Some actual factual birding !!

Readers please note ... the picture-downloady-thing has gone on strike right now.....  but I've shown you where the pictures should be so you can use your imagination....
UPDATE ... it seems to be working now ... 

Well, it does work, but it didn't seem to like the picture I wanted... but it did like this which, interesting though it is, has nothing to do with anything. Better some picture that nnothing though eh ?

No laughing at the back !

It has been a sunny day after that sick joke of a "spring" we haven't had.

Here's the proof of said sunnyness...

[Note ... again, it wouldn't do the picture I wanted, but it seemed to like this one, which is actually fairly to the point.]

Seeing as how the Librarian had the use of the  RayCar this morning I took the dog for a long walk along the canal ... well, more accurately by the canal. Target bird was Kingfisher for my May 3k local patch list.

I will get rid of the tension right now by telling you that I didn't see one...though I met someone who did.

However, I did see a few good things... good in a local/Aldcliffe-type context you understand.

First off, a lovely Little Owl was conveniently sitting on the lower right branch of a conveniently close tree ... and I snapped it... the bird, not the branch. The sheer quality of this snap will impress you, even more so as I did it by holding the bins in one hand, the tinky pocket camera in the other, holding the latter up to the former and pushing the button whilst squinting into the sun hence complete inability to see what the hell I was snapping. But it's there, in a "Where's Wally" kind of way.

A canal barge lady came out of her canal barge to see what this strangely-scarfed idiot was doing outside her barge. I told her, and I lent her the bins and she ticked it.

I then trundled further on and into the Deep Cutting. Back in the old days I did this walk almost every morning before work, with, of course, an entirely different dog. Per person per day I saw very little, but over the years good sightings came along... Lesser Spot, Water Rails, Common Sands, Minks, various Terns, Woodcocks etc etc. .... and pretty much every year in the first few days of May, a Wood Warbler would turn up .

When I told top birder Ziggy  ( Hello Ziggy) about this I don't think he believed me, I mean, who does (?) , but as he was compiling an Aldcliffe List at the time  I promised I would ring him up next time a Wood Warbler showed itself. It did, I did, he got it.

Well readers, today was, flukily, an actual bang-to-rights Wood Warbler day. Tootling past the bridge thingy in the deep cutting I heard a Wood Warbler singing.... and a bit of patient waiting produced the bird itself....... May 2nd, 10 am, Wood Warbler. Honk Honk!!!.

And that wasn't all.... just before leaving the DC on the return trundle, I heard a quiet warbling amongst the assembled greenery. Ha, I thought, it's one of those sneaky sub-singing Blackcaps that all those misguided twerpkins ID as Garden Warblers. More patient waiting ensued, the bird came into view and it was a bloody Garden Warbler. This species has become increasingly harder to "get" in my little patch  over the last few years so there was considerable internal rejoicing at this modest sighting.

So there we are. We won't even mention all the other exciting things... me trying to fool the dog but she fooled me instead,  an old bloke stopping me to ask how far I could see through "those binoculars" , finding that Moschatel was still flowering in the usual top secret places, another old bloke asking me if I had ever seen a Goldfinch, plus, incredibly, on two separate occasions a person coming towards me along the canal path turned round and set off back again.... twice! .... the fun never ends. It must be that stupid Dr. Who scarf of mine.

And now some lovely music from Datblygu ... Cyn Symud i ddim ... currently the top track on that new-fangled mp3 gadget...

 Quite New-Orderesque in places ...

Unusual Trip Tick ...

Hey ho ---- all the occupants of Castell Ray trundled to Whitley Bay and Tynemouth yesterday. The trip yielded the usual tourist views plus an odd sighting.... here we go ..

[A] A big boat ...

[B] Two little boats ...

[C]  An upskirt view ...

[D] Actually that was a Mr. Collinwood ... here is his plaque ... you know, if I'd been a clever-arse and just put these 3 pictures on, I could have changed the title  from "An Unusual Trip Tick" to ...wait for it, wait for it ... " An Unusual Triptych."

That's a quality pun that is. .

[E]   but what about this pecular, and frankly unexpected, sighting ....

It's one of those things you come across that you just ain't going to report.... nothing good will come of it you can bet. There's no trick photography involved by the way. I saw it, I knelt down carefully and took the picture with my trusty pocket camera.

While you are dizzy with the ramifactions of that lot, here's Carmen Boza with a fine acoustic song,   distancia de seguridad ..........

FOOTNOTE ... your genial host, one ray by name, hasn't owned or played a guitar for over 5 years, but today a rush of blood to the head ( probably that sighting above) led to the probably misguided purchase of a very cheap acoustic guitar. His fingers are, of course, as soft as butter and in the intervening years he has forgotten a very great deal .... but at his advanced age of 2 billion seconds minus 9 days, he has to ward off the approaching dementia-related conditions and start making new connections in what I like to think of as my brain. Wish me luck folks.

Hanna Brain, bird detective.

As regular readers will know, I have already published three best-selling "bird crime" novels featuring Detective Inspector Hanna Brain .... and I'm now working on a book of short stories featuring her and her team. Here's one of them, as a sort of pre-publication free sample............

  You're off the case , D.I Hanna Brain !!

D.I Hanna Brain had not had the best of mornings. Her troubled sidekick has been kicked in the side by an Ostrich while interviewing a potential suspect in a  case of Ratite-Bashing in North Finchleyshire and was unlikely to be fit for for duty until he was fit for duty. At least.

Meanwhile, our troubled, red-headed , twice-divorced tousle-shirted heroine had been taken off her latest case. True, she had made mistakes. True, she had made mistakes. But she was not responsible for either of those mistakes, but the Chief Super was. But the Chief Super was blind. To her excuses. But the Chief Super was blind to her excuses.

She was always being taken off her cases! She was forever being shunted to one side and put on pathetic feeble lopshifting cases, visiting old biddies who had had their bra's nicked off their washing lines and stalking people who were stalking other people. But D.I. Hanna Brain was a rebel. She was her own woman. She had her own way of doing things, she broke all the rules, tossed her raven curls, left her troubles on the doorstep, loosened her canon,  looked herself right in the eye and kicked over the traces. She wasn't going to be like all the other D.I's in crime fiction ...no .... she was bloody well going to leave the case well alone and investigate feeble and pathetic cases of unlicensed donkey-riding, putting stamps on envelopes upside-down and suspicious lurking ....... that would show them, eh!

She returned to station with her head held high, which was the usual way of returning to the station actually.  She changed her tousled shirt, put on a mousy wig, a mousy tail and mousy whiskers and went down to the canteen with the Duty Rosterer. On the way, he let her have a look at the duty roster he had just written, and her eyes, one of which was rather tired after looking  at the other one, flitted down the list listlessly. She made a list of three cases in her policewoman's notebook, which is just like a policeman's notebook but with a mirror inside the back cover. She downed her coffee  in a trice, took the empty trice back to the empty trice rack and haughtily drew herselt to her full height.

The first case on her list was right up her street. In fact, it was only three doors up from her house, in Foolscap Street. She knew exactly what she would find.... his alibi would be a tissue of lies, the evidence would be paper thin and once the facts had been held up to the light of day she would see right through them.

The occupant was dressed. As a policewoman, Hanna knew exactly what to ask and when .
The occupant was dressed as a policewoman. Hanna knew exactly what to ask and  when he had changed into his ordinary clothes she asked him. It turned out that he had woken up an hour ago and found that he had been dressed in a policewoman's clothes, and his house had been filled with exactly thousands of stuffed birds in glass cases. No, he had no idea why this had happened, where they had come from or whom they belonged to.

Hanna pushed her way past numerous glass cases containing stuffed Gannets. stuffed Hoatzins, stuffed Peregrines, stuffed Tattlers......... she began to wonder..... was she in some sort of elaborate joke here? Every room in the house had been filled from floor to ceiling with a ridiculous assortment of specimens.. Hanna began to panic slightly... after all, she had to nail this one. This was her speciality. They were all birds, and birds were her thing.

In the living room, she noticed a family photograph on the mantelpiece. She picked it up to examine it thoughtfully..... her eyes lingered on each face staring out at her in that overcrowded room ... after about 3 hours she put it down again thoughtfully.  Detectives generally did that, and she was a detective. She now knew that three of the people in the photograph were not genetically related to their so-called parents, that one of them had fled to Liberia years ago and had probably returned last week to avenge an ancient wrong, and that one of them had the reckless eyes, transparent ears, long nasal nose and huge bum of a typical sufferer from Terminal Pharyngonasalcerebropateloid hypohypersemiproliferous ramifications of Clerihew's Syndrome and was most likely dead.

She needed facts. She decided to get some. Here's how it went....

D/I Hanna Brain....   " Just for the record, sir, what is your full name?"
The Occupant .........." Moss..... Leighton Moss."
D.I Hanna Brain........" Ah. Yes. I think I might know what has happened here Sir.... just leave it with me."

One short explanation later she was heading off to her next case.... but she couldn't help that nagging worry about the bloody policewoman's uniform. But waking up as a policewoman was hardly a crime... after all , she did it every morning. Well, most mornings. But she couldn't get it out of her mind that one of the reasons she had been booted off her case that morning was , uncannily, that she had woken up dressed as a policeman. How strange was that?

Anyway, D/I Hanna was speeding off to her second case......

More of this later.... in the meantime, here's Bando with the cracking " Shampw" .

Ah, these Welsh-speakers... they know what's what . If you want more of this sort of thing ( the song I mean... wake up there)..... why not visit my Welsh blog, or even my widely acclaimed Welsh Pop Music blog. Why not indeed.

birdfood babylon !

There's been a lot of fuss about lapses in food standards lately, but I think it could be spreading into the bird food industry... I began to suspect something when I was measuring out the " table mix" this morning...

I went out to look at the fat feeder and began to get an inkling that something was going on..

I rang the suppliers and apparently the police are going to organise an "Operation Swoop" on all bird food manufacturers.

And another thing.... I thought that I had invented the 2-piece jigsaw ( see 2 posts ago) but stap me vitals if I wasn't in a junk shop recently and found this ....

 

6 of the bastards..... ruining my idea. They're bloody tricky as well. I haven't opened the next jigsaw I promised to show you yet, the forty-piecer, but it's coming soon.  

Seen in my local issue of "@Lancaster" magazine... some terrific advice about what to do if you have hornets in your garden ...

As for music, here's an instructive tale in two episodes.... here's a song by Belinda .. Luz sin Gravedad...... 

Isn't that lovely.

Here she is again with a song in a slightly different style ... Lolita ....

something seems to have happened between those two songs !! 

And now, as a completely tangential thingy, here's a little video about that film of " The Hobbit" ... one of the many books that I have never managed to get past page 1 of..... it only lasts 4 minutes but could save you from a lot of expense and an uncomfortable couple of hours. ....

Everything Wrong With The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey In 4 Minutes Or Less

PANSTARRS ..

You might or might not know that there is a  comet visible over April ... comet Panstarrs. I know it sounds like i've made it up but it's real all right. Here is some info on how to find it, plus an evening chart and a morning chart... 

Update on April 5, 2013: If you live at mid-northern latitudes or farther north, you can still catch Comet PANSTARRS in binoculars. EarthSky’s sky blogger Bruce McClure, in northern New York, saw Comet PANSTARRS with binoculars in both the morning and evening sky on April 4. And again saw the comet in the April 5 morning sky. The comet is now near the Andromeda Galaxy and the two faint fuzzies are visible within the same binocular field. They appear together in the northwest after dark, and in the northeast before dawn.
The charts below – designed for April 2013 – show the comet’s location for April 3 and April 15. Comet PANSTARRS pairs with the Andromeda galaxy in early April and climbs upward toward the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia during the first half of April. Use binoculars. Look to the northwest as soon as it gets dark, around 70 to 100 minutes after sunset. Better yet, perhaps, look for this comet in the northeast sky before dawn, around 100 to 70 minutes before sunrise. Comet PANSTARRS is intrinsically fainter now as it heads back out to the outer solar system, but it now appears against a darker sky background – especially in the morning sky – making it easier to spot. Plus the moon is waning in the morning sky. If you haven’t caught Comet PANSTARRS yet, try now!

Here's the evening map...

and here's the early morning map ...

Good luck everyone out there !

My exciting new career .....

Yes, yet another exciting new career has hoved into view .... I'm going to be the "face" of a new project to gently ease old farts like me out of active birdwatching and into premature senility. Here's one of their early efforts starring me, but actually not everything went quite to plan.

Don't worry, the next one's going to be a sensation.

To liven things up a bit, here's top Kraftwerk-style Welsh band Clinigol with Siwan Morris with "Am Wastraff 09".......

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These were on the Aldcliffe Canal about 200 m from my house yesterday..... I can't find either of my " Ducks and Geese" books anywhere ( although I had no trouble finding massive tomes about Parrots, Nightjars etc etc) and the internet has not been very helpful. I wonder where they have escaped from?

They seem to bear a passing resemblance to "Chinese Geese" or maybe " African Geese.

Actually it is quite refreshing to find the internet to not be the instant answer to everything.

More on this later...but for now here are Welsh Whimsical Wizards Gorky's Zygotic Mynci with Cân Megan ...