Monday 11 June 2012

Mixed Fortunes

Ian and I checked the remainder of our boxes in the Hodder Valley yesterday and after all the rain we have had recently we expected some casualties. We had 15 boxes to check and this included some where we had ringed the pulli last week and we wanted to check the development of the chicks. What we found were what could only be described as mixed fortunes.

Five boxes had dead broods in and the split was one brood of Pied Flycatcher and Great Tit, and the remaining three being Blue Tits. Two broods had fledged and the remainder (8) were either about to fledge, or were looking quite healthy and were ringed. We ringed three broods of Pied Flycatchers totalling 16 chicks altogether.

For weeks I have been meaning to take the picture below of a sign that is up in the valley where we have our boxes. I thought I would share it with you because every week it makes me smile!

 
You will probably be aware that I co-write another blog Fleetwood Bird Observatory with my good mate Ian. We operate the Fleetwood peninsula, or should I say Ian does at is Ian who does all the hard work, like a bird observatory and document all the sightings on a daily basis. One of the bird news organisations, not the good people at Birdguides (we like them), another one and I think you probably know who I mean, have been 'cherry picking' certain records from our blog.

On the FBO blog we lump all the individual sites under 'FBO' as we know that people reading the blog aren't really interested whether something is at 'sand bar point' or 'saltmarsh creek' etc, but it is more the flavour of the migration that people are interested in. Not these people; they are desperate for information and they have been trying to guess where certain birds have been within the FBO recording area, and have rather amusingly been getting it wrong! Such is the desperation in our area for some people to twitch common migrants, rather than put the time in to find them for themselves, that some of them will have been heading to the wrong area based on this bird news organisations gen! It amuses us, but doubt it will amuse birders sent on a wild 'common migrant' chase, but then again they probably only have themselves to blame!

2 comments:

Stringer said...

Hilarious !!

We've recently had an incident with a certain bird information service, Rare Bird Alert to be precise ! The way they operate left us with a bitter taste in our mouths, in fact we were seriously unimpressed with their conduct.

Some of the local lads have taken their bats home over this incident, suffice to say RBA won’t be “the first with the news” in these parts anymore !!

It's funny to think of idiots with pagers running around the place looking for whinchats, ring ouzels and the like....... very sad indeed........ even funnier is the idea that their little boxes are pointing them in completely the wrong direction !! ........ I think these losers need to put the boxes down, get out more, and do some proper birding.....

The thing that amazes me most about these pagerslaves is that they follow the little box like it is GOD !! The thing rules their lives and whatever it says is gospel !! ....... I am sick of hearing people say “the pager says this” or “the pager says that”...... The pager tells these people what to do, it’s like they are robots or something...... If the pager told em all to jump off a cliff do you think they would do it ?!!..........

Hmmmmmmm......... Does anyone know how to hack into vodaphone ?

Personally, I couldn’t give a flying fart what the pager says...... and if people don’t turn the annoying bleeping off they are quite likely to find it either in little pieces under my boot or inserted where the sun don’t shine.......

Finally, I remember someone with a pager turning up here to twitch a ruff once !! FFS !!!

I try SO hard to be tolerant of others, but you cannot get away from the fact that some people are just utter feckin cretins .....

The Hairy Birder said...

It is the one and the same over here that has been lifting stuff off our blog, trying to second guess where a common migrant (a recent Little Stint was a classic example) was and getting it completely wrong! They won't be 'first with news' on any of our patches either!