May Highlights

   

Whilst some people have been birders all their lives, some come to it later in life. Others still start off birding and then drift off into other pursuits - the "wilderness years", until something brings them back to it. I fall very much into the latter category and this is the tale of how I came back into the fold. In hindsight, it was a combination of a number of factors which on their own wouldn't have brought me back but taken together were enough to bring me in from the cold.

I remember as a boy getting interested in birds. Someone had bought me four RSPB posters of the commoner birds in various habitats for a present and I used the garden one to get to know the commonest birds. I discovered that I enjoyed this identification process and got a bit more interested. Gradually I progressed to the Observer Book of Birds (which was fairly useless in hindsight) and then to the Birds of Britain and Europe (I forget who published that). I joined the Young Ornithologist's Club (the RSPB youth wing) and went on a few local trips and I was hooked. Then as I grew into a teenager I got into other interests. I'd like to say that it was drink and girls though it was actually more like fishing, bridge, Dungeons & Dragons and computer programming. It's only here amongst birders that I feel that I can comfortably confess to such interests - after fellow birders are hardly likely to accuse me of being too nerdy! I went off to University and whilst I kept up the fishing sporadically the birding had long since fallen by the wayside.

Time passed, I met my VLW and we settled down here in Oxford, first in Marston and then we bought a house in Walton Manor, near Port Meadow as it happens. In the summer of 2007 we went on a family holiday up to Sutherland (north west Scotland) - one of the last true wildernesses in Europe apparently, it was wonderfully remote. Without particularly trying we came across some interesting bird life up there with breeding Black-throated Divers calling on Loch Stack, a view of a Merlin hunting along the road as we drove by, Ring Ouzels on Ben Stack and a flock of twenty Ptarmigan that we stumbled across on top of Arckle, a rather harsh, almost lunar-landscaped mountain in the region. Seeing these birds piqued my interest and brought back childhood memories of seeing pictures of these birds in my bird books and wondering if I would ever actually see them. Without realising it at the time, this gave me a nudge in the direction of birding.

A few week later, during one of my periodic attempts to get fit I was going for a run on the Meadow which I remember was unusually flooded all year. I remember running along the path by the flood water and seeing at least a dozen long-legged white heron-like birds there on the floods. I stopped and stared! Surely those were Egrets - something that was incredibly rare back when I was last birding. I happened to pass a birder there who confirmed that they were indeed Little Egrets which he told me were now rather common. I got chatting with the birder and he explained to me about Bird Guides. That was a real eye-opener. Back as a boy there'd been none of that (there wasn't even the internet back then) so to learn that one could look up what birds were about sounded amazing. I went home and signed up for a free one week trial. It was just as amazing as I'd thought: there were all these bird reports on tap. Suddenly seeing different birds actually seemed possible! I went into town the next day and bought myself the Collins bird book.

I got quite obsessive about checking the Bird Guides site so when a few days later a couple of Pectoral Sandpipers were reported on the Meadow I went straight down there to take a look. I dug up my old Boots 8x30 bins and went down to the Meadow where I met the original finder of the birds who soon put me on to them. 

It was a particularly good autumn on the Meadow with a Grey Phalarope turning up and the Pec Sands staying a good while. What with the floods being around the whole time there were plenty of waders to look at and to try and get my head around. I remember stringing quite a few ID's back then ("what's new" I hear you say!) but keenly reporting them all on Bird Guides nonetheless. I joined the OOS and went along to some of the talks. I got myself some better bins and my first scope which was some useless Opticron budget scope which lasted all of a few months before I decided to get a Swaro.  Gradually I got to know people in the county, and a very friendly and welcoming bunch they were too. My birding started to improve and I got into blogging when I set up the Port Meadow Birding blog as an outlet for my new-found enthusiasm for this hobby. Things progressed and I now find that I can't imagine life without birding.

Looking back, if I hadn't been living next to Port Meadow, and the floods hadn't been there all summer and the birding particularly good that summer then I don't think that it would have happened. Somehow though, all these things came into alignment to bring me in from the cold and back to birding.