Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Doing the Twitching Sums



The birds you seek are not in these bushes ...
My first visit to The Naze to see some Yellow Browed Warblers. It took me a while to get a feel for the place, and for some time I found myself looking at banks of empty bushes, or glimpsing goldcrests, chiffchaffs, long-tailed tits and blue tits. I thought I'd go away empty handed, but fortunately the locals were helpful, patient, and generous in their assistance. I finally got a brief glimpse of a YBW at the top of a sycamore, and a Firecrest peeped out of the middle of a bush.

I got to considering the time I'd spent doing the various things I'd come to do, and constructed a pie chart. Here it is.
Time allocation for today's twitch 
The YBW is there at 0% and the Firecrest doesn't even register. It would seem on the face of it that this is a poor return, but birding is nothing if not about travelling hopefully, and the search through flocks of flitting waifs in the hope for the eventual jewel was fun. I'd go again if the opportunity arose.

3 comments:

laurence.d said...

The Naze is a particularly frustrating place,still amazes me how close you can be to calling birds and yet they remain invisible, I go regularly and was there on Tuesday,we had fantastic views of 2 ybw at the Sycamores.

DorsetDipper said...

thanks for the comment Laurence. I think the difficulty made the challenge quite a fun one, once I had seen one and didn't feel quite such a chump for going to a place with 4 YBWs and hadn't seen a single one!

laurence.d said...

You Should never feel a chump at the naze, it,s notorious,four birders can go there at the same time and see completely different birds.

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