It was Bill Oddie that wrote; Bird-watchers are tense, competitive, selfish, shifty, dishonest, distrusting, boorish, pedantic, unsentimental, arrogant and - above all - envious. This evening I can just about identify with every single word of it.
If anyone has been following this blog, since it's birth back in that dark October of 2007, they will have been aware of my annual pilgrimage to Shetland. Annual that is until this year. At the end of last years visit, and for various reasons, Andy and I decided that we would take a break this year. So if you're looking for daily anecdotal updates on days spent thrashing around in ditches, snaring my ball sack on barbed wire fences, drinking dirt cheap blended whisky and of course quaffing a selection of savoury pastries you're out (or in, depending how you look at it) of luck.
So as I write this, on what would have been the eve of the eve before our trip, Shetland is seemingly awash with 'rare'. Every Twitter alert makes my heart skip, I can't stop picking my phone up and refreshing the stream - remember the time when stream was just something you played in or a rather high piss up the school toilet wall? The competitive, selfish, unsentimental and definitely envious parts of me are hoping that this year is absolutely hopeless for rare and as such will scare people off going next year. But lets face it we're not going so it's going to be huge and they'll be even more birders next year - I suppose there's always Scilly....
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Not the best photo but for me finding birds of this calibre is what Shetland's all about.
We of course didn't find this , we were never that lucky
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2 comments:
I wouldn't fret too much Mark...i reckon the recent eastern 'party' may be over on Shetland with the onset of more westerly's...
Yes...they might find the odd further biggie amongst the debris of vagrants...
[High quality 'after party debris' tho it has to be said]...
Of course...there may be another big yank in the offing up north...
ps...['big yank' is not rhyming slang in this case]...
If we had been going tomorrow, I'd currently be thinking 'here we go again - a week of easterlies and loads of good birds, and now it's going westerly for at least a week...'. So it's obviously not just us! Maybe we should go a bit earlier next year?
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