Pandora's Box?

This lockdown thing is quite evidently encouraging many of us birders, naturalists, etc, down paths we never saw ourselves taking. In my case, it's got me garden listing. And I'm pleased to say that my #BWKM0 list crept up to 41 today, via Kestrel and Mallard. But keeping a garden list is something which probably the majority of birders do anyway. Hardly a big deal then.

But what is a big deal, and as far as I am concerned has prompted a paradigm shift in birding behaviour, is nocmig. To be honest I had rarely given much thought to what might fly over my garden after dark, and I certainly never envisaged myself sitting outside in multiple layers, ears cocked in anticipation. But that's what I've been doing. And following hours of nothing, on Monday night a Moorhen flew over calling. Wow! And last night two did likewise. And I caught one of them on a basic voice-recording app on my phone, and was pathetically chuffed.

Anyway, even before this cornucopia of nocturnal avian riches, I had already taken the plunge and ordered a proper digital recorder. It arrived today...

Oh dear... 

It was not cheap, but my philosophy with kit like this is to buy something decent if I can, knowing there will always be a market for it second-hand if my enthusiasm proves to have overreached itself.

I am now at the bottom of yet another steep learning curve. My intention (at least initially) is to use it in harness with my ears. I would equate it with a birder using a camera. Identifying a tricky bird from images later is perfectly okay with me, and on that basis I would happily 'tick' anything I recorded and heard, even if I couldn't ID it at the time. Of course there are other scenarios re nocmig, but I'm steering well clear of them just at the moment...

Naturally I have carefully retained the packaging. Just in case.

PS. It is 20:55. Guess where I am sitting right this second.