Spring Oddity

As per usual on a Saturday, I donned my 'The Cat' goalkeeping shirt and stood between the sticks to save many of the shower of shots that were fired at me. We won.

Yesterday, the news broke that Bill Oddie was leaving Springwatch. I actually knew on Monday but was sworn to secrecy. It will be very interesting to see who (if anyone) they get to replace him. I've heard the names Alan Titchmarsh, comedian Rory McGrath and Ben Fogle bandied around. 

What do you guys think?

Posts yesterday - Poles today

I can't believe it!!

For two mornings in a row, I've dragged my carcass out of bed and drove myself down to The Scrubs for a quick hour's birding. It was a cold, crisp and sunny day. Perhaps that was the only thing of note to comment about this morning. Well, actually there were around 30 Meadow Pipits in the grassland and a majestic group of 4 Mute Swans headed serenely over.

After moaning for several days, I had an apologetic phone message later from the Council promising to next week move the pipit sign I was complaining about in yesterday's blog to the proper place that it should be at. I truly fear for the future of our precarious population as I can't see their breeding area recovering before they start setting up territory. What's more, it sadly seems likely that the grassland will not be made into part of the Local Nature Reserve that the wooded bits of The Scrubs enjoys.

Today was the day that I finished the Conwy RSPB article on my favourite walk, which is naturally The Scrubs. I will ship that over to them once I've given it the over night test. I called the editor of BBC Wildlife Magazine to see whether she had received the ideas that I emailed over for some articles that I'd like to write for them. She was up for meeting me, so I will be heading over to Bristol the week after next for lunch with her and her colleagues. 

Meanwhile, the editor of Bird Watching Magazine managed to secure a trip to Poland for me to write a piece on Urban Birding. Fantastic! Also, next weekend I'll be heading over to Paris to explore some of its urban sites for the magazine. I always get excited visiting new cities for birding purposes. Of course, I'm not a complete glutton for punishment, thus I will be squeezing in some time out of town to get a birding fix.

My thoughts and prayers go out to my friend Ciska Faulkner, a producer who whilst filminga commercial last week in Helsinki, Finland came down with meningitis and had to be flown back to London. She is currently in hospital. I wish her a speedy recovery.

Hitting the post

Mute Swan - Petria Whelan

At last I made it out to a rather waterlogged Wormwood Scrubs for my first bit of birding for a couple of weeks. I originally got a text from Fiona Barclay of Birdguides, who lives in nearby Acton, alerting me to a Egyptian Goose flying towards The Scrubs. I jumped out of bed as if I'd just wet it!

Although I have been moaning about it, my lack of binocular action is actually par for the course for me at this time of the year. I tend to be in hibernation until mid-March when the promise of migrants galvanises me into overdrive ie, daily visits and looking at everything that moves.

This morning a high flying Mute Swan made a couple of circuits and c20 Meadow Pipits revealed themselves in the grassland. It was the largest flock for a couple of months. This is normal for this time of year and no doubt, some of the males will be in song flight before long. Unfortunately, their favoured breeding area has a desire path cut right through it due to the excessive short cutting by dog walkers. After much badgering, I managed to get the Council to put signs up requesting that the paths are not used to help regenerate the area for the pipits. Instead of putting a sign post up at either end, they put the sign at one end and the other in a completely irrelevant place, far from the contested path.

Nothing's ever easy.

I also had around 400 Carrion Crows and at least 100 gulls (mostly Herring & Lesser Black-backs) all up in the air together, as if they had been spooked by some unseen assailant. My guess was that it was a high flying Peregrine.

It was good to get back into the saddle again.

Jet!

Planning migrations..

After Monday night's mega jabbering I took a day of from communicating yesterday to get over it all. But the feedback was good and anyone out there reading this blog can feel confident and book Wembley Arena because we would fill it twice over!

On a serious note, the old gentleman that had the heart attack is on the mend and is recovering well. We can rest assured that it wasn't one of our jokes that set his heart off. Mind you, we did talk about girls a lot and in particular, we talked about the importance of women in the adolescent years of heterosexual boys. Maybe he got excited harking back to his younger days?

Today was a good day in The Urban Birder office. I got offered a 4 day trip to Lisbon, Portugal in May by the Portuguese Tourist Board so that I can research for an urban birding article for Bird Watching Magazine, Kensington & Chelsea Council called me (I met the woman at the recent London Biodiversity Forum that I chaired) and have offered me a role in a project to do with exposing wildlife to kids in the area. I'm meeting with those guys next week. I also was asked by Southwark Council to lead a bird walk next month and finally, I was invited to be a 'name' at the Spring Birdwatching Fair in Tamworth, Staffordshire.

Keep it coming folks!

Orator? Move over Barack!

Mike Dilger & I in our Clacton dressing room

The day has come. The day that Mike Dilger (The Dilge) and I were to descend upon the good people of Clacton in Essex to deliver our long awaited talk on our birding lives.

I woke up at 8am - late for me, as I had hoped to head out to The Scrubs for some meditation time before starting my day. So much for that. I put the finishing touches to my RSPB article on the Brighton Starlings and sent it off to the editor, then set about tickling my Conwy piece. 

My ex-agent left me a voicemail to wish me a good talk tonight (as he had arranged it) and also mentioned that I may be getting a call from the producer at the Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2 to get me to come in to chat about feeding garden birds at 1pm. No more than 20 minutes later I received the call from the producer. He asked me to come in and chat live on air for 1.20pm. On an ordinary day that would have been cool, but today was the day that me and The Dilge had ear tagged to do the final rehearsals, view our video clips and put together our powerpoint presentation. Despite that, I agreed to do it, so a car was organised to pick me up.

Meanwhile, I had an email back from the editor of RSPB's Birds saying that he loved my Brighton piece. Nice.

When The Dilge arrived at my house, he wasn't best pleased to learn that I would be breaking off our crucial rehearsal time to do something else. I thought about what he was saying and agreed with him. So I pulled out of it and they got Stephen Moss from the Natural History Unit to step in.

The Dilge and I cracked on. Boy am I glad that we took that extra time as we sure needed it.

We eventually arrived at the theatre at 5.40pm after a traffic-filled 2.5 hour drive across central London and into darkest Essex. For those with poor geography (myself included) Clacton is situated on the coast, lapped by the freezing waters of the cold North Sea.

We were shown to our dressing room where we set about rehearsing our talk again. At 7.30pm we strode onto the stage to face an audience of around 800 mostly elderly members of the local arts and literary society. The talk started smoothly. We got a few laughs and were holding the audience's attention. I was in the middle of a story about when as a kid I watched an animated film called 'The Last Of The Curlews' and how it shaped my future birding life. Meanwhile, Mike had just received a message from the organiser that we had to stop the talk because someone in the crowd was having a heart attack and needed to be carted of to hospital - pronto!

Of course, despite trying to loudly whisper at me to finish, I was in full flow with arms waving and with the crowd listening intently. Once I'd finished, he stepped up and addressed the audience telling them the news. We retired to our dressing room whilst the poor fella (who by now had blue lips and a decidedly grey face) was shipped off to hospital.

After a 25 minute delay we returned to the stage and delivered the remainder of the talk. It was a hit. They loved it. At the end, Mike signed a few copies of his book and I signed a few autographs. Jeez, I feel like a celebrity!

There were plenty of smiles on the drive back as Mike and I planned our world tour!

The Bird Loving Cat

Football on Saturday morning was a bit of a triumph as we won by the ridiculous scoreline of 12-6 and the game included stint where I played in central defence for around 20 minutes. Which seriously curtailed any surreptitious birding that I do when I'm in my normal position as goalkeeper. Having said that, I only saw a Magpie today. 

They call me The Bird Loving Cat due to my apparent ability to pounce across the face of the goal like some scrambling cat leaping after a ball that has invariably already hit the back of the net.

No, I'm not that bad. I rather like my football moniker.

On Saturday evening, I was supposed to be live on BBC Radio 5 Live chatting about the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch. But annoyingly, they never bothered to call me. I got the call today from an apologetic producer and in the end I was on tonight. The female presenter announced the piece by exclaiming, 'Calling all twitchers!'. My first thought was; you can't rely on twitchers to count the birds in the garden because they'd be out hunting for rare birds. I kept that thought to myself.

Despite the miserable weather, I had an excellent day in the office and made great headway on my to do list. Well, apart from the fact that I have not even looked at my talk that I'm doing tomorrow night, let alone rehearsed it!

Pornithology?

Haviside's Dolphins - their relevance to this blog will become apparent (Sacha Barbato & Nathalie Gilbert)

I woke up expecting to feel lower than a dolphin's droppings, but instead I felt great - and this was despite the grey, wet weather outside of my bedroom window.

It was also despite the fact that I had promised a friend of mine that I would help him move from his flat in Shoreditch into his newly found girlfriend's basement flat in Stoke Newington. So I drove across to east London a largely alien territory to me, a certified west London boy. We humped various unnecessarily heavy boxes including a ginormous TV that was surely the weight of three small dead baby elephants.

He then handed me a much lighter box and asked me to look after it as he didn't want his girlfriend to discover it. Curious, I cried 'what's in the box', a bit like Brad Pitt in the last desert scene in 'Seven'. Matter-of -factly he answered 'it's my porn'. I'm now the trustee of 'Debbie Does Dallas' and other similar works. The things you do for your mates!

Back at home, I got cracking on getting pictures together for my talk on Monday. I really do need to rehearse it. Radio 5 Live called me and asked me if I would be interested in being interviewed tomorrow night about this weekend's RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch as it is the 30th anniversary. Naturally I agreed, so I will be on at around 9pm for a few minutes on Saturday night.

It also reminded me that I have not indulged in any ornithology for sometime. That has to be remedied. The only birds I noticed today were a group of six aerially chasing Common Gulls that were screaming at the top of their lungs over Stoke Newington. I paused from struggling with a massive box that was about to split to admire those gorgeous gulls.