Plans Afoot

Although I find this hard to believe - and rather sobering - I've been publishing online birdy stuff for more than two decades now. In the early days it was BirdForum. My first BF post is dated 24th September  2004, but in January 2006 I started a thread entitled Backwater Birding, focused on the Axe Estuary and nearby locations in East Devon. It rapidly grew to become a popular, multi-author birding diary for the mostly Seaton-based contributors. Backwater Birding was a lot of fun at the time, but I could not have foreseen that it might one day become a source of inspiration for a knackered old pensioner...

As I sit here on a freezing night in January 2026 I can roll back the years to those days of at-that-point largely unrealised hope and expectation, and view them through the lens of 20 years' worth of local birding experience. And boy, what a ride it has been. I am not really one of those who is motivated by the rarities, the ticking and the listing and all that. Of course I have tried it, but for me it's all a bit shallow. No, give me the tricky ID's, the puzzles, the quiet corners, the little voyages of discovery. That's where my jollies lie, and 20+ years of birding in East Devon and West Dorset have provided them in spades.

Within weeks of starting Backwater Birding, this happened...

A composite of several digiscoped pics taken by Steve Waite of 11 White-fronted Geese on Colyford Marsh on 5th February 2006.

The above photos still reside on Backwater Birding, and provide exactly the motivation needed to get me planning an early alarm for the morning. With widespread sub-zero temperatures tonight, and with Tundra Beans and White-fronts peppered country-wide, maybe tomorrow...?

Another source of inspiration is a spreadsheet of my old 2004-2010 records. There was a bit of a freeze in January 2009...

The Axe Estuary at around 14:30 on 7th January 2009. Lots of ice.

Around lunchtime on that date I witnessed the arrival and departure of two flocks of Aythya ducks offshore. First, 15 Pochards and a Tuftie flew around Seaton Bay and away east, then 10 Pochards likewise. Later I discovered a flock of 11 Gadwall on the sea...

11 Gadwall in Seaton Bay on 7/1/2009

Pochard, Tufted Duck, Gadwall? Common stuff, right? Maybe elsewhere, but not here. In fact, Pochard is far from annual. The weather is probably nowhere near as chilly right now, but reminding myself of that cold-weather movement 17 years ago has fired me up for tomorrow.

And there are plans afoot...