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Thought I’d chime in as another UK birder. I’m generally interested in natural history and tend to go down a route of botany and entomology in the summer but birding is where I started out and is definitely my main interest in the winter when everything else is dead/hibernating. I can probably answer some questions about the UK birding and twitching scenes. One of the things I don’t like about the hobby in general is that birding is still heavily the preserve of middle-aged men. Is it the same in America? Pablo Bluth posted:I'm more of a Wildlife photographer than a birder, but a UK goon checking in. I have to say those of you in the New World have it easy; your birds are way less timid. Hello fellow south-east UK birder! There are some great sites in the south east. You kinda have to adjust your expectations away from “wild” and more towards “feral” where once settled land is slowly going wild again through neglect. Feral land is everywhere but particularly along the Essex and north Kent coasts and the Thames estuary. Bits of it are surprisingly sparsely inhabited given how close it is to London. You won’t get away from human influence; it’s a very flat windswept landscape and there’s always derelict buildings and WW2 defenses that are visible from miles away let alone the ever-present sea walls. But the birds don’t care, that they’re left alone is what’s important to them, so in winter you get to see massive wader and duck/goose aggregations (and the raptors those kinds of numbers pull in). I’d try checking out the Isle of Sheppey (Elmley marshes and Harty Ferry raptor viewpoint in particular), the Dengie Peninsula in Essex (you’ll need to walk lots down the coastal tracks) or the Hoo Peninsula in Kent (my personal fave). If you go to Hoo: check out Cliffe Pools for ducks, grebes & roosting waders, Northward Hill for high views over the peninsula, a massive heronry in spring and an incredible, noisy rook & jackdaw roost at dusk in winter (they don’t settle properly for ages and burst into the air en masse – a few thousand corvids whirling around over your head); and the shoreline at low tide (St. Mary’s and Egypt Bays in particular both just north of Northward Hill) for some pretty impressive collections of waders. You won’t get very close to the birds given how open the land is but you can see nature unfold without disturbance; watching a merlin spearing through a starling flock here is one of my favourite memories.
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Sep 9, 2013 17:24
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BeastOfExmoor posted:I'm understanding the link correctly, people are shooting reptors because they eat Grouse which hunters want in higher numbers? It surprises me quite a bit that this is an issue. Coming from someone who's never been to Europe, my impression has been that birders are way a way larger and more powerful group in Britain and hunters are way less powerful. Public access rights are often poor or non-existent on the lands where this takes place and the areas that need observing are pretty enormous. With poisoning, nest destruction and trapping, there's no out-of-season shooting sounds to alert people either. These wildlife crimes are often only discovered by complete accident - typically buried caches of dead raptors or someone walking on a rarely visited area of open-access land and discovering poisoned bait or cages/snares with dead protected species. When prosecutions do take place, they're typically against the incredibly poorly paid gamekeeper (his accommodation in a keeper's cottage is often part of the pay) rather than the site owner. The fines are thus fairly low and often the keeper goes straight back into employment with their original boss. Scotland introduced vicarious liability legislation that holds the site owner responsible for wildlife crimes performed by his staff on his estate and the early signs are that this is working quite well there. But our environment and wildlife ministers don't seem interested in introducing this in England. On a related note, this government's environmental ministers have turned down attempts to ban the possession of carbofuran (a poison often used in raptor poisoning cases that EU law already makes illegal to use) and pushed for the culling of buzzards which are still slowly expanding back to their pre-DDT range (this time to protect pheasants - a non-native species dumped into the countryside in their millions each year for the express purpose of charging wealthy people a lot of money to go shooting them). It's a tiny, incredibly wealthy part of our population who have the ear of our government and own a disgustingly large portion of the land who're doing this. It's just another symptom of my country's screwed-up class system. Balaeniceps fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Sep 20, 2013 |
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Sep 20, 2013 13:21
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