The Learning Curve

The year is 1981. A summer trip to Minsmere with Mrs NQS. Both of us are relatively new and inexperienced birders, still at the bottom of the learning curve. The Island Mere is covered in ducks, all in assorted manky brown plumage. I can't remember exactly what I wrote in my notebook, but it was something like 'Unidentified ducks, lots'. Yep, I was pretty useless at ducks.

But I was eager to learn, and so persevered with the intricacies of bird identification. And not just with ducks. Fast-forward a year or so to October 1982, and the now very pregnant Mrs NQS and I are on the Staines Res causeway, where I am counting the resident flock of a hundred-or-so Dunlin on the drained north basin. Amongst them is another little brown wader which catches my eye. It looks different somehow, in both plumage and structure. Eventually, with the helpful input of two other Staines birders, I work out that it has to be a Baird's Sandpiper. Rather handily, it stayed until the following April.

Looking back, it surprises me how quickly a novice birder can go from 'useless at ducks' to picking out and identifying a pretty subtle wader in a bunch of very similar but much more common congeners. Probably though, I shouldn't be surprised. After all, I was dead keen, I did a lot of birding, and I made an effort to learn new stuff. Application pays off. Which brings me to the point of this little tale...

Some years ago I got sick and tired of looking at big flocks of gulls on the Axe Estuary and realising that if a juvenile Yellow-legged Gull filled my scope I would not know it. Something had to be done. So I made an effort to learn what to look for, and eventually began to find and identify juv YLGs. In the process I no doubt looked at, analysed and discarded many thousands of Herring Gulls, and not a few Great and Lesser Black-backs. In time I went through the exact same process for Caspian Gull. That exercise is still paying dividends today. Or, to be more precise, yesterday...

A mid-afternoon break at Coronation Corner. Lots of big gulls on the mud and in the river. First scan across them with a scope and there's a Caspian Gull bobbing about in the water, having a wash! It caught my eye as instantly as if it had been painted day-glo yellow. Admittedly it was all rather jammy re timing and whatnot, but I can tell you that a dozen years ago I would have looked right through it. That simply doesn't happen any more.

There's a moral there!

Anyway, it was clearly Tim White's bird from 17 Jan, and this time it hung around long enough for Steve, Ian McLean, and Tim to see. There will be some good photos, but in the meantime there's this one...

Hello again.