WEEDON’S WORLD

OWING TO THE weirdness of magazine schedules, it is mid-july as I write this. Euro 16 has only just finished and I’m yearning for the start of the football season in mid-august. But I am yearning more for the start of what we birders choose to call autumn. Now, some birders declare the dawn of autumn as when the first non-breeding Green Sandpiper comes back through at the end of May. I’m talking about the meat of the matter, the good stuff, the glory of return migration. Much as I like butterflies, love the height of moth season, totally get dragonflies, and revel in the long days and (occasional) warm weather, I want birds, new birds, migrating birds. The trouble is my local year list has ground to a halt. After an exceptional spring, since I ticked Spotted Flycatcher on 21 May, I’ve added nothing new. Indeed, I have even turned to a wee bit of twitching further afield than my usual Peterborough area confines. Contrary to what you may think, UK listing is not really my thing. Indeed my personal British list is so small that I fear you may think less of me if I were to reveal it. You see, back when I was first seeing what I considered rare birds in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the size of one’s list was how one was judged as a birder. That and whether you had a scope. I had a small list and no scope. In those days of my youth, I clung to the idea that seeing a bird in Britain was much better than seeing a bird ‘abroad’ (one of those ugly words that thankfully seems so horribly dated now). A rare bird, no matter what it was, ticked in the UK was something very special, and so much more satisfactory than ticking it in a ‘foreign’ country, which only felt like a half-tick. The fact that the foreign bird would be seen in its own country, in its natural habitat, fit and healthy and behaving as that species ‘should’ was understood, of course, but somehow seemed like cheating. But, more recently, I have done a fair amount of birding in different countries. In fact, I have seen most of the birds on the official British List. Just not in the UK… Refrain, please, from asking me how many birds I have seen, though, as I’m not a ‘world lister’, either. Don’t get me wrong, I do love seeing new birds, I just don’t have the hardcore collector’s drive that is required to take such listing to the competitive extremes necessary. Seeing birds in their ‘natural habitats’ is great, but I am not against going to see rare birds in the UK. I just don’t do it much. However, one bird which tickled my fancy was the recent Great Knot in north Norfolk. GREAT KNOT The rarity liked to stay on the edge of the mass of Knot (those are godwits in the background) Though it is a bird I have seen before in India and Australia, I had never seen one in breeding plumage, and, after all, this individual was theoretically only a tad more than an hour from home. So, I headed out to Titchwell with my friend Will Bowell to see the magnificent wader after work on day one of its stay. Except, of course, it wasn’t there. It wasn’t there the next time we went, either, when we slogged more than eight miles at Titchwell and Brancaster through wind and rain and still failed to connect. But, I’m not really grumbling, as the next day we returned and it was easy to see doing its usual thing of standing on the edge of a flock of several hundred densely packed Knot on Titchwell’s expansive freshmarsh. And the next time we went, it was doing exactly the same thing, all day. Like a Knot in Turnstone’s clothing, it was a thing of beauty. Slightly bigger than the background masses, with a longer bill, grey headed, liberally splashed with jet black on the breast and with delicate orange markings on the shoulders and fine black rows of dots on the flanks. Yes, it was fairly distant and spent most of its time asleep, only occasionally waking and stretching its neck ready for flight, in sync with the tangled mass of Knot on the freshmarsh. It only occasionally fed and bathed and wandered around. But it was a lovely bird to watch and enjoy. In fact, it was much nicer than the grey versions of Great Knot I had seen in the species’ regular haunts of the fine sandy beaches of Gujarat or Queensland. Perhaps there is something in this British twitching after all. Mike

And the next day we went it was doing the same thing all day. Like a Knot in Turnstone’s clothing

weedworld.blogspot.com