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Curiously, I owe the last 20-odd years of birding enjoyment to my bike.
Had my wife and I not been keen cyclists, we might not have chanced upon Minsmere when doing a circular ride from our holiday base in Peasenhall. Having been moderately interested in all things wild since I was a kid (I still have my pressed wildflower collection turning to dust in the attic), I had a cheap pair of binoculars with me, and the man in the RSPB shack (as it then was) made me an offer I couldn't refuse - join the RSPB and receive a copy of the Mitchell Beazley pocket bird book for scarcely more than the single entry fee.
The die was cast: we had a great time and would never look at LBJs the same way again. I acquired a pair of 10x42 Adlerblicks that I thought were brilliant until several years later I compared them with my wife's new bins; my pride and joy seemed unaccountably to be filled with yellow smog. Fortunately they soon failed to survive being dropped onto a rock on Port Merion beach, so I could upgrade to Swarovskis with a clear conscience.
I'm with Simon Barnes when he says that he never 'goes birding', he just 'is birding' all the time. So, with our interest in two-wheeled travel, 'cyclo-birding' was born, and we've since cyclo-birded from John o'Groats to Land's End, Bordeaux to Barcelona, Ravenna to Rome and even Krakow to Budapest, amongst many more local journeys. It's amazing what you see from a bike - you can hear calls, see over walls and hedges and stop wherever you like. On these organised rides we made an interesting discovery: birding is contagious. At first our companions regarded us a bit weird, but after a few days people would stop and ask what we were looking at, then they started keeping a look out themselves and we were often approached with "I saw a big brown bird on a post ..what do you think it was?", and asked each evening what we had seen. I hope we may have inadvertently won a few converts. |
However, undiluted birding in our favourite areas, like North Norfolk and the Highlands, required serious kit, in our case a Kowa scope and tripod, upgraded many years later to a Leica 77 APO. I admit to a masochistic liking for seawatching, Snow Buntings and Shorelarks in late February. Dedicated overseas birding holidays came next: Majorca (several times), Spain, Morocco and more recently Iceland.
Having moved to Sheffield in 1974 (for a job) from the gentler rolling country of Hertfordshire, I've never regretted it. Visiting the South East frequently on business convinced me that I'd made the right decision; the traffic and lack of wild open spaces now feels claustrophobic.
After nearly 30 years in Broomhill and Nether Edge (with Firecrest, Lesser Spot and 80 Waxwings on our list), we moved, almost by accident, to Derbyshire. We fell in love with what we call our 'stone hide' - an old farmhouse on the edge of Grindleford surrounded by damp rush meadow and woodland. Energetic scrub management and the addition of a garden pond, a scrape and a larger field pool have helped to boost our list to 79. It also offers some good digiscoping opportunities: in 2007 recently had four Tawny Owls raised in our kestrel box, and we could watch and photograph up to five birds at a time from the bedroom window - a real privilege. In 2008 they got it right: two Tawnies in the owl box and four Kestrels in the kestrel box!
It was not until 1997 that the SBSG featured in my life; during a Lakes weekend to celebrate a mutual friend's final Wainwright, I got chatting to our esteemed ex-Chair Pete Brown, and his gentle, almost painless, arm-twisting persuaded me to join up soon afterwards. The last three years have seen me involved in tetrad work for the Breeding Birds Survey, which whetted my appetite for getting more involved in the real work of the SBSG.
In early 2007 it was more gentle-ish persuasion, this time from Dave Wood, that got me onto the Committee, and I soon picked up the website baton from Tony Morris. All I can say is it's a good thing I took early retirement!
Simon Bailey |
