Sometimes I am tempted to go ‘twitching’
The Laughing Badger Gallery, 99 Platt Street, Padfield, Glossop sean.wood @talk21.com
SO here’s a conundrum. Every day in the UK and Ireland rare and exotic birds are being spotted from, and in, all points north, south, east and west. I would like to know whether this has always been the case, or is it just that there are more birdwatchers watching?
I would wager the latter, but the answer doesn’t really matter as the plain facts speak for themselves, and prove beyond any doubt, that virtually any bird can turn up on these shores, from anywhere, at anytime. To prove the case I checked the fantastic Birdguides website at www.birdguides.com and here are a few examples from this week:
Lapland Bunting at Red Rocks, Cheshire; Long tailed Duck, Audenshaw Reservoirs; Osprey, Martin Mere and a Great Northern Diver at Carsington Water, and then in Galway, my spiritual home, a Forster’s Tern, and before you ask, I have not got a clue who Forster was either. Readers can access much of the site for free, and it is constantly updated with reports and photographs.
Hardcore ‘twitchers’ use the likes of Birdguides and other bird alert services to let them know where the latest rarity is, and then depending on how rare, or whether or not they have already ticked the bird off on their ‘life list,’ they will set off in pursuit, driving and flying hundreds of miles to catch sight of their quarry.
It’s not my bag particularly, but I do confess to twitching once, and that was to see a young male Snowy Owl from the High Arctic which had managed to find it’s way to a huge cabbage field in Lincolnshire, and that was a fantastic sight. No bird has tempted me since. However, if I had not been in the wilds of Belarus, I would most certainly have dashed to County Kerry in southern Ireland to catch a glimpse of this absolute beauty, a Gyrfalcon from Greenland. Kerry birder Liam Doyle and his 10-year-old son Adam were in the very fortunate position of being finders of a white-morph Gyr on January 18.
Liam says: “It was a bright and breezy day down at Fenit, a small fishing village on the outskirts of Tralee. The village consists of a small port and much of its coastline consists of small bracken-covered cliff faces. It was on one of these very cliff faces that my son Adam first spotted the falcon. The Gyr had just killed a Curlew, and was beginning to tear it apart as we watched.”
With no shortage of high cliffs and expansive, water-bird filled estuaries around its coastline, County Kerry really provides the perfect cocktail of habitats for a Greenland Gyr to spend the winter in. Unsurprisingly, the county can boast 14 accepted records, most famously in recent times a bird found aboard a French trawler west of the Blasket Islands was kept on board and fed chicken!
I could also have been persuaded to ‘twitch’ last year, when sailing near the Isle of Islay, as reports of an Ascension Island Frigatebird at Bowmore popped up on my phone. In case you are wondering how far the young bird had wandered, the Ascension and Boatswain islands where they breed, are rocky outcrops in the Tropical Atlantic Ocean; that’ll be thousands of miles then.
And as for Forster, and not many people know this, he was, Johann Reinhold Forster, best known as the naturalist on James Cooks’ second Pacific voyage, where he was accompanied by his son Georg Forster. These expeditions promoted the career of Johann Reinhold Forster and the findings became the bedrock of colonial professionalism and helped set the stage for the future development of anthropology and ethnology.