The Ups and Downs of Local

If you fancy a bit of solitary foot-slog with little or no chance of encountering other humans, the Dorset coast on a Sunday is probably not the place to go. So I didn't...

A few weeks ago I invested in the Ordnance Survey phone app, and this afternoon used it to find myself a footpath walk from home that would take me into the wilderness a bit. Our home is in Bradpole, on the NE outskirts of Bridport and just a few minutes from proper countryside. Bird-wise I had no expectations whatsoever, but obviously hoped for some interest. Here's my route...

The route (in red) is nearly all footpath or bridleway. The coloured stars all have birdy significance...

If you follow the route in the clockwise direction I took, you will quickly spot the purple star. This was the first birdy surprise. Nothing that special, but 5 Meadow Pipits in the grassy field there was still nice, and an excuse to fire up the camera...

Meadow Pipit. Straight off the camera, untouched. 1600mm of zoom, hand-held. ISO 400, 1/250 sec, exposure bias -0.3. To make life simple I took the focus and exposure off the fence post, not the bird.

Same again, tinkered with. Good enough for me.

Shortly before the northernmost point of the route I came across a good-sized flock of Redwings, certainly 50+ birds. Very flighty, as per normal, but still worth a photo I thought...

From where I was standing I certainly wouldn't have known if one of these Redwings had actually been a Black-throated Thrush, but the camera would... Full zoom, hand-held, 1/160 sec.

The red star is next to a little lake which I'd never come across before. No surprise that there were a few Mallards, but I was pretty amazed to see a pair of Tufties also...

Smart drake Tufted Duck. 1500mm zoom, and just 1/60 sec shutter speed. Camera supported on fence post.

On my old Seaton patch a pair of Tufties would have been quite notable. Perhaps they're notable here as well? I don't know. Basically I know next-to-nothing about my local birds, and that really hit home this afternoon. As I toddled along, wondering if this stream might hold Dipper, or those hedges might harbour Yellowhammers, I genuinely had no idea whether or not such musings were realistic. If I'm honest I was mostly disappointed at the apparent lack of birds. For example, at one point (on the RHS of the map) the footpath went across an open field (where it was totally unmarked!) and beneath a line of pylons. I took a couple of photos...

I don't know exactly what crop I was walking through, but the stuff seemed lifeless, and the whole area rather sterile...

These fizzing, crackling monsters are such a blight.

Anyway, no Dipper or Yellowhammers. And I was almost back at the starting point when I got my final surprise. Here the path runs along the edge of a field, separated from the adjoining road just by a hedge. Unexpectedly I flushed a Snipe, then 11 more, and then another single, straight off the weedy path. I certainly would not have predicted that.

In addition to the above I saw or heard 3 Green Woodpeckers and a couple of Nuthatches, but little else made me go "Oh, that's nice..." Quite interesting though, and I will try it again one day. A different route. I can highly recommend the OS app; it was invaluable. Some of our local footpaths are marked very poorly indeed, or not at all, and without the app I certainly wouldn't have had the confidence to go steaming diagonally across a crop field.

I'm no different to most birders I guess, and focus 99% of my effort on places where it's obvious there will be good birding (that's 'good' in a local context of course) while completely ignoring enormous swathes of surrounding countryside. While I fear that much of that surrounding countryside might well be an ecological desert, surely some of it isn't...?