Slow Birding

My first autumn trip to Scilly was in October 1984, and looking back I reckon very little of it involved what I now think of as actual birding. It was basically a full-on week of twitching. But my next autumn trip was very different...

The last two weeks of September 1986 began with a very wet, very windy Scillonian crossing. It was blowing a sodden hoolie from the SE, which did not relent until the following day, when the sun appeared and shone its happy rays on hedgerows leaping with birds. I no longer have the old notebooks, but my memory tells me that common migrants were everywhere. Assorted warblers, chats and flycatchers, an abundance which called for a birding approach that I've employed on every Scilly trip since. Stop at every gateway, scan every hedge, look along every furrow, etc, etc.

Slow birding.

Sure, it isn't rocket science, but it is surprising how few birders do it. An advantage of this kind of approach is that it will often give you a feel for which spots are particularly birdy right now, and then you can add 'wait a bit, and see what pops out' to your list of tactics. I love birding this way. Mind you, I don't always have the discipline it demands and sometimes cover ground much quicker than I ought. But when I do manage to take it easy and be a bit more thorough, there is usually something to show for it.

I would like to report that my efforts in this regard have paid off handsomely in my local birding, but, er...

The best recent(-ish) four birds I've found close to home are probably these:

• Hoopoe - flushed as I walked along.
• Golden Oriole - flew across my line of sight as I walked along, and could well have been flushed from the hedge I was following.
• Red-backed Shrike - raised bins to check Linnets, and there was the shrike in the same field of view!
• Wryneck - disturbed (almost flushed) as I walked along.

In other words, not one of them is the result of a careful, systematic scan, or a patient bit of 'wait and see', or any other particularly commendable tactic. No, all four were the result of jam, and just being there. Ah well...

Nevertheless, I can think of many, many less spectacular birds which have recently fallen to slow birding. Pied and Spotted Flycatchers, Wheatears by the score, Whinchats, assorted common warblers, and so on.

Even this afternoon, during a lovely walk from West to East Bexington and back, carefully searching a grassy field of sheep in the hope of Richard's Pipit or something, produced a Green Woodpecker poking around. Just a Green Woodpecker, but one I would have missed otherwise. And had it been something rare instead, well, wouldn't I have been chuffed with my cleverness! To be honest, by local standards it was quiet today. In 3.5 hours up to 19:00 I saw just 7 Chiffchaffs, 1 Blackcap and 2 Wheatears. But I would have missed even the Wheatears if I hadn't spent a good while scanning the ploughed fields at East Bex...

Slow birding's reward. A cracking male Wheatear.

And why was I scanning the ploughed fields? Well, where shall I begin? Dotterel, Buff-breasted Sandpiper...who knows? At one point I found myself staring intently at something 'interesting', lying low in the soil. With bins I couldn't quite make it out. It did look birdy, but alas, a bit too static. I changed position to see if it turned into an obvious lump of wood or something. Nope. Still birdy, yet for some reason it didn't quite look kosher. So I got the camera out and took a photo at 2000mm zoom. Ah...

This is the resulting photo. See it?

No wonder it had me going. I think it might be a lump of Pheasant. Definitely feathers anyway.

Here are a couple of West Bex photos, in order to illustrate the kind of habbo that is just begging for a bit of slow birding. Taken from the same spot, one looks downhill towards the sea, the other uphill towards the coast road...

A bit of West Dorset coast. Birds like it, and often hide in it.

Not much today, but tomorrow...?

As the autumn deepens, and parts of the east coast give birders based elsewhere a tantalising glimpse of what is dropping in on this green and pleasant land, expectation is raised. You cannot help it. However [relatively] mundane your local birding haunts may be, there is hope, there is optimism. And somewhere, somehow, sometime soon, someone will score big-time. Personally I hope it's the result of some nice, careful, slow birding...

Just imagine if the slowly-birded bunting went 'tic' instead of 'tsiew'. One day...