one could almost leap across, is the water-hungry project going to dry out the remaining marshes where the Stour runs!
Surely the UK’s largest offshore windfarm punctuation every sea vista that Turner ever painted, has to be a good thing. Low carbon cost power from attractive turbines that can do no harm. A positive benefit on a seawatch – now when I ask for directions to that passing Skua the answer will not be, ‘over there by that big wave’ – doh! But, ‘its going east past the 23rd windmill from Reculver towers’.
Wait-up! Low carbon cost? Don’t they have a projected life span of just about the same length of time it takes for the power to pay for their construction. Can it be right that Nuclear Power is far less costly to the planet in real terms?
But at least turbines cannot hurt birds right? Its been proven hasn’t it? That video I saw on the net of a Griffin Vulture being cut down by a turbine blade surely was a hoax?
20 odd years ago I gave up eating meat in the belief that growing cows was a lot less cost effective and productive than growing crops. I have been totally vindicated by the fact that Friesian flatulence causes more global warming that all the air-miles in the world.
But hold up, I still eat fish don’t I? Cod stocks have dwindled from over-fishing, one Tuna species is on the verge of extinction and long-line fishing is wiping out every tube-noses of the southern hemisphere!
But I only eat farmed fish, that’s gotta be OK, isn’t it? Huh?
Uneaten fish food and fish excrement causes pollution, too many nutriments causes eutrophication leading to algae blooms, and the farmed fish are fed on non-farmed smaller fish anyway! Then there is disease and…
…whoa! Stop. I can’t take any more!
Just tell me this. Can I fly off to see tropical birds or not? Will I be condemning the world to a future characterized by water wars and mass migrations or will my green pound ensure the survival of the rainforest for tourism and give a living on the land to locals?
4. Reasons to be Grumpy, part one …
I have lost count lately, of the number of times I’ve lain in bed looking out at the weather and wondering if I can be bothered to bird. I’ve no idea what the problem is, as, whenever I do stir my stumps, I thoroughly enjoy it. It doesn’t matter what I see, or where I go, whether for year ticks, rarities or just to marvel at the wonders of feathered flight. I just relax and enjoy it all. But glued to my pit, with one half-open eye, I vacillate and oscillate; internally debating whether to dress and go, shower and work, or just doze and dream away the day.
Today I managed to force the one eye open long enough to see wind bowing the lilac and rain running down the window pane… just the day for a spot of sea-watching. In less time than it takes to tell, I had turned over and shut the eye again. However, the call of the wild, or my over-full bladder forced my eye open once more. Still economizing on vision, my one eye navigated to the bathroom then kitchen where I brewed some coffee. Then, like Alice sliding down the rabbit hole, I found myself pouring coffee into my travel cup and pulling scope from cupboard. I left in the thin T-shirt and heavy overcoat needed for that time of year and this sort of birding.
As I drove past the kiss-me-quick shops and bucket-and-spade beach of my hometown I could see that the mist was thick over the water. Had I decided to ‘go for it’ on an impossible day? Increasingly I find my sixth sense is on the blink. The days I turn over and slumber turn out to be glory days missed, whereas those where stumps are stirred turn out to be becalmed and birdless. No wonder I find it hard to get motivated when the gods of birding rain on my parade, and the bird of paradise is out of sight, lodged firmly up a nostril!
Never one to let good sense triumph over stubbornness, I proceeded in a westerly direction to my favourite watch point. Not only is it a high view over the place where the English Channel turns a corner into the North Sea, but also because it requires a trek of just 10 yards from the car. A tired Victorian shelter has been brightly refurbished in seaside blue. Granted there are times when I have to elbow old lacy ladies out of the way, or stare maniacally at a late day-tripper until they scuttle away in fear, but usually its as lonely as a skunk with halitosis. There is a corner where one can sit out of the wind with the scope aimed at the best ocean view.
And that folks is where the ‘reasons to be grumpy’ started. I was on time, with the wind set right for a decent seabird passage, but could see barely 50 feet of exposed water before the curtain of thick mist. Ferries were sounding foghorns and sailboarders were bashing into breakwaters. Even the gulls were huddled drab and drizzly on the beach.
I tried to be optimistic whenever a Cormorant crossed a gap in the mist. Once a lost looking Arctic Skua wandered down the tide line. It was so close to me that I pushed away the scope and fumbled for my bins, only to find that I’d left them in the car.
Part two, reasons to be cheerful…
I had decided that I would throw the towel in at 09.00. But at 08.55 the mist suddenly cleared, I could see the massed turbines of the windfarm, but the blades were not spinning; typically the bird-bringing wind had dropped. But, no! By nine o’clock the wind was stiff again and the waves were being sheared by scatterings of skuas!
It suddenly all went horribly right!
It turned completely apple-shaped; a patch so purple it practically proclaimed itself the pontiff!
At first it was the turn of the Arctic Skuas that harried Common Terns and ganged up on Sandwich Terns until they dropped sand eels for the skuas to vacuum up. Shearing west like dog-fighting world war two pilots they lifted my spirits instantly.
The next hour disappeared into smiles and out-loud exultations made to no audience at all. Pomarine Skuas joined the battle flashing their white bellies and sporting sharp black caps. Then an unexpectedly early Long-tailed Skua so close I could clearly see its tiny landing lights on the leading edge of the wing. Finally the wing flashes of Bonxies, Great Skuas that came right to the strand, scattering the waders and out-bullying the gulls. Lazily they dipped and soared closer and closer until, my breath held, I could almost reach out and snatch them from the sky!
That’s the trouble with birding! Just when you think you have perfected your scowl and turned down the corners of your mouth until they point due south, the damn things go and turn the sun on in your soul!
5. Migration Misery …
God forbid that I am getting mellow as I mature, or should that be moulder? Today I have been seriously silly and unwarranted smiles have limped across the dial putting me in grave danger of cracking my face....
If you want more... You'll have to buy the next edition of Bird Art & Photography... or wait quite a while for the next instalment!
