The Pokerbird

Pokerbird Has Moved

2011-01-16T15:07:00.002Z

Pokerbird has moved to http://blog.theandygibb.com/

Believe in Lucky Cards

2010-07-19T21:02:00.002+01:00

For me it’s the two of hearts. You can see how a hand like two of hearts, seven of clubs instantly looks so much more powerful. I'd certainly not pass up the chance of betting on it. Raising... well, not so much really.

Let's get more sensible. Such cards may act as random signals to bluff and as such should not be pooh-poohed. Players use combinations too. Any five and ten is a popular one on the basis that all straights contain one of these cards. So, you're going to hit your opponents with a not-so-well disguised straight.

And then there's that old perennial favourite: ace and... ace. Ha! Don’t make me laugh. The number of times that's failed?

Don't Worry About the Size of Your Bankroll

2010-06-24T17:27:00.002+01:00

You'll win soon enough to increase it, and keep on increasing it. Your cash in hand will always be sufficient to cope with the few losses you'll suffer. Oooh, half a dozen at the most; certainly not twenty or thirty on the bounce.

Should Fate actually dare to treat you so badly, simply replenish the bankroll, make a loan to it – you know, just for the short while that you're in the red. It won't be a question of throwing more money at the game; you'll take the loan back when the winning times return.

As they surely must.

Call a LAG Only with a Great Hand

2010-06-23T08:02:00.002+01:00

Despite your lack of notes, you’ve identified the guy who’s in every hand and who bets every flop. Time at least mentally to give him the LAG label. Loose-aggressive. You’ve got his number. And you’ve finally got a good hand, better than top pair anyway. Call him all the way to the river, or the end of your stack, whichever is sooner. He'll not beat you this time.

Trouble is: LAGs have a tendency only to stick around when they do have a chance of winning or if they can bully you out of the pot. If you start picking and choosing the hands to stand on, they'll out-guess you every time.

THEY'RE NOT STUPID.

But it’s so much easier to believe that they are.

Texas Hold'em Isn't Proper Poker

2010-03-23T17:56:00.001Z

So seek out draw or stud games. They'll be easier to come by if you insist on sticking to cash but much harder in tournaments. You may be twiddling your thumbs a while there. Frustrating – always a bad start.

You can overcome this by mixing your games – a dash of draw here, some stud there, a few hands of hold'em in between. Nothing like switching methods and mindset to obscure the basics of poker, which you are still trying to learn, right?

Texas hold'em tournaments – how dull, for an inquiring mind, so make sure they're long ones that require hours of concentration. (You know sit'n'gos make sense really.)

Play Cash Games

2010-03-21T19:35:00.002Z

Let's assume no-limit hold’em here. You can take a certain wodge of your bankroll to the table and replenish it from time to time. Unlike a tournament (barring the rebuy variety, which is a whole other snake’s nest), there's no limit to what you can lose.

Uh, yes there is: your bankroll is the limit and you really don't want to lose that.

Maybe you have iron discipline and can pull out of tables that are bleeding you dry. Even so, consider who it is that may be sucking your lifeblood away. The pro’s don't bother with tournaments. They grind away day after day on the cash tables. They keep on doing it.

They’re not sadists. They're making a profit, albeit a slow, steady one. They're making a profit. Out of... who?

You.

Play Many Casinos At Once

2010-03-19T17:00:00.002Z

This is clearly the best way to find one that you like. You can check out all the different tournaments, varying structures of cash games, styles of players and you might even toy with the note-taking. And those bonuses... if you're finding that clearing one bonus is a tad slow-going, clearing several in parallel will be positively glacial.

And what's happening to your bankroll? Haven't I mentioned bankroll yet? Oh, I will. Unless you're Bill Gates, there's probably a limit on the amount you can lose – er, sorry, invest in this new venture. Splitting that amount between a number of sites increases the danger of going broke on one of them. And the danger of just “putting a little bit more in there.”

But that's not so dangerous really, is it.

Don't Play with Play Money

2010-03-12T20:14:00.001Z

In your impatience to work towards your big, fat bonus, you will of course start playing with real cash. Never mind that a bit of finger trouble operating an unfamiliar interface may push you all-in on a beer hand. Or you don't notice that one raise and a call has already happened as you try to steal the blinds with your K2, off-suit.

You'll get the hang of it after the first few losses. And, boy, that bonus is... just as far away as it ever was.

(Hey, this is post number 150. Yay!)

Call a LAG Only with a Great Hand

2010-03-11T19:40:00.001Z

You’ve identified the guy who’s in every hand and who bets every flop. Time to give him the LAG label. Loose-aggressive. You’ve got his number. And you’ve finally got a good hand, better than top pair anyway. Call him all the way to the river, or the end of your stack, whichever is sooner. They'll not beat you this time.

Trouble is: they have a tendency only to stick around when they do have a chance of winning or if they can bully you out of the pot. If you start picking and choosing the hands to stand on, they'll out-guess you every time.

THEY'RE NOT STUPID.

But it’s so much easier to believe that they are.

Take No Notice Of Note-Taking

2010-02-09T14:26:00.001Z

Every poker-room lets you take notes. But how easy is it? And how easy is it to read those notes? Can you float the mouse to do the latter? Click once, to start the former? A bare minimum, surely, given the speed of online games.

Who’s worrying? We're not taking notes anyway. It’s far too much effort. Who needs to know if the latest pre-flop raise or bet from mrfish, or some such innocent sounding name, is part of a long line. Or whether sharky has been limping into way too many pots. Or mthrfkr (do all online poker players have the imagination of a two-year-old?) will never shift off a hand.

God knows it’s hard enough to put opponents on a range of hands without muddying the waters with their tendencies. You don't need a casino’s note-taking ability.

Choose the Biggest-Bonus Poker Room

2010-02-03T12:37:00.001Z

That's right. There are loads of online casinos out there, all desperate to fleece – er, sorry, establish a meaningful customer relationship with you; and they all offer humungous cash bonuses to reel you in. It makes sense to pick the biggest one and deposit to the max. So you have to play a bit to earn points, and what do points mean? Points mean unlocking the bonus.

Then you start grinding away at the tables. And probably losing. Still, you're earning all those points towards your bonus, so you check them just to make you feel better. Uh-oh.

Unless you're playing at ridiculously high stakes for a tyro (and I’ll have something to say about that too!), it'll take you the rest of the century just to release the first five dollars.

Never mind: it is a big bonus.

How To Be a Bad Poker Player

2010-02-02T14:30:00.002Z

With apologies to Simon Barnes, but this does not even intend to turn you into any sort of poker player. It should warn you off by listing all the traps I've fallen into on my way to becoming a poor poker player. If it doesn't, then follow my advice to play a worse game than I do. And, please, end up playing on my table. Please.

OK, so you're not listening and the first mistake you must make is your choice of poker room. Or even whether to play live or online.

Play live. It’s so much more expensive and you can lose far more than you ever could online, quite apart from having to spend on travel, drinks and food. Still, for a night out with the lads, it beats a strip club. And if you're a girl – yes, even girls get tempted by poker – it definitely beats a strip club.

Now we're sitting nice and comfortable at home in front of the Web, still reading this, I hope. And I’m going to make you wait for the next nugget. And the next. And so on.

Watch this space.

It's Really Happened

2009-11-05T09:50:00.003Z

As I hinted in my last post, the Pokerbird has completed his transformation into Andy Gibb, which is what he was all along. This blog will continue to hold occasional poker thoughts but the bulk of my "stuff" will be on the new one. ⇒

Approaching the Ultimate Limits?

2009-10-19T11:29:00.002+01:00

Modern analysis of a generation-old book about population, production, consumption and pollution seems to show that its nightmare scenario is winning the race to be the most accurate. Prepare for meltdown somwhere around 2050. Thankfully I should be dead by then.

Prepare also for the migration of this blog to WordPress on my main website and its transformation into a journal about transformation and birds, of course.

Semi-Bluff Reraising: A Winning Poker Play?

2009-10-17T20:32:00.003+01:00

For fun, I've incorporated strict suited connectors (down to 54s) to my starting repertoire, which has increased the flops giving me four to a flush or straight. I have no problem semi-bluff betting them when I’m first to act, even if I've been sucked into calling a pre-flop raise. As far as I know, the board hasn't hit my opponents and I may as well bet for information at least or to steal the pot at best.

It’s less fun responding to another player’s post-flop bet. I’m not sure that reraising is working. For a start, I already have information: that my oppo likes his hand, unless he's continuation betting. So, the only motivation for reraising must be to steal the pot. And players are fighting back by re-reraising, damn their eyes. Then not only have I failed in my steal but I’m getting shite odds to call. And to call with a fair proportion of my remaining stack, indeed maybe committing all of it to the hand – not what I had in mind with marginal starting cards.

What if my opponent merely calls my raise? Do I continue the semi-bluff on the turn? Again at far greater cost than my budget for the hand? Basically, I’m getting into scary territory.

I think that floating is the answer. Call the bettor despite the lousy odds, even the implied odds, on the draw. There's still a chance to win the pot on the turn if he gives up the lead. I don't have to worry about distinguishing continuation bets either; I can treat them all the same.

The float doesn't work well against serial bettors, so it’s important to read them. It’s not good against multiple opponents either although, with a draw, they may generate good pot odds by calling. Really, it’s just any old excuse to stay in the hand and chase down a beautiful thing. The hard maths would determine the effectiveness of reraising versus floating but for now I’m going on instinct.

So much for a cash game. The situation in a tournament is different. In the name of pushing on, fast, early doors I'd reraise, even put my entire stack at jeopardy. A 2-1 chance to double up? Ease the next few levels? Be the table bully? Against spending an hour or two struggling to some grisly end, probably against the same odds?

In fact, I’m tending also to play one-gap suited connectors early in tournaments, which increases the reraising dilemma. But it’s a damn sight more fun than waiting for monster hole cards, especially when they’re overtaken to knock you out anyway.

Common Scoters, Bittell

2009-10-16T19:20:00.003+01:00

My Worcestershire list moves on for the third time this month after the earlier great white egret and mandarin ducks. It takes unusual visitors to notch it up and these were sea ducks about as for inland as they could get. A mixture of fifteen females or juveniles treated me to a flying display when I got to the reservoir. Why no males?

I don't know. Much is not known about our only Red-Listed breeding duck except that it may not remain a native breeder. Mink, forestry and oil seem to be the main threats. The species is badly enough off to warrant its own Action Plan. So that's OK, then.

I don't know. Again. How about one great big Action Plan? Something inspired by the observation that “if we keep doing what we do, we'll keep getting what we get”, say.

Now let's talk about me. Or specifically my Bittell list, which has some weird omissions. Today I fixed some of them with little grebe, kestrel, pied wagtail, wigeon and shoveler. So I did well for ducks although I’m still missing teal and pintail, and will probably never add ruddy duck.

It’s been a ducky sort of month so far but it is the time of year when they start to fill our reservoirs, lakes and coastal waters. They're one of the joys of a British winter among... er, not many joys actually. And I’m not getting an escape to Australia like last year’s. (Did I ever mention that?)

Do Ya Feel Lucky?

2009-10-15T14:08:00.002+01:00

Well, do ya, punk? Clint’s immortal line in Dirty Harry could stand for our attitude to climate change. Asking if global warming is true or not is futile. Who knows? That question is a sideshow and begs the real question, which runs akin to Pascal's wager. Whether we believe climate change or not and the worst happens, we're fucked. If we don't believe and we're right, what have we lost? Relatively a little time, a little energy, a little prosperity. Maybe a lot but still nothing compared with everything.

So, our baleful effect on the planet needn't be true, just possible. A drunk after a fine old all-nighter in the pub could have come up with the concept and we’d still have to take notice of it. Or a bunch of old men compiling a book many centuries ago. How if the authors of the Bible had warned of worldwide destruction by not believing in global warming instead of personal damnation by not believing in God? Would climate change be a religion now, along with the same compelling reason to bet on it?

As it is a great many respected scientists and thinkers have devoted a great deal of observation and experiment to reach the same conclusion. Doesn't that make it more convincing? If not absolutely compelling. The nay-sayers insist at least on a debate. What a smokescreen this is, the old delaying tactic. When exactly does debate stop and action start? Again, who knows? It may be too late already. It may be time just to believe or not believe.

It is possible not to believe and yet still act. The wager allows this: we're not choosing a belief but a lifestyle. Do we feel lucky? I hope the environmentalists do. An article in the Telegraph suggests that learning to be lucky generates good fortune. Lucky people are more receptive, more aware, more apt to spot luck. We may need it.

For the sake of Blog Action Day, feel lucky, punk.

Redwings & Fieldfares, Upton Warren

2009-10-14T13:08:00.003+01:00

Bang on schedule, these winter thrushes are back. Last year I picked them up a day earlier; but what's a day between reuniting friends? The redwings are already numerous, the fieldfares less so. We saw only one small flock. Skylarks too were on the move. They're not an obvious migrant, being a native breeder, but large numbers fly down from their upland breeding areas and in from the north. Whether this means just Scotland or northern Europe, I don't know.

The fieldfares are an especial thrill with their bold patterns and chattering calls. They also have the coolest nest defence mechanism. Basically, they fly above predators and “shit on the bastards below”. Remember that from football songs of yore?

The two thrushes pushed me closer to my goal of 600 species for the year, as I predicted the winter birds would. The list stands at 578 with a trip to Scotland in the offing at the end of the month. Whooper swan, pink-footed goose, velvet scoter and turnstone should be easy, with maybe red-throated diver, purple sandpiper, crested tit, Scottish crossbill and twite depending on where I go. Locally I could still expect Bewick’s swan, grey partridge, Mediterranean gull, little owl, brambling and that darn bittern, reported on BirdForum, which didn't show again today. I’m also missing barn owl, lesser spotted woodpecker, tree sparrow and corn bunting, but Lord knows whither they've retreated.

What's that? 19 off the top of my head. It sounds easy but, like many birders, I over-estimate. The game is much harder than that.

10 Species You Can Kiss Goodbye

2009-10-13T21:51:00.005+01:00

An interesting population countdown from LiveScience. I've actually seen one of these species in the wild - the condor, almost a dead cert (no pun intended) down the Big Sur coast of California. I wonder if any bookmakers are running bets on which will be the first species to go.

This sounds like poor taste but it could be the best publicity: get William Hill or someone to sponsor an endangered species and offer a price on its extinction. They'd have a strong motivation not to pay out on those bets.

Mind you it may also give criminals even more motivation to push them to extinction. I'd bet on the publicity winning out.

Australian Roads & Shopping

2009-10-13T13:28:00.006+01:00

You know those roadside warning signs? Low-flying aircraft. Slippery when wet. Old people – always bent double; I’m not going to be like that, surely? Wild animals. And in Australia, kangaroos. They get their own special sign. And you know how you ignore them because the hazards never happen?

A mistake for the first one I passed on my way to Armadale from Perth. Just minutes after it, a large ‘roo bounded across the road in front of the car. No worries yet. The animal was far enough ahead and gone quickly enough that it presented no danger but the nether regions of my mind were firing synapses. I was on the brake pedal and checking for tailgaters without a conscious thought. “They travel in pairs,” I had read.

Sure enough, a second, smaller creature appeared under my left bumper. I had time and space to swerve and the animal must have sensed me too, because when I looked behind, the road was clear. No squished carcass. No thud either. No damage to the car. That would have been a good start to the trip.

Aware of the inverse irony of the situation, I drove more slowly that day, that week and for the bulk of the holiday, all the way from Adelaide to Cairns. It was truly ironic, then, that not a single other kangaroo road-hopped in all that time.

I stopped at Armadale, which seemed basically to be a shopping centre, as unremarkable as Redditch. Except that Redditch folk don't shop in bare feet. Nor does everyone in Armadale and at first I thought I was seeing some grossly underprivileged section of Australian society. It was weird and a little unnerving. Didn't these people even worry about broken glass or dog shit? But that was me being particularly British. Australia is relatively litter-free. The roadsides, for instance, are pristine compared with our corpse- and McDonald’s-strewn motorways. Down under, you only have to watch for the wildlife. ⇐ ⇒

Impressionist Mandarin Duck

2009-10-12T20:35:00.003+01:00

Were I sneaky enough, I'd assert that today I dashed this little watercolour off while watching a colony of mandarin ducks on the River Severn at Trimpley, Worcestershire. No-one who reads this blog knows my dismal 9-grade for art O-level aeons ago. However, the picture is the best I can salvage from my Olympus SP-560 stretched to full capability in trying to capture the flock right across the other side of the river. The Severn is wide at Trimpley! The ducks also refused to venture from the very strong shadows cast by the Wyre Forest and a blazing southerly sun.

Alien species seem also to be a Pokerbird theme but these guys are so handsome and apparently innocuous that they're worth a fifty-mile round trip, especially to become my 145th county bird. The list joins Hampshire, my birthplace, on this total, but both still lag Angus on 178. Santa Clara, over in Silicon Valley, beats everything hollow with 219. I know, I know: these figures are not a patch on the real record holders.

On the subject of dismal tallies, the Walkwood Watchers attempt at the Big Sit! yesterday actually bettered some other teams’ scores. Goddammit, we can't even win the wooden spoon!

Buzzard Brings Down the Curtain on Big Sit!

2009-10-11T20:48:00.005+01:00

A raptor would have to figure prominently in a Pokerbird adventure, this time to bring the Walkwood Watchers’ day tally to a meagre 18 and prove my earlier prediction wrong. But what a great 18th bird and so nice to enjoy it without the fear of Maltese bastards gunning it to shreds. Not that they get a chance at our common buzzard; they pick (as though there were anything selective in their slaughter) on the honey buzzard, which isn't even in the same genus despite having a similar name. Buzzard clearly got applied liberally to birds of prey.

The local magpies took exception to it and at one stage four of them were trying to see it off. One persisted much longer than the others and at times I thought I would witness one of those moments photographed recently of the bird riding on the buzzard’s back. It didn't happen.

Nor did the Big Sit really. Unless we pull out a late tawny owl, not heard in these parts for nearly a year, or redwings fly over; and they were reported from the Wyre Forest this morning. The big miss was bullfinch. You expect one or two of those in a day but you also expect compensatory irregulars. We could have had several of woodpecker, nuthatch, goldfinch, starling, marsh tit, lesser black-backed gull, sparrowhawk or pied wagtail without raising eyebrows.

Ah well, here's to next year. ⇐

Big Sit! Score Struggles to 17

2009-10-11T16:08:00.004+01:00

A flyover chaffinch has just added to the expected coal tit, jackdaw and jay in the last few hours. The mizzle – it could hardly even be called a drizzle – lasted until mid-afternoon; it doesn't really stop the birds coming in but it does stop the birders going out. A good thing I included four feet of dining room within the circle; this is England after all. At least we could watch the feeders.

The next targets are bullfinch and, strangely, buzzard. I see both every month but that doesn't guarantee every day. And the evening is already beginning to draw in. I’m guessing that, unless we get a last burst of sun, there's no chance of any raptors.

Chiffchaff and great spotted woodpecker bring up the second rank of birds I've seen frequently around Walkwood. Well, chiffchaff informs you I've not endured a winter here. Great spot though is a good candidate for at least being heard. The next two hours will tell. ⇐ ⇒

A Slow Start to the Big Sit!

2009-10-11T10:00:00.005+01:00

Slight drizzle is keeping the bird numbers down from within the Walkwood Watchers’ 17-foot circle. Before I did a quick stint out in the damp just now, only eight species had appeared, among them the usual suspects of blackbird, robin, wood pigeon, dunnock, greenfinch and blue and great tits. Long-tailed tit is never so numerous but they too were on the list.

The last five minutes added magpie, crow, a yaffling green woodpecker, wren and black-headed gulls calling somewhere over Morton Stanley Park. So, we're up to unlucky thirteen. Notable absentees thus far include coal tit, jackdaw and jay, which has been plentiful and obvious, collecting acorns over the last few weeks.

Hopeful of a few of the less regular species, we're still on for around twenty. There's time left to sponsor as well if you’d care to support BirdLife Malta and the RSPB. ⇐ ⇒

Free Games #1: The Big Sit!

2009-10-10T10:24:00.004+01:00

Tomorrow sees the world’s best non-competitive competition, organised by the Bird Watcher's Digest. Basically a team counts all the species of bird seen or heard from within one 17-foot diameter circle. Note that it’s the team not the birds who are restricted to the circle! A flyer (no pun, I’m sure) details the full rules of the challenge.

The Walkwood Watchers, that is Dave (who doesn't know it yet) and I, will probably struggle to get much beyond a count of twenty but is inviting sponsors. I’m in for 50p a species. We'll send the money to BirdLife Malta, whose current home page video is just sickening, and the RSPB. I have to include them: any organisation whose president says “vagina” on the telly has my vote! Good on yer, Kate.

Back to the Big Sit! Anyone out there fancy taking on the might of the Walkwood Watchers? Or at least sponsoring us? ⇒

Scottish Icterine Warblers

2009-10-09T12:00:00.005+01:00

Oh, Lordy. Here's another tricky, non-descript species to get to grips with, found thanks to work on the BTO Breeding Atlas. No, no, no, it's a Good Thing, right? Yes, it is.

Moon Crash vs. Chicxulub Crash: Away Win

2009-10-09T10:52:00.006+01:00

The conspiracy theorists and panic-mongers are having a fine time with NASA’s plan to crash a rocket into the Moon at 12:30 today. Will it be the end of the world as we know it? Hardly. That little world suffers a good dozen similar collisions every year and the craters we see from here show it survives impacts that dwarf one piddly rocket.

Coincidentally, I've just read about the meteorite that hit Chicxulub 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period. That was a crash.

I can only get my head round it this way. Imagine taking a Redditch-size ice-cream scoop out of the planet, preferably Redditch itself. There's your meteorite, more like an asteroid, what? Now fire it out of a great big gun, let's say at South Wimbledon, another shite place where I’ve lived.

On a planetary scale hurling Redditch at a bit of London is pretty small beer – just a pinprick on the globe – but if you were anywhere near it... how near? Most of us have felt that satisfactory thump of something quite big going off, like a huge firework. Imagine a house going off then, or a plane (I’m sure we can all do this), or an office block, then a complete town. You’d get out of the immediate neighbourhood.

So now, how far? Well, the Chicxulub impact threw up instant Himalayas ninety miles away. Curiously, that's Redditch distance. That's Coventry too. See how I've got it in for some places? Actually that's the entire south-east of England done for and it doesn't end there. Wikipedia fills in the next few moments better than I could.

It also posits a tsunami because Chicxulub at that time was on a continental shelf. Look at the height of this wave though – half a mile to a mile. The recent ones in Samoa and more distantly Indonesia, terrible as they were, didn’t even crawl out of the cradle in comparison.

Not much to do with birds but, of the dinosaur family, they may be the only survivors from the mass extinction that followed. The meteorite might not have been the sole culprit: the ecosystem was already under stress from a vast series of volcanoes separating India from Madagascar. In any case the Tertiary Period and large mammals were on their way in. That was the K-T Boundary that was.

I don't think we'll get the same show from NASA’s rocket.

2009-10-08T09:11:00.002+01:00

Need a summary of The Gibb Life? Bung me an email address and I’ll throw it on the mailing list. Limited edition of one trillion only. Hurry.

The Rhythm of Nature

2009-10-07T14:11:00.006+01:00

On the second day of my voluntary seabird-watching job the wind wrecked our sheltering umbrella construction and drove a spray up into our optics. Again, we needed the arrival of John who moved us further up the cliff to get us out of the weather’s worst. Still, visibility was bad with frequent showers and often the only object of interest was a rock just below our viewpoint.

The tide was such that an occasional wave would wash over the rock, leaving on its surface a pool which gradually disgorged back to the sea through a couple of waterfalls. One of the flows was quite robust but the other would sometimes dry up before the next replenishing wave. I fell into a reverie of imagining the falls in Yosemite and how they operated on the same principle, except with snow as their reservoir. A mild panic even began to set in when, rarity of rarities, the main waterfall threatened to falter.

It never did. Whoosh, wave. Pool, falls. Vigorous waters, slowing. One fall, drying, sometimes dried. Whoosh, wave...

That's what the hours can do to you. Again, it was a different pace of life, relaxing into the pulses of the natural world. And the day passed quickly. Before I knew it, I was back at the B&B and marking up the final totals for an email to Russell and BirdGuides. Yes, my day wasn't over until the paperwork was done and the paperwork showed 25 Balearics for the two days – bang on target thus far. ⇐ ⇒

An Albatross-Eye View

2009-10-07T11:24:00.002+01:00

Not quite a movie but a camera snapping away every thirty seconds has filled in some gaps in our albatross knowledge. These pictures have come from round about the saddle of three individuals and give a hypothetical rider's view. Clearly this is fascinating from the ornithological perspective but also provides a glimpse of what's really out there in the oceans - something still pretty much a mystery.

Another Excuse for Gun-Happy Morons to Wage their War on Birds

2009-10-05T14:53:00.003+01:00

This time it's the poor old parakeets that people, mark you, introduced to this country. And here we are trying to tell Malta that the greater any list of legal targets, the more the wanton killers can cover up any illegal hunting.

Great (White) Egret, nr Pershore

2009-10-04T20:56:00.005+01:00

Egretta alba according to the Collins Bird Guide; Ardea alba to Wildlife Recorder (WR) and BirdGuides, which includes the “White” in its name. WR only includes “White” for its alternative Egretta alba scientific name. Sibley in the US and Morcombe in Aus both agree on great egret Ardea alba but Robertson & Heather in New Zealand call it white heron Egretta alba. And Robson for South-East Asia throws a complete spanner in the scientific works with Casmerodius albus.

Is this the same bird around the world? To which genus does it belong? Ardea tends to be the herons and Egretta, the egrets. I've had trouble with consolidating worldwide records for this species since I first started seeing it. The confusion seems to be historic and Wikipedia suggests that the egret is in fact a heron, with the possibility that the down-under race is a separate species.

Got that straight? The visitor to Worcestershire showed for all of three seconds this afternoon, less than 1% of the time it took to sort out its taxonomy. Still, the glimpse was long enough to identify black feet, which in the absence of an accurate size is the best distinction from little egret. I was happy enough with it anyway.

1999: Fulmar and Sandwich Terns at Lyme Regis

2009-10-03T20:45:00.007+01:00

OK, I've a whole series of these things from ten years ago, this time August 25. Like I said: I've been at this game for a while:

"I had driven through nearly an hour of torrential rain and lightning from the M5 down to Lyme Regis. Chard had threatened to turn into Venice with waterfalls cascading off roofs to join the rivers forming in the streets. I was beat almost before the trip had begun.

Lyme itself was not much better. I spent another hour trying to find shelter to eat my sandwiches. Only the Herring Gulls looked relatively unperturbed.

However, in the midst of all this gloom and murk another gull flew across the front and veered out to sea. I don't know why I noticed it particularly -- some sixth sense maybe? As it turned away its flight action became more apparent -- those stiff wings, flickering more than beating. I got the binoculars on to the bird and sure enough the colouring and shape was all Fulmar. Suddenly munching a rye bread and Marmite sandwich in a sodden Dorset town did not seem like such a bad idea after all.

Later the weather turned completely and it became too hot for jeans and t-shirt. It also became possible to check out the other birds. A pair of terns called out at sea. I suspected Sandwich Tern from the shape, and the call did not seem like that of a Common; but I am no expert and these birds were too far out to tell for sure. Five minutes passed and the pair obliged by settling on the fast disappearing rocks 100 meters away. This time I could definitely make out the yellow tip to the bill and the slight crest.

A smart pair of Grey Wagtails, possibly my favourite bird, on the stream running through the town was a welcome late addition to the day's list. Then I had to head back to Winchester."

Movie Star at Arrow Valley Park, Redditch

2009-10-03T11:54:00.003+01:00

Not really but, in an odd departure from the factual, my Collins Bird Guide describes the nuthatch as visiting birdtables in worst Rambo style. This is not the first time the Pokerbird has associated a nuthatch with a film. There must be something about the Sittidae family, maybe that Zorro-like mask? Digression apart, today was my first record of our nuthatch at the Valley to bring my score there up to 67. I also logged only my second sighting of tufted duck, which Upton usually delivers for Worcestershire.

Now fully attuned to the phenomenon, I heard one partial burst of a chiffchaff’s song, which is a lot more normal than the full works that have grabbed the country’s attention lately. A grey wagtail broke a five-month drought for what is my favourite species. This is too long and it’s not as though I've been avoiding their habitat: I religiously check streams and ponds for them.

This one obliged by giving me good binocular views and even wagged its way into the same scene as a song thrush, a bird that I totally missed last month. That would have been a great picture if I'd had a camera and 2000mm lens; they were that far away. The sight is lodged in my mind instead, which is what counts really.

The Meaning of the Chiffchaff’s Autumn Song?

2009-10-02T22:41:00.003+01:00

Fascinating edition of Autumnwatch this evening, if a bit exhausting. Maybe it’s my age (and a considerable amount of Banrock Station). I was at least alert enough to register the bit about chiffchaffs singing. I’ve never been aware of this in the autumn, yet today one was very obvious outside the West Hide at Upton and last week another was calling in Walkwood. Now it seems that others have noticed it too.

What can it all mean?

Mute Swans, Upton Warren

2009-10-02T17:16:00.005+01:00

Seems like they've done well this year, six cygnets all looking a decent, easily defended size. Until recently I laboured under the common misapprehension that the Romans introduced the species into Britain but it appears they merely domesticated the bird. Mute swans are more native than we are. In fact only a handful of species are more alien.

One undoubted stranger graced the Moors Pool this morning too. It looked more ruddy shelduck than anything else but also included touches of red-breasted goose, mallard and Egyptian goose. It would be interesting to see its family tree. These weird hybrids turn up often.

Also regular at Upton, teal, lapwing, Cetti’s warbler (seen!), tufted duck and reed bunting were present. I note them especially just to ensure that they appear in my Worcestershire list. As I left, a couple of swallows dashed across, the latest I've seen them in the county. They must have been hightailing it for the South Coast, where they will hang on, maybe till the end of the month.

No winter returnees yet but it can't be long.

Great Tits in Walkwood

2009-10-01T12:06:00.005+01:00

The only wonder is that I’ve resisted that headline for so long. Actually the coppice was dripping with the birds on my start-the-month-list stroll this morning. Their buzzy, rattling calls and sharp, insistent cheep-cheeps filled the glades. These are just two examples of their vocal repertoire, which some authorities number at 57 – as many varieties as Heinz, which sounds just a little too coincidental. It’s a lot anyway, enough that great tits are probably the source of any unidentified noise in a patch of British woodland.

They're cheerful, cheeky little chappies too, which got me to thinking again about the robin’s autumn song. One hears it and feels it as melancholy but is it really that way round? Pre-music I can imagine early people getting the blues as the year declined, with which the song would have been inextricably linked. Then when we came to making our own music and wanted to express sadness, might that have sounded a bit robin-like? I bet this isn't an original idea.

I know I've banged on about my year list for 2009 but, taking a non-calendar twelve months, the year ending yesterday has been my best ever – 652 species. This isn't a patch on the dedicated listers but I didn't think that I would ever better it. However, my twelve months running up to the end of this October already stands at 649 and it’s missing relatively local birds like bittern, grey partridge, little owl and brambling. I may even hope for jack snipe, lesser spotted woodpecker or corn bunting. Or more.

In any case it’s going to be a good birding month. (It always is.)

Protecting Poker Hands on the Turn

2009-09-30T13:42:00.005+01:00

An earlier post offered some suggestions on playing a vulnerable poker hand, like top pair, on the flop. What about protecting it on the turn?

In other words this card has not completed any obvious flush or straight and you reckon still to be ahead. Standard wisdom has it that a bet of half the pot here will price any opponent out of the hand but implied odds suggest this is not so.

To keep the maths relatively simple, suppose there had been 4 big blinds (BB) in the pot on the flop and one opponent remained. This seems like a pretty average scenario. Now, on the turn, there are 12 BBs: the original pot; your bet; and the opponent’s call. If you bet half of this (6BB) and your opponent calls again, the pot will have 24BB on the river.

Then, disaster. The river card hits: it seems to complete a flush or an obvious straight. Your opponent bets to represent this. Do you call or fold? It depends on how much he bets.

Assume that he was drawing to a flush and so had a 4-1 chance of completing on the river. Four times out of five he will lose his turn bet of 6BB for a net deficit of 24BB. The fifth time needs to more than compensate for this. It’s not hard: 18BB already come from the pot and your bet on the turn. Your opponent only needs 6 more to break even. This is a quarter of the pot at the river.

If he bets this or less, you should call. He’ll never make any money that way, which implies that you'll never lose any. In fact, you'll come out ahead by occasionally calling pure bluffs or hands where the bettor genuinely thinks he is ahead but you have him beat.

Unfortunately the river bet is rarely this small. You then have to apply a sliding scale to decide whether to call or not. The bigger the bet, the less inclined you should be and the better hand you will need. It gets a little complicated.

Matters are so much simpler if you bet around the pot on the turn. Yes, we've gone back there with 12BB in the pot. You bet around 12 yourself and your opponent calls. This makes 36BB at the river, when the same disaster strikes. But now your opponent needs to make 48BB to justify losing 12BB four times. 24BB come from the pot and your bet at the turn, so he needs to get another 24BB.

This is a much bigger gamble on the river, fully 2/3 of the pot. Now you can call any bet smaller than this and come out ahead. In fact, again taking bluffs and misjudgements into account, you could probably call near pot-size bets most of the time.

If your opponent were drawing to an open-ended straight, at slightly better than 5-1 odds, he would need nearly 60BB, which is a pot-sized bet. And with any kind of hand (say you’d improved to two pair or a set) you could probably call any bet – with your entire stack if necessary.

Betting aggressively raises the bar, quite a lot, at which you have to make calling decisions. Note that if you’ve identified an opponent who never bluffs, you simply don't call apparent made hands, thereby removing any possible gain he could make from this play. And don't forget to bet for value yourself against a known fish but beware of likely slow-players.

But they're a whole article to themselves.

Another Environmental Yardstick: the McFarthest Spot

2009-09-29T10:33:00.002+01:00

This is brilliant: check out the map in particular from what I think is a photography blog in the US, but the words will make you laugh too.

The Berlin Wall for Wildlife

2009-09-28T10:30:00.005+01:00

And it's being built in the US of all places. Or not so surprisingly seeing as it's a legacy of the Bush era. Let's hope that Mr Obama can find time from fixing all the old fart's other fuck-ups to get round to this one. The poor chap has his work cut out! An excellent US nature blog reveals all.

Long-Billed Dowitcher, Chew Valley

2009-09-27T22:15:00.008+01:00

This American wader just happened to me. BirdGuides had listed it a few days back but I'd thought no more about it until I stopped at Herriott's Bridge this afternoon as part of my standard route round the lake. I was only in the area looking at a room to rent in Chew Stoke, which pretty much has to be a birder’s dream. Fingers crossed on that one.

A gaggle of telescopes at the lay-by told me something was up, so I hauled mine out of the boot and joined them. I picked up the muttering of “long-billed dowitcher” and then remembered the earlier report.

Among half-a-dozen snipe the stranger was easy to separate. But was it a dowitcher? I've seen long-billed dozens of times in California and short-billed often enough, and generally separated them by habitat. By default the long-billed occupied the Bay Area while shorties were more coastal. I guess I even got quite lazy about that because it’s nowhere near a hard-and-fast rule.

Certainly the length of the bill is little use in identifying them, so I’m continually amazed when British birders confidently announce one or the other. I used to have the greatest difficulty with them. So, here's the British trick: if you’ve got a dowitcher, which is rare, it’s long-billed. Short-billed is a mega; the last certain sighting was back in 2005.

Still not sure whether I was looking at the right bird, I decided to play a game of sketching what I did see. Here in words is what I came up with: surprisingly similar size and build as the snipe; grey head and breast with darker cap and possible eyebrow; a slight gap between the breast and coverts/scapulars – rather like a common sandpiper; black-spotted grey coverts under black-spotted rufous scapulars, then back to black-spotted grey on the mantle; and a kind of weird, splayed tail-feather configuration. Google Books shows typical shorebird topography for these terms if you scroll down a little. I had to use it.

The spotting on the feathers signifies a juvenile at this time of year, as do the rufous fringes, so I got those bits right. I’m not too sure what was going on with the tail though! The rest of the description is pretty much spot-on for any dowitcher.

Sketching, in my case just ovals and lines (you should see the tiny head on my effort!), is something I should do more. Again, I tend to get lazy. But not this time, not for my 278th British (sic) bird. Surprisingly it did nothing for the year list: good old Shoreline at Mountain View, CA gave me one back in March. Or was it short-billed? Ha! I don't know. However, this afternoon did push the year list on to 575, thanks to my first water rail – so late in the year. I could reckon on getting to 600 since I have yet to see many of our common winter birds.

Did I mention that I was away last winter? I expect so.

Osprey at Chew Valley Lake

2009-09-26T21:43:00.004+01:00

Here's something from ten years ago – August 24, to be exact – when ospreys were still a bit of a novelty:

"I had got up early to catch high tide at Severn Beach. I walked out of the door at seven to the start of some persistent rain and changed my mind instantly. There were hides at Chew Valley and I would at least stay dry. There is nothing to be gained from peering through droplet-coated binoculars while getting soaked and probably blown about into the bargain.

"A good decision. Within moments of settling in to the Stratford Bay hide I saw a large shape above. Great Black-backed Gull was my first thought. I had never seen one at Chew, so that wasn't too bad. An instant later better was to come. The bird turned to reveal splayed wing tips -- way too splayed for any gull. I knew that I could only be looking at an Osprey.

"I watched it hunt and thought how expensive an operation it was. No gliding or soaring in this weather. More or less continuous wing-beats and turns punctuated the odd plummet as the bird saw something only to pull out as its prey disappeared. Once it continued its dive, thrashed around and came out with... Well, was there something? The binoculars did not resolve anything and the Osprey continued its quartering.

"A second dive, thrash and lift-off definitely produced a wriggling victim. I was in a state of tension. Would the bird hold on? This fish definitely did not want to be caught. I could see the Osprey try to straighten its catch as I knew it must before it could fly efficiently. I looked out for gulls that might try to harass the Osprey. Eventually it had its cargo stowed to its satisfaction and powered off overhead and away behind the hide.

"You can see all this stuff on the TV but you will always miss the emotional involvement provided by being there and witnessing the whole chase. I felt nearly as exhausted as the Osprey must occasionally have felt after a hard day's work."

21 Robins A-Singing in Walkwood

2009-09-26T17:07:00.005+01:00

Doubtless there were more but an hour’s stroll surprised me with this number in such a small Redditch coppice. They were second only to wood pigeons whose abundance was not a surprise. Robins are more obvious at this time of year, being, along with wrens, about the only bird in full cry. It’s all territorial now but even so the song sounds more melancholy than aggressive. There's the pitfall of applying a human interpretation to a wild creature.

Robins also depart from most birds’ behaviour with the female being as adept a singer as the male. She tones it down somewhat in the spring when it is still the bloke’s responsibility to advertise the goods. Now, I’m guessing here because Google has failed me, that the sexes don't have much to do with each other from the autumn onwards. So, each individual bird maintains its own territory, which only breaks down once the spring arrives and love is in the air – la-di-dah.

That's enough romance. I also watched three buzzards soaring. How pleasant to see them without fear of some fascist with a gun blasting them out of the sky. I feel almost shell-shocked from the Maltese slaughter.

Another Magnificent Victory for the Men with Guns

2009-09-25T12:04:00.005+01:00

This time it's in Saudi Arabia where a northern bald ibis has been shot and killed. The species has now been pretty much extirpated from the Middle East. BirdLife use the word 'extinction' in their headline and I wish they wouldn't: a small population does also cling on in Morocco. Extinction should have the emotional impact of murder or rape or paedophile. Instead it gets overused and diluted. The trouble is that extirpated is such an unwieldy term and few know what it means anyway.

At least in this case the Saudi government seems to be embarrassed by the activities of its hunters. Would that we could get the Maltese overlords even to admit to the existence of any killing in Malta.

Why Not Gun Down the Gunmen?

2009-09-25T11:18:00.004+01:00

After witnessing Malta’s war on birds, it is tempting to fight fire with fire: go into the shooters’ lairs and massacre the lot of ‘em. Take out their children and wives too, and by implication all succeeding generations. That would solve the problem, wouldn’t it? In the same vein I've listened to birders here talk of shooting dogs that run amok through flocks of birds, and driving over cats for being... well, being cats.

In a rational moment anyone could predict that these actions would escalate the problem. It is how wars get going. It’s interesting though to dissect why such a notion is tempting.

Number one has to be the motivation of being right where the other guy is so clearly wrong. We all love that and go out of our way to find ever more issues in which to put one over. There's nothing like the feeling of being right. From that standpoint we can totally invalidate the opposition and justify whatever action we take.

There is a problem. Right and wrong don't exist. You can't point at them. They have no weight. We invented the words without, unfortunately, a precise definition or field guide to aid in identifying them. By their tenuous nature right and wrong have become a barrier between people; we no longer connect across the words and neither side gets what it wants.

What's the solution?

We're bad at this. Thousands of years of disputes have come down to the same old answers: have a war; write a law; kill ‘em; bang ‘em up; boycott their goods; fine them; and so on. Each creates a new problem, sometimes a worse one, without even necessarily solving the old. Maybe, as a society we're simply not mature enough yet to be successful at handling problems. Maybe we need to recognise that they will always exist and we don't need to solve them, just turn them into problems we’d like to have.

Here's a nice one, inspired by a couple of incidents from my week on Malta.

On my one day off I caught the bus to Rabat from Dingli, where I waited at the stop with a couple of lads. I asked one when the bus was likely to turn up.

“It’s a bus,” he replied, showing that the universal experience of buses was at least one shared piece of humanity.

We went on to talk in the usual male lingua franca – football. He was a Pompey fan; I’m Saints – the biggest clash of right and wrong on the South Coast. But we connected and no-one came to blows and no birds got shot. He even spent the journey into Rabat pointing out his favourite landmarks.

The second scenario saw me throw an errant football back to a kid in Buskett Gardens. He very politely thanked me in perfect English before continuing his game.

No, I’m not suggesting football as a better problem, although it could have its part to play. But kids, yes. I doubt that either of these two nippers would be interested in blasting bundles of defenceless feathers out of the sky. In fact, wouldn’t a child be horrified by it? I mean actually seeing it and the bloody, broken mess that is the end result? I don't mean as some hypothetical, virtual computer game.

Wouldn’t a child be more in thrall to the beauty of a wild creature? Wouldn’t it be worth capturing that spirit before the murderous adult world begins to impose its twisted values? Win the hearts and minds of the youngsters and they will surely swamp their butchering parents. Then the next ten years will just be a damage limitation exercise.

Three Things I Never Knew About Raptors

2009-09-24T07:26:00.006+01:00

Guts. They're the key to a raptor’s ability to soar. Guts and wing area. A shorter gut means less weight, a lower wing-loading and “up she goes!” That's why a sparrowhawk soars and a similarly dimensioned wood pigeon flaps like crazy. The pigeon is full of guts for processing seeds. The hawk with its high-protein diet doesn't need so many.

This came out of a fascinating talk given by Keith Offord to the Kidderminster branch of the WMBC last night. Here's more: raptor is a taxonomic term. Yup, the birds have hooked bills, binocular vision and long, pointy claws; but so do owls, which technically are not raptors. Nor are New World vultures, more closely related to our storks. They evolved convergently to the same body pattern. (Actually all vultures have somewhat subdued claws but I’ll skate over that.)

And finally, why are some species’ females bigger than the males but not others? Nobody really knows but there's a correlation between this sexual dimorphism and the speed of the birds’ prey. Dead stuff doesn't move fast at all and the sexes of the carrion eaters, like vultures and kites, are the same size. At the other end of the scale birds are the zippiest things on the planet and the female of our sparrowhawk can be twice the size of the male.

So there's another thing for him to worry about, along with his lack of guts. (Just kidding: I wouldn’t tangle with a male sparrowhawk.)

Pulborough Beats Mizieb Any Day

2009-09-21T19:51:00.005+01:00

What a contrast. This morning I enjoyed wood sandpiper, black-tailed godwit, green sandpipers and even an alien species, Egyptian goose, in the English peace of RSPB Pulborough Brooks. A sparrowhawk circled and climbed, and a kestrel flapped low over the wader scrapes. I didn't have to fear for them.

One week ago at the battlefield of Mizieb in Malta, almost certain death would have visited the two birds of prey. As it was, those woods were silent and empty, save for a handful of hostile gunners, looking like mama had just taken their favourite dolly from them. We also walked past a veritable ghetto of crudely constructed shooting hides. I had the impression of passing through a deserted concentration camp, but one that was ready to jackboot to attention in a moment.

Over-dramatic? Not given the latest grisly evidence from Malta’s war on birds. Just yesterday at Mizieb, BirdLife and CABS recovered 76 freshly killed birds supposedly protected from the shooters by the Maltese government. If you think our politicians are cynical, that lot are positively brazen. I don't know how the Maltese can bear them any longer.

Don't Worry about the Alien Species?

2009-09-21T08:46:00.006+01:00

Some chap at Sheffield Hallam University springs to the defence of alien species, like ruddy ducks. I guess he is at least examining the question of "should" although I doubt his new term of "eco-xenophobia" will really catch on - a bit of a mouthful, what? He recommends that we focus on problem species instead. Hmm... I can think of one big, big candidate - oh, but it's an alien species too.

(I mean homo sapiens of course.)

The Only Casualties in this War

2009-09-19T08:58:00.006+01:00

What you won't see in any travel brochure: “Watch magnificent birds of prey that have flown the length of Europe blasted out of the sky. See those that only have their legs blown away die slowly from being unable to land. Marvel at the rubbish-strewn, lunar landscape, stripped of vegetation by bird-trappers. Endure the dark, hostile scowls of the locals.”

Outside the thin veneer that is Valletta. Mdina and the tourist resorts, this describes a week in Malta.

And what about this side-note? Planes from Britain, the Emirates, Egypt, Spain and other Western nations land just yards from gun-toting hunters. Doesn't this seem crazy? Who can tell the difference between them and Al-Qaeda operatives? The latter could position a whole arsenal by the airport without raising a single eyebrow. Imagine allowing that at Heathrow.

The raptor slaughter is but a pinprick in the hundreds and thousands of other birds who also fall prey to hunters’ guns and traps. Want to see a finch on the island? Go look in a cage. Go look in a British cage. Seriously, you’re more likely see one there.

The finches are more of a local problem. The international scandal is that Europe now invests time, space and money for migrant birds to come and breed in safety. They're our birds, born in our lands. We don't want them gunned down by Mediterranean savages, never to return again. In any other war – and this is a war, declared against birds by Maltese hunters and ruthlessly promoted by them – we would send the army to protect our citizens. As it is, a few dozen brave, dedicated birdwatchers from all over the continent can really only monitor the situation, as helpless as UN observers.

In case the Maltese government hadn’t noticed, the environment is top bill these days, right up there with terrorism. Birds are the environment, in fact one of its best gauges. To slaughter them on such an industrial scale must be the biggest act of vandalism in Europe. It’s time for the country to drag itself into the 20th century. Only then should we even consider allowing them to participate in the 21st century Union.

On Flying Away from Malta

2009-09-18T12:01:00.003+01:00

It's been a strange raptor-watching holiday when you've been urging the birds to "Just go. Fly away. It's not safe here." This picture shows, if you can pick them out, a few of the killers' hides, dotting the departure coast of Malta. The gunners will even shoot birds down over the sea, which gives the lie to any claim of hunting for food.

Death in the Afternoon

2009-09-16T10:37:00.003+01:00

Yesterday saw the start of the 3 o'clock hunting ban, so we enjoyed peace at the Mtahleb killing fields. So did a flock of bee-eaters, without fear of their gorgeous plumage being ripped to shreds by assassins' shot. Even a much later young honey buzzard seemed safe and we admired cracking views as it sought evening refuge. It had almost dropped over the horizon when it appeared to stoop. A second later, "crack, crack, crack" told a different story.

We were struck dumb. The first flouting of the law in hours and some cunt had slaughtered yet another of our birds.

Malta has decades yet to go to catch up with the 21st century.

A Maltese Attitude to Hunting

2009-09-14T10:38:00.003+01:00

Sunday afternoon our raptor-surveying team met a plane-spotter at the airport and heard a normal Maltese's reaction to the gun-toting hooligans. He and several friends had watched a "large bird" fusilladed down at their watchpoint. "Grown men, we wanted to cry," he said. Everywhere the teams go, the same message from the majority but too intimidated by the bully boys. That's why we're here.

Hunting Birds on Malta

2009-09-13T10:55:00.002+01:00

You can do it with binoculars or guns. Sadly, guns are more prominent, especially this morning when rain promises to bring birds in. A nice welcome for them. Again, a minority makes life a misery for everyone else. It seems that the Maltese are scared out of their own backyard by the gun louts. How often does this pattern repeat itself?

Malta Ain't So Rustic

2009-09-12T11:08:00.002+01:00

There's a little bit of postbox England in Malta, right outside the hotel. Last night I also passed belisha beacons, which seem to have disappeared back home. Things are rural round here but it took miles of urban getting away from the airport - not what I expected.

Another Critically Endangered Species Found

2009-09-11T10:58:00.003+01:00

BirdLife reports sightings of Fiji petrels attracted to pungent bait at sea. They also have the tally of critically endangered birds at 192, not the 190 I reported from the BirdFair, but hey, around 2% of the world's birds is too big a number.

Playing the Perfect Poker Path

2009-09-09T11:48:00.003+01:00

Only one player wins a tournament.

So, everyone else is on a path leading to their elimination. Even if they play correctly all the way through, the rest of the entrants will not win the main prize. Their final correct play will fail when the inevitable call or all-in push hits a bad beat or a monster. That's the nature of the game: it’s a gamble.

Playing correctly is supposed to work over the long run. Such a player will win more than his fair share of tournaments and come out ahead. But consider the problem of one tournament in isolation. Could some incorrect strategy increase the chance of winning it, and increase it enough to swamp the maths of the long run?

Consider the simple case of a tournament where everyone, including you, is playing correctly. You'll most likely lose. Unless you play incorrectly somewhere to change the perfect path. And play incorrectly often enough to put yourself on the perfect path, if at all possible. The trick is knowing where.

You can't know, of course, and in reality incorrect plays elsewhere move the perfect path. So, it may be more useful to view this path as a ridge above the surrounding landscape of the other player’s ridges. The higher your ridge, the less likely it will be terminated by contributing to some bigger ridge. This is called insurance. And you need it early. That is the time to play incorrectly.

I've seen it so often. The idiots, who double and treble up within minutes by throwing everything into seven-two offsuit, are maybe not such idiots. I’m not advocating this extreme an approach but, even as early as the first few hands, the surrounding ridges are growing. Fast. You need to grow with them. Play those marginal hands, bet those draws and call those bluffs – more so than my earlier thoughts on tournament poker strategy. Hard to be so reckless? Not if the entry fee for the tournament is an amount you could risk for just a few hands of poker. Plenty of players do it; you'll have more success than you think.

Or you'll go out. But you were going out anyway.

World's Smallest Parrot Filmed

2009-09-08T22:16:00.004+01:00

The first ever film of buff-faced pygmy parrots has just shown on BBC1 in the Lost Land of the Volcano series. Apart from these the expedition team has been finding oodles of new creatures and some other pretty elusive birds.

Marsh and Willow Tits

2009-09-06T17:48:00.005+01:00

A walk down to Trimpley Reservoir brought my first marsh tit sighting for a couple of months. I was actually on the trail of a willow tit. I thought I heard one but it’s been nearly six years since I even logged one and I’m quite out of touch with its call. It has a nasal, buzzy quality, just like a chickadee, but the marsh tit has a similar, softer call. I got two birds in the binoculars but both were clearly marsh. I’ll have to practise with my Roché bird songs and go again.

The woodland held a wealth of species – great, coal and blue tits, great spotted woodpecker, nuthatch, treecreeper, spotted flycatchers, goldcrest and a raven. That’s certainly flavour of the moment. There was even a train. Ha-ha! The video recorder on my phone works, as does uploading to YouTube – two more landmarks to go with this, my hundredth post.

Immigration Crisis Over: Swallows Leaving

2009-09-05T14:43:00.005+01:00

Lord knows what our robins, blackbirds, tits and finches think when waves of hirundines, warblers and swifts sweep into the country from the Third World. Is there an avian equivalent of the BNP? And would the blackbirds be welcome in it anyway? It’s not even as though party leader, Griffon (Vulture), is a native.

OK, that's enough allegory. Or is it metaphor? Upton Warren today saw a stream of swallows, house martins and sand martins pushing their way back to Africa. Hobbies seemed to be following: one perched obligingly by the Moors Pool and darted out for insects. Another laboured over the hide with some unidentifiable feathered victim in its talons.

Birds of prey, in general, appeared to be on the move, too. I saw several buzzards, one of which looked distinctly osprey-like with long, straight, fingered wings. The light was appalling and I was trying to see through trees, so I had to write it off as yet another one that got away. I heard later that a marsh harrier had passed at about that time but I would never have put my bird down as any sort of harrier.

No rarities, then. But some damn fine birds all the same.

International Vulture Awareness Day

2009-09-04T20:15:00.005+01:00

10,000 Birds gives the reasons why we need this tomorrow. Not a species us Brits get to see and it doesn't help our awareness when Hollywood movies call them buzzards, as in Clint's immortal line from The Outlaw Josey Wales that "Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms."

Our Population of Ruddy Ducks

2009-09-03T14:53:00.004+01:00

A bit parky at Arrow Valley this morning and, look, the leaves are turning. Brr! I should be heading south again.

The lake held the usual suspects: swans, mallards, great crested grebes, herons, coots, moorhens, greylag geese, Canada geese. So, I got to thinking about ruddy ducks, not that I've ever seen one in Redditch. No, over breakfast I'd read a story in Scribble that opened with ruddy ducks quacking. Had I ever heard a ruddy duck quack? I didn't think so. I'd heard them doing that chest-thumping thang but... quacking?

I checked my Collins Bird Guide which states that they are mainly silent. I thought so. Brownie points for me.

Still I kept thinking about them. Ruddy ducks used to be regular at Upton Warren but my last sighting was over a year ago. I know Defra are shooting them because of their threat to an endangered cousin, the white-headed duck. Doesn't this rather lower the conservation morality to the huntin’-shootin’n’fishin’ level?

It’s one of those dilemmas and, what's more, it begs the question posed by a deeper dilemma. Should we even be removing the duck? The killing fraternity likes to argue from the basic stance of controlling pests, regardless of the method. Pest is one of those words, like weed, that we conveniently apply to what we find inconvenient, like a duck that's outside its known historical range.

Known to us, that is, and in our time frame. Ruddies threaten the white-headed by breeding with them and producing impure offspring. Doesn't this suggest that the two ducks are so close genetically that we may be witnessing speciation in progress? And how many times has speciation been interrupted by outside events pushing the diverging populations back together again?

In a way it hardly matters whether the ruddy ought to be here or not. We've changed the environment so much in the last couple of thousand years that it’s hard to say what should be and what shouldn't. Maybe we should examine our relationship with the word “should”.

So, philosophically, should I head south?

Are We All Running as Big a Scam as Madoff?

2009-09-02T19:58:00.003+01:00

A Ponzi, or pyramid, scheme is one whereby the early entrants get to rake off profits from the contributions of those who join the bandwagon later. Golly gosh, doesn't this sound a bit like expecting the next generation to pay for this generation's excesses? And in the process denying the coming generation any of its riches, like the nineteenth century's passenger pigeons? Hardly the spirit of generosity. The Chronicle brings up the Madoff parallel much better than I could.

The Sea-Watching Volunteer

2009-09-02T11:00:00.011+01:00

It was like an epiphany, spending five days learning how to use my binoculars and telescope. I'd never been in such a long relationship with them. I also learned how to manage my expectations. When you see a figure like 3024 Manx shearwaters in that period, it’s tempting to think they were streaming past. Divide that number by the 3600 minutes that twelve hours a day makes and the stream reduces to a trickle. Add the fact that shearwaters also tend to clump into groups of anything up to twenty and there's actually an awful lot of quietness out there.

We did have the constant company of gannets. Who could complain about that? The local shags and fulmars also went about their business. And the paperwork kept us busy. Every hour we monitored the state of the wind, clouds, sea and its glare. To get an accurate reading for the wind meant a scramble up 50 metres to the top of the cliffs. Twelve times a day for five days... strewth, I climbed the equivalent of three Munros. No wonder my packed breakfast disappeared faster and faster each day.

The rhythm of scanning, recording and monitoring kept boredom at bay and gradually became the normal stuff of life. The rest of the world lost focus, turned unreal, irrelevant. Michael Jackson could have died and we wouldn’t have noticed (actually, he already had).

Back to 7:36 on the Sunday morning, I was yet to settle in to this pace. The first Balearic slipped past to set going another rhythm – ten that day; fifteen the next; and so on. We were counting beats, beats in the passage of sea life.

By eight o'clock the first of very few auks – a razorbill – had entered the records and my wind-climb produced a peregrine falcon. On the next hour I missed a passing great skua. Another pattern developed; it became a standing joke that the skuas would wait for me to start my ascent. My compensation that time was ravens and, at ten o'clock, a wheatear. The ensuing hour the Balearics peaked at four and I finally had a good enough view of one to honestly add it to my British list.

The morning ticked on. At twelve we broke for an hour, the period of maximum glare, then settled back to the rhythm. Before long, a sooty shearwater appeared, looking like a gigantic swift skimming the ocean. Another British first for me, we counted twelve in the entire five days.

A land-based distraction punctuated the afternoon: a pair of choughs probing the turf on the cliffs behind us. Meanwhile on the non-avian front Julie was having a quiet time until a basking shark appeared, quite close by. For me the day was indeed full of firsts.

And the weather held. We needed the umbrellas against twelve full hours of sunshine. It was a different story on the Monday. ⇐ ⇒

Extinction is for Ever

2009-09-01T17:10:00.004+01:00

Fuck the anniversary of the start of World War Two. That of the death of the last passenger pigeon is far more symbolic of mankind's latent Nazism, but on an entire species level. Reduce a population of wild birds from billions to zero in little more than a century? Impossible, the sustainable-hunting fraternity will tell you. No, we are capable of anything, except adjusting our own behaviour to accommodate the rest of the planet.

Raven, Redditch

2009-09-01T11:34:00.007+01:00

First of the month, so my rather irregular jaunt round the coppice at Walkwood to get the September list going. Well, last month I was on my voluntary job in Cornwall; in July on an outing with the RSPB at Cannock Chase; June dipping on purple heron at RSPB Saltholme... Dave and I hadn’t gone far into the wood when a loud cronk issued from the canopy.

So, out on the moors, up a bleak hill or on some storm-lashed cliffs, raven would have come to mind immediately. But in Redditch? I caught a black shape flap noisily away above us. It was indisputably a raven.

The call took me back a few days to walking back from Tesco, a route through suburban Redditch, when I also heard a single cronk. I looked up then, saw nothing and dismissed it as a figment but now realise that it too must have come from a raven. The species does seem to be spreading. I see it regularly at Bittell and reports appear on BirdForum from Upton Warren, so I can't be long adding it to that list.

There's no reason, apart from persecution, why these “honorary raptors” shouldn't spread. I used to see them regularly in the Bay Area where, like golden eagles and harriers, they thrive in the absence of gamekeepers. Funny that, ain’t it?

Shearwater Spectacle on YouTube

2009-08-31T10:19:00.003+01:00

The shearwater picture on The New Dharma Bums is impressive enough but the YouTube video, although indistinct, gives a better impression of the sheer (deliberate pun!) numbers out in, presumably, Monterey Bay. Also presumably, they are sooty shearwaters. I occasionally saw this kind of carpet of birds when I lived in California but never over such a large area.

Making a Website with ASP.NET and HTML

2009-08-30T20:03:00.006+01:00

Microsoft provides Visual Web Developer Express as a free download to design websites built on their .NET technology. .NET is nothing more than a common set of functions for interacting with a user and ASP.NET implements it for the Web via Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP). These create the HTML from which a browser, like Internet Explorer, builds a Web page.

OK, that's the jargon. The bottom line is: you can cut all that crap and just use Visual Web Developer (VWD) as an HTML editor. It does some of the tedious typing for you by filling in text it knows you'll need and even makes it XHTML-compliant. And if you want to try any of the fancy stuff in .NET, like master pages and reusable code, it’s there for you.

I've already hinted at using this to design a website and the resulting mish-mash appears at my birding/writing/programming pages. Yes, it looks like I’m not going down the Drupal route: I’m the sort of control freak that likes to programme as close to bare metal (or silicon) as possible.

And really, VWD is simple, for simple pages. It’s only when you start pushing the technology that the learning curve becomes as vertical as the brick wall against which you feel you're banging your head. You have to try the whistles and bells one at a time.

Most frustrating recently has been CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This is supposed to be the XHTML way to go: it separates style from content, presentation from the actual words. However, something as simple as centring images seems to require such an inversion of the thought processes that Einstein would struggle with it. This is not VWD’s fault: it merely conforms to the coming standards.

It did have one big roadblock when testing the website locally, which might drive the less tenacious away. So, here it is, cleared: Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.

PS. I would never advocate not using the <p> element to mark up an HTML paragraph. After all, a paragraph is a paragraph, right? But look in your newspaper. Is there a space between paragraphs? Check the latest, or any, Harry Potter. Spaces there? The Bible? Goddammit, even an HTML reference book? Spaces between paragraphs? No.

Then along comes HTML itself. “I know: let's stick a space in between paragraphs.” Fucking brilliant, mate. So, here's a nasty, but CSS-compliant, way to remove the space and indent the way it used to be:
p {text-indent:1.2em; margin-top:-1em;} p.scene {text-indent:0em; margin-top:0em;}
Now just add class=”scene” to the first paragraph of each piece. Scrivens!

Nanotechnology: Don’t Worry, Be Nosy

2009-08-29T14:46:00.002+01:00

Cornelia Dean in the New York Times asks her readers if they worry about nanotechnology. She needn't worry: people worry, full stop. It's a neat way of invalidating. It totally sets up the framework in which any future discussion will take place. That framework is one of fear. Wouldn't an unprejudiced enquiry be more productive?

I say this not necessarily as a supporter of nanotech but as one who has used it in a thread running through my science fiction novel. It’s interesting, goddammit, not another scare story. But that's precisely why I make it scary in the book. Scary sells.

Grey Phalarope, Witcombe, Gloucestershire

2009-08-28T19:34:00.003+01:00

This year I’m doing well on phalaropes: red-necked added to my British bird list two months ago; and only my sixth sighting anywhere of grey today. What better compensation for dipping on the wryneck that's been showing at the reservoir the last couple of days? At first, distant, the phalarope flew after five minutes – right to our edge of the water – for binoculars-filling views. They're not shy.

It was moulting into winter plumage and impossible to sex. The female of the phalaropus genus, like the dotterel, is the colourful one and does all the courting. Oh, to be a phalarope. Hang on, though. The bloke gets left on the tundra with the kids while her-outdoors buggers off back to the African oceans. This wader, along with the red-necked, is also unique in spending its non-breeding life at sea. So, today’s bird was probably female.

In summer plumage the gal’s body and neck are red, as are the male’s but more blotchily so. In fact, they're called red phalaropes in the USA, where they're also considered the rarest of the genus. Rarest because America has a third phalarope, Wilson’s. It’s a landlubber but “she” still wears the trousers.

Black Terns, Upton Warren

2009-08-27T14:28:00.004+01:00

An influx of these through the Midlands in the bad weather yesterday left three over the Moors Pool this morning. Without expecting them, they're easy to overlook initially. The adults have largely moulted into winter garb, which along with the juveniles’ plumage, renders them white below and only somewhat greyer above than common terns.

Their behaviour gives them away. Their constant, bouncy flight brackets swift plunges to the water’s surface to pick off insects. Closer inspection, even just through binoculars, reveals the darker shade, a hint of collar and, on the youngsters, a definite leading dark band to the wings. For contrast a common tern did join them later and was clearly bigger and sturdier too.

Despite missing the late spring’s black terns in breeding plumage, it was good to add these to the year list and moreover to my score from September last year, which now stands at 645. I used that date as the start point for my round-the-world twelve-month list but may push it back to October because I’m off to Malta in a couple of weeks. More of that later, I’m sure.

I spent an hour in the lapwing (east) hide, absorbing these birds plus a very obliging common sandpiper and male kingfisher. I know this now because it wasn't wearing “lippy”, as someone put it (the female has a red base to its bill).

Frankenstein: Cause for Complaints

2009-08-26T20:10:00.004+01:00

49p got me a copy of Mary Shelley’s classic and, to some folk, the first science fiction novel. I could have bought David Copperfield for the same price but felt that Frankenstein would be less challenging for a post-holiday read.

How wrong can you be? I can cope with the wordiness and convoluted sentences of that era, so I didn't struggle too much at first. But Victor Frankenstein, he goes on and on about how miserable he is and what tedious company he must be for his friends and family; and when he's done going on about that, he goes on about it some more. Well, yeah, you're tedious to the reader too, buddy. Just get over yourself.

Pages and pages of it. One long, persistent complaint. Don't we all know people like that? And don't we all wish we could make our excuses and leave at the earliest opportunity? "Me, me, me, me, me." They dominate the conversation; they dominate your life. Jesus, I don't want to read about it as well.

And then that gives them another complaint: you don't care about me. Oh, my God. The fact is: they're gonna complain about something.

I've dropped the book at the point where he’s about to create Mrs Monster. I’m sure that’ll turn out badly too.

Movie Birds – Charlie’s Angels

2009-08-26T12:40:00.004+01:00

Movies that get their ornithology wrong appeal to the trainspotter in me. From nearly ten years ago, the bloomer in Charlie’s Angels still tickles. I'd only recently moved to California but even so knew that when Natalie (Cameron Diaz) exclaimed that a pygmy nuthatch only lived in one place, Carmel, I was definitely in Hollywoodland. Moreover, she had identified the bird from its song over a telephone connection.

For starters, few species in the world are restricted to an area as small as one town. Then, California really only has one endemic bird – the yellow-billed magpie, which is widespread throughout the Central Valley. To give the film’s researchers credit, pygmy nuthatch does actually occur in the state, but also in Oregon, Washington and as far east as Colorado.

What made the mistake more egregious was a previous shot of some very, very red bird supposedly representing the nuthatch; and as for the song... No, no, no, no, no. Although going to an earlier version of the screenplay on Daily Script suggests the source of this error and just how little the original authors knew about birds. In this, a good couple of pages before Natalie’s detective work, they introduce a bright red songbird, which she later, by sound, has to identify as...

A blue spotted egret?!?

Yeah, that needs a whole paragraph to itself. Then Alex (Lucy Liu) pins it down to Florida. If nothing else, this demonstrates the huge gap that can grow between script and final cut. Speaking as a wannabe film-writer, I say, “Don't shoot the author!”

Eeny-Meeny...

2009-08-24T13:15:00.004+01:00

Here's how much the local magpies care about the local cats. And vice versa. Apologies for the crappy shot but I didn't want to open any windows or doors for fear of disturbing the tableau.

Greenshank and Birdfair, Rutland Water

2009-08-23T19:48:00.010+01:00

The greenshank belongs to the same tringa genus as wood sandpiper but is much larger and much more common. In fact some even nest in Scotland while the rest breed in boggy pine forests of northern Europe. This is terrain favoured by the woodie, for whom it is described as taiga, so I guess the greenshank likes taiga too. "The wonderful thing about taiga is that taiga is..." Sorry, couldn't resist. As befits waders, both species need their trees punctuated by water.

At Rutland’s lagoons today one bird was on its way back to Africa or may have been near the end of its travels. A few hardy individuals do spend the winter in our more sheltered western estuaries. The lagoons also held several ruff, a wader that is pretty much in a class of its own. The male’s extravagant breeding plumage, especially the neck feathers, named the species from the item of clothing that ruff more readily brings to mind.

Now, why was I at Rutland? Er... Oh, yes! The British Birdwatching Fair, whose theme the last three years has been critically endangered birds, like Balearic shearwater. 2009’s focus is on birds that have been lost and may yet be found. Now, isn't that an awesome thought? For all our take-over of the planet it’s still possible that species not seen for decades may yet be around. The Cebu flowerpecker is a case in point, presumed extinct early last century but rediscovered in 1992. BirdLife has identified 47 other birds for which we should not yet give up hope.

I met Erik Hirschfeld, who operates just the other side of the knife-edge. He edits the Rare Birds Yearbook, which summarises the state of play for the 190 critically endangered species. I bid for this in the Birdfair’s auction but was seriously beaten out of contention. Good on whoever ended up with it!

Other encounters were Dean Eades and the good folk at BirdLife Malta, about whom I hope to be posting much, much more.

PS. While writing this, I glanced out of the window to see a hobby hawking insects – yet another first for Redditch.

Sabine’s Gull, Upton Warren

2009-08-22T22:01:00.004+01:00

My good friend, Midlands Birder, was at the twitch for tonight’s flight in of this handsome arctic breeder. It must be a little way off its course from Greenland or Canada to Africa: some birds skim our western shores but rarely reach as far inland as Worcestershire. I was lucky enough to pick it out as it flew and so got the full benefit of its striking black, white and grey wing pattern.

It’s a beautiful thing. And British bird number 277 for me.

In US Alone, 30 Birds Killed every Second in Window Collisions

2009-08-22T19:00:00.003+01:00

Sorry to bang on about this again but this statistic is truly alarming. What's the figure in the UK? I don't know. How about a conservative guess of more than one per second? Even so it's way too many and far outstrips the damage done by cats, hunters, cars, wind turbines, yes, and even magpies/sparrowhawks/other bogie birds. The full article is at 10,000 Birds.

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2008: Whither from Perth?

2009-08-21T16:32:00.004+01:00

The last Saturday of November and the sun was blazing. I had a car and Western Australia was at my feet. There was to be no pelagic but my Bransbury suggested other bird-rich sites near Perth – Rottnest Island and Yanchep National Park among them but both in the wrong direction for Stirling Ranges, which was a recommendation I had to see. Unhappily, he listed nothing on the way, a distance of about two hundred miles south-east. I seemed to be in for some solid driving.

First, though, I required better accommodation than the backpackers for my return and last couple of nights in town before flying to Adelaide. To this end I ventured out to Guildford in the eastern suburbs. I don't know: I must have thought it would be quieter and have cheaper hotels. It was also on a railway line for easy access to downtown and close to the airport for an early morning departure.

I was wrong about the hotels. What few Guildford had were way expensive. Instead I settled for a full Australian breakfast, rather similar to the sort I could have eaten in Surrey, while Frank Sinatra crooned over the café’s music system. Winter heat, brekky, ole blue eyes: life doesn't get much better.

The route south took me round the airport, so I scouted the neighbourhood for lodgings and found the old reliable standby of Formule 1. That would do; I'd book it when I had Web access. For the time the Tonkin Highway was removing me from metropolitan Perth and into paperbark groves. I wasn't sorry to leave: the city hadn’t lived up to glowing reports and assurances that, “I'd love it.” It had been pretty ordinary.

Wilder, more untamed regions beckoned. I got a much faster taste of how wild and untamed barely ten miles from the city centre. ⇐ ⇒

Solving Bird Collisions

2009-08-20T14:09:00.003+01:00

Fascinating stuff from The Cornell Blog of Ornithology last week reporting on an American Ornithologists' Union meeting.

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Holdem Poker Strategy: Protecting Top Pair

2009-08-18T16:11:00.003+01:00

When playing poker, top pair on the flop is not enough to win the hand. For a start you must bet to protect it. At this stage in no-limit hold ’em it’s the accepted philosophy to bet around the size of the pot. This offers any opponent odds of 2-1. If he is drawing to a flush, he has a worse than 4-1 chance of hitting it on the turn. This is a good deal for you, ignoring the added complexities of later rounds of betting and cards. The bet also prices out opponents who are drawing to a flush with an overcard, when they have a 3-1 chance of making the flush or a pair better than yours.

If the flop has cards of three different suits, no flush is yet possible. Now an open-ended straight is the only danger and you don't need to commit so many chips. A bet of half the pot offers an opponent 3-1 against his slightly better than 5-1 chance of completing the straight. Again, it also prices out a hand drawing with an overcard.

Why would you want to bet less? Well, every bet is risky. You may be facing a hand with two pair or a set, both very hard to see but your opponent will probably raise you. Now you have to judge how full of shit he is. Does he really have the goods? Remember: you only have top pair, a hand unlikely to improve, and the default course must be to let it and your chips go. So, it’s as well to be efficient with bet sizing. Over the course of time it all adds up.

Note that a flop with two suited cards matching one of the suits in your hand reduces the chance of an opponent completing a possible flush. In fact it too becomes a slightly better than 5-1 chance and you can bet half the pot. The great thing here is that you know it and your opponent doesn’t! Now your efficient bet sizing can suck him in to a gamble that is not profitable for him and this translates into profits for you.

Incidentally, betting more than the pot becomes a game of diminishing returns. You can never put enough money in to offer evens and betting twice the pot only offers 3-2. If an opponent has a hand strong enough to call 2-1, 3-2 isn't going to make a huge difference, especially when the implied odds of future betting rounds swamp this small margin.

Cormorant, Redditch

2009-08-17T19:40:00.005+01:00

Not exactly a headline grabbing species but in more than ten years association with the place, including living in it for several months and twenty-four visits to Arrow Valley Park, I have never seen a cormorant here. The Park it was that held one today and therein may be a clue: it is a fishing park. The angling community’s main take on cormorants is to kill them. Google “cormorant angling” and check out what comes back to get a flavour. Even the BBC calls the birds “greedy and vicious”, exclusively human traits, I would have said.

I don't take that crap about minorities giving the majority a bad name on board either. Fishing to eat I can understand. Fishing to haul some hapless creature out of its natural environment and asphyxiate, I don't get. Even catch and release hardly seems a pleasant way to behave towards a creature. Imagine if birdwatching were like that!

The idea of at the very least hurting something must surely be ingrained in the psyche of hunters. Not much chance they'll think outside that particular box for any obstacle to their gratification, like a cormorant. Really, their parents should have drummed the spoilt two-year-old out of their systems.

Seabird-Watching Binoculars and Telescopes

2009-08-17T11:29:00.009+01:00

One other observer was an integral part of the team for the five days I spent on Gwennap Head. Julie Hitchins, coincidentally also down from Redditch, was tallying cetaceans, sharks and seals. The project’s remit covered much more than Balearic shearwaters.

Together, we counted nothing the first hour as we struggled to construct a shelter from a couple of umbrellas and a few tent ropes. We’d both seen the finished result the day before but had failed to register the exact configuration.

We did finally settle down to surveying but didn't fare much better until John arrived. There's a technique to this lark. I've already touched on having the right equipment but using it correctly is just as important. For a start it helps to know the general route that the target birds will take.

In our case we knew that the Balearics would more or less accompany Manx shearwaters, which we were also counting. They were flying on an east-to-west line about a kilometre out. In theory, scanning this route in the opposite direction should have caught most of the birds. In practice, the sea was pretty same-y and offered little guidance to keeping a telescope on this line.

The answer was not to scan at all but to park the scope on a hotspot. Conveniently, the Runnelstone buoy sat about a mile offshore. Keeping this in the top of the view kept the line of flight in the bottom. Not quite as interesting or active as continually scanning, but more reliable. The best seawatching spots in the country have these offshore markers. They also serve to guide other observers on to a sighting and to find what someone else is excitedly shouting about, provided you leave your scope parked even when not attending to it.

After a while you can determine some structure to the local patch of sea, thanks to prevailing winds and underlying topography, like reefs. Then you can scan out a bit but it’s no good randomly swinging a telescope round the entire ocean right from the start.

In the course of this experimentation I also discovered a feature, unsuspected for six years of telescope ownership. I had always had great trouble looking through other people’s; the image seemed to waver and sometimes disappear completely. I chose my Kowa because it did less of this but it still wasn't perfect. It has a rubber rim that surrounds the eye end of the eyepiece. I must have absently rolled it back.

Blimey! Suddenly the image was solid and with a much greater field of view. The rubber was only the thickness of a pound coin but it had been sufficient to push my eye too far away. I do have very deep set eyes. Think Tom Cruise but without the rest of the looks (or the money. Or Nicole Kidman. Oh no, neither has he now!)

Anyway opticals designed for the normal face don't cut it for mine. Inspired by this discovery, I tried looking through my binoculars without my glasses on. Same result. Instant increase in steadiness and clarity. Now if I could just train my eyes not to need spectacles... ⇐ ⇒

Little Egret, Upton Warren

2009-08-16T13:01:00.004+01:00

Spotted crake was top of the menu, but was off, for this morning’s visit to Upton. A couple of reports late yesterday had driven the early birders in at half-past-five but the crake hadn’t shown by the time I arrived at ten. (I've done my crack-of-dawn starts for a while.) Nor did it oblige later.

A little egret, however, did show to become my 119th species at the site, the only wonder being that I have missed it all this time. Upton has hosted the odd individual recently but the egret doesn't seem to have taken to the place despite becoming increasingly common in Worcestershire.

Little egrets officially became British breeders in the mid-90s on Brownsea Island and, since then, have established themselves widely. Even now their generally accepted UK headquarters is the Island but it seems that not all is well there. As far back as 2005, ravens predated all the nests and it’s hard to find any more recent information. I only went digging because a bloke in the hide today (yeah, the same one as down the pub) asserted that the egrets had failed for the same reason this year. Is it so?

As I was about to call it a morning a splendid kingfisher whirred up to perch for a minute in front of the hide. According to my Collins Bird Guide, it’s possible to separate the sexes when breeding by the colour of the lower bill – pale red for female; black for male. I didn't note that detail on this bird but wonder if it holds outside the breeding season.

So many questions!

The Australian Nature Reserve: Whingeing Pom #2

2009-08-15T11:22:00.007+01:00

If my previous whinge was about one particular backpackers, this rant does include a more general anti-Australian sentiment. However, it is anti-anywhere outside Britain because we’re such the world leader that the rest of the planet looks totally shite. Heavens! What could it possibly be? You’ve read the title, so you know already. It was never going to be our ethnic cuisine or weather or drinking habits, was it?

Yup, nature reserves, or more specifically facilities for watching wildlife. Australia is blessed with a great many conservation parks and so on, and probably beats us in terms of percentage of land set aside for nature. This sounds good for the birdies and critters, but is it? If the public can't engage with all this space, won't they eventually resent accommodating it? Won’t it suffer abuse, being out of sight, out of mind?

The Herdsman Lake Visitor Centre was the last useful, enclosed birding facility I would find until Atherton, by which point I'd driven ten thousand kilometres. This journey did throw up the odd shelter and a couple of hides that looked over dried-up lakes, but that was it. The antipodean birding Mecca of O’Reilly’s in Queensland had no more than a café balcony from which to view. Even low-cost basics like information boards were missing and as for more substantial infrastructure like car parking, visitor centres, cafes, shops, accommodation... patchy in the extreme.

Imagine travelling six thousand miles in Britain or about seven times between John O’Groats and Land’s End. You could use that distance to zigzag liberally down the country through major centres like RSPB Forsinard, Loch Garten, Strathbeg, Montrose, Vane Farm, Lochwinnoch, WWT Caerlaverock, Saltholme, Leighton Moss, Martin Mere, Welney, Titchwell, Cley, Minsmere, Barnes, Dungeness, Pulborough, Arundel, Radipole, Slimbridge, Sedgemoor, but strangely not into Devon and Cornwall. This is only a selection and then there are countless smaller reserves, Wildlife Trust sites, even individual, unaffiliated hides. I know we're a compact little island but you don't have to travel far to watch birds in comfort.

The only upside to the paucity in Australia was that I felt like quite the pioneer, a frontiersman, opening up new territories, boldly going where no birder had been before. It was more of an adventure. And I bloody well earned the birds I did see.

Not so much a whinge then, as a hymn of praise to Britain. We're crap at just about everything else but we do birding good. Maybe we don't take so much care of the actual birds themselves but that’s a whole other rant. ⇐ ⇒

Conservation Volunteering with SeaWatch SW

2009-08-14T10:40:00.009+01:00

Of the world’s 190 critically endangered birds Europe has only two, one of which is the Balearic shearwater – down to about ~~4000 individuals~~2000 breeding pairs and declining rapidly. In five days I had the privilege of logging 51 records of these Mediterranean birds dispersing past Gwennap Head, just south of Land's End; although I honestly identified only a dozen. At a distance, which is so frequently the case, they look similar to their cousin and abundant British species, the Manx shearwater.

It takes a trained eye to separate them and fortunately we had a couple in the head of John Swann, resident of Cornwall and veteran sea-watcher. He also had a telescope designed for the job with its wide-angle, 30x magnification eyepiece. My tiddly 25x zoom jobbie simply didn't trap enough light or give a decent field of view. I almost fared better with the trusty old 10x42 binoculars, so my first lesson covered getting the right equipment for the job.

It may have been as well that I didn't know this before starting: I felt challenged enough by the prospect of five days’ getting up pre-dawn to spend twelve hours on an exposed Cornish headland. If the summer had been anything but the monsoon we've been experiencing, I might have relished the idea. As it was, I nervously packed everything I owned that was waterproof and windproof.

Getting to Penzance the morning before my shift started, I made a preview visit to the site to meet Russell Wynn, the co-ordinator of the project. To get the Balearics, which tend to pass relatively close to shore, the team had set up camp somewhat lower than the well-known watch-point at Porthgwarra. This involved a scramble down the unforgiving Cornwall granite and particularly through a defile we got to know as The Crack of Doom. Fortunately an easier, but more roundabout, route also existed. I got into the habit of taking this.

Preliminaries and introductions over, I decamped to the B&B, which came as part of the deal, and then spent the rest of the day being a tourist: i.e. driving into and out of Land’s End without paying the four quid to stop there; and failing to find anywhere at all to park in St. Ives. Hey, it was August. ⇒

Wood Sandpiper, Upton Warren

2009-08-12T19:55:00.007+01:00

What is it about this wader, apart from its scarcity relative to common and green sandpipers, of which several also pecked and probed at the Flashes this afternoon? The bird is certainly handsome with its clean supercilium, mottled upperparts and more slender build than the green, which is the only other medium-small tringa sandpiper regular in this country. Really it’s misleading to lump the common sandpiper in here, being on its own of the genus actitis in the Western Palaearctic. And it does look quite different.

The woodie today seemed to show brown in the mottling – hard to judge at the distance it was keeping – but a faint smudge of tawny beside the breast also suggested that it’s a juvenile. It has been mentioned on BirdForum as such.

The Collins Bird Guide notes that it will have been born on bogs and marshes in the taiga. Until I started to rewrite my SF novel, which posits that the Gulf Stream will cut out, I'd have been hard pushed to say what taiga was. Well, here's the lowdown: the sequence in the arctic runs, from coldest down, something like ice cap, tundra, taiga, boreal forest, steppe. Taiga does have trees but not so many as the forest and principally conifers. So, now you know how to make a wood sandpiper feel at home, or a taiga bean goose presumably, as opposed to a tundra bean goose.

But I digress. Whatever it is about tringa glareola (which seems to have no meaning other than pratincole), the bird is still drawing the crowds at Upton. Enough that the hide was full, although partially with tripods straddled across benches, a breach of etiquette, surely, also mentioned on the BirdForum thread.

I stopped at the Cuckoo Hide on the way out and got my reward in a snake swimming towards me. Lord knows what it was but it had an orange nape. That should nail it for someone out there.

Website Design

2009-08-10T12:09:00.004+01:00

Before I launch into my seabird volunteer adventures, I have a postscript to the domain hosting saga.

I registered theandygibb.com with GoDaddy, who give you all sorts of freebies for your £6.40 a year. For instance, I had found with pokerbird.net that I could redirect it to this blog without having to host the domain elsewhere. (I also bought and redirected thepokerbird.com just to get round the non-availability of pokerbird.com. Again, I am the Pokerbird!)

In fact, GoDaddy offer free hosting and a slew of CMSs (Content Management Systems), which was perfect because I wanted to use Drupal. So, theandygibb got a Unix hosting account. Problem: all the nice add-on applications, which include the CMSs, are only free for a paid hosting plan. Well, three quid a month isn't going to break the bank but I still had one other avenue to explore.

When I got back from my world travels, I toyed with the idea of returning to computing and tinkered with Microsoft’s ASP.NET. I played enough to supplement my existing HTML and build a half-decent website reasonably quickly. I'd try that.

Hell’s teeth: I'd signed for a Unix account, to get the Drupal. I hadn’t got Windows, which runs .NET. (You see how this stuff can drive you round the bend?)

Nothing daunted, I set theandygibb.net up for Windows and shan't bore you with the trials of using ASP and Visual Web Developer, except to assure you that they were manifold. You can see the result by following the link. Pretty kludgy, huh? And with a GoDaddy banner across the top. I should have known.

So it looks I’m having to pay to get Drupal on theandygibb.com but I’ll let that idea marinate a while.

The Cattle Egrets are Coming

2009-08-09T11:11:00.002+01:00

They've bred somewhere in Somerset and this morning a juvenile graced Chew Valley Lake, so there's a high chance that it's one of the first British-born birds. We're getting all these southern species, which may be some symptom of global warming. This bird kept company with a half dozen little egrets, a Mediterranean species which was also rare fifteen years back. What will be our next new breeder?

Balearic Shearwaters

2009-08-07T10:16:00.003+01:00

In five days Gwennap Head, just south of Land's End, has seen 51 of Europe's only critically endangered birds. Acting as a volunteer for Seawatch SW, I honestly only identified half a dozen of them and will relate the full story over the next few posts. ⇒

2008: Herdsman Lake Land Birds, Perth

2009-07-30T09:59:00.008+01:00

The stilts weren't my first bird identification problem. As soon as I got clear of the car park, a raptor tilted and wheeled over sedge beds across the lake. That behaviour back home would have made it all harrier but I was getting some distinctive underwing patterns that didn't match any of the circus genus in the field guide. These birds of prey do indirectly get that taxonomic label from their performing skills: they circle round each other when courting. This bird didn't circle. It disappeared.

No matter. I wasn't going to win them all and I hoped to get a more comfortable view from the Visitor Centre. I had no problem getting in but a sign demanded a gold coin to use the facilities. What was this? A pirate economy? Did I also need a tot of rum and a dead man’s chest? I wondered where to get these gold coins. Tourist Information? It was too late for that, so I roughed it outside.

My raptor, or maybe another one, reappeared and by dint of checking a very useful four pages of overhead drawings in my Morcombe, I pencilled in little eagle for another lifer. I was still racking up the waterbirds with ease but I had more trouble in an area of paperbarks and flooded gums right by the Centre. Various wee birdies there would only keep still long enough for me to be certain of one new species – western gerygone (pronounced jerry-gone-ee with the stress at the end of jerry; I only learned this a month later).

In the more open areas I made the reacquaintance of willie-wagtail. This bold, little, black-and-white, long-tailed flycatcher, not a million miles unrelated to the magpie-lark, would also be a constant companion the breadth of Australia. I added further lifers with a flock of little corellas and, disappointingly, laughing doves. They should have been no closer than India. Finally, a singing honeyeater became world bird number 870 for ten lifers in a couple of hours.

Those hours had taken a slight toll of my skin too and I could feel my face burning. It was time to spend my last sleepless night in Perth. ⇐ ⇒

Internet Domain Name Registration

2009-07-29T11:59:00.003+01:00

This is off-topic but semi-related. I've been trying to make a website that is more inclusive of what I do than just this blog. It’s bad enough already that I've set the Pokerbird up to cover two topics and I don't want to dilute it further with other interests. So, I've spent the last few days laying the foundations for a portal domain, one of whose rooms would be this blog.

First, I needed a name and that took me into the murky world of registrations, bidding and auctions. One obvious target was pokerbird.com, which was for sale on Sedo. You can generally find that out just by typing the URL into a browser. Sedo seemed kosher enough, so I signed up and discovered that the starting price was $100 to transfer the site.

Hmm. Seventy quid, eh? More than I wanted to pay but still not excessive. I bid and less than 24 hours later got a counter-offer from the vendor of £300. So, what was the deal with a starting price? He further said that he had offers over £300. Well, dummy, take them. What's the point of allowing me to undercut them? Two weeks later I notice that the domain is still for sale. Like I said: a murky world.

Just to ring-fence him I registered pokerbird.net, .org and .info for less than £30 at GoDaddy, the world’s biggest domain registrar. In the Web landscape that put me in the suburbs compared with the shiny .com downtown of corporate glass and steel tower blocks. But, hey, the .net neighbourhood in particular is up and coming.

So much for headquartering this blog. I had a bigger problem with my own personal portal. I have a famous name, so andygibb.everything is taken. Even without an illustrious namesake I’m sure few personal domains are untenanted for anybody. Try it for yourself. Actually, the Andy Gibb people had had to settle for .net. I’m sure whoever’s sitting on .com is a relative of my pokerbird.com friend. Anyway, joebloggs.com in general is out.

Except that for days the answer was staring me in the face at GoDaddy before I twigged. They love to sell domains, so much that they present a list of choices close to what you have requested. These include .net, .org, et al, suffixed domains like andygibbstore and prefixes like my, new and the.

The – theandygibb.com. Aren’t I the Andy Gibb? Not just any old Andy Gibb, not even that one. The one.

I snapped it up. Job done. Well, not quite. Now I have to create the website and that's a whole other story.

National Trust, Hanbury Hall

2009-07-23T17:08:00.008+01:00

This is the weather that's been littering the Midlands. I stopped here for a huge cream tea on my way back from failing to find a decent cagoule under a hundred quid in Worcester. To my shame I've never so much as driven past Hanbury Hall in my long association with this area. Of course, I picked a day when the building itself is closed but I was still getting value for money with my NT membership saving me the £4.50 entry to the grounds.

£4.50!!

The cream tea wasn't huge either: that's just a turn of phrase.

I thought I had a bird list for Hanbury from my days of living in Stoke Prior; and so, I diligently logged a kestrel, swifts, house martins, wood pigeons, a couple of moorhens and one apiece of blue tit, blackbird and robin. I had no such list. Well, now I do.

A Sneak Peek at RSPB Middleton

2009-07-22T17:31:00.006+01:00

And it was sneaky. They're nowhere near ready for visitors yet but we were at Broomey Croft and it was just a short stroll up the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal. So we went.

The water levels were high, not surprising after all this rain, and the wader habitat was swamped. A couple of little plovers, one green sandpiper, an oystercatcher and a few lapwings stuck it out regardless. Little egrets found the conditions more to their liking, as did a goodly selection of wildfowl. One hobby glided through low-level.

The boundary between Warwickshire and Staffordshire snakes through the reserve and it wasn't always clear where to assign sightings. The border zig-zags enough that I had previous visits to Middleton Hall and Dosthill incorrectly down for Warwickshire. So much for accurate county listing.

Consequently Broomey Croft today actually added ten species to my Warwickshire total, including eclipse-plumaged gadwall and shoveler and a juvenile whitethroat. None of these birds looked like their distinctive breeding pictures in the field guides. What with that and the waiting for autumn migration, it’s a hard time of year to bird.

Yellow-legged Gull, Bittell

2009-07-21T20:12:00.007+01:00

Dave observed that this gull had only one mirror in its wing tips. It was undeniable. My Collins Bird Guide says it has smaller mirrors than the other possible source of confusion, the herring gull, but this bird seemed determined to proclaim its difference. In addition its mantle was a darker shade of grey, but not so dark as to compete with lesser black-backs, and the legs were... well, they weren't pinky. Not obviously yellow either but we were certainly looking at a yellow-legged gull.

I've tried for rarities at Bittell in the past and failed to connect with any. I told Dave this on the drizzly trudge to the upper reservoir and he said, “Thanks. We're not aiming to see a yellow-legged gull, are we?”

“No, we're not. We're going for something else entirely.”

The gull perched obligingly on the buoy where previous birders had reported it and my duck was broken. That was one more to the Worcestershire bird list and another to follow immediately when we got on to the little egrets, also mentioned by those birders. These took me up to 141, just four behind my best English county, Hampshire, but still 37 adrift of Angus. They all pale against my 219 in Santa Clara, California but, hey, everything’s bigger in America.

In a brief respite from the rains, we had earlier dipped on the pom skua reported through Bartley reservoir. It was useful to find out where the place was, though, for future, wintery reference.

2008: Herdsman Lake Waterbirds, Perth

2009-07-20T20:57:00.013+01:00

The afternoon was drawing on and I was to collect a car to transport me round the south-west corner of the state. I had to get to Bayswater Car Rental (“No Birds” – hopefully not an omen) in Subiaco, which was a good opportunity to catch a train. I know, I know: I should have outgrown all that. My excuse could be that Perth’s trains work a lot better than its buses but I wasn't to discover that until a week later.

It was too early to park the motor for free back in Northbridge, so I took myself off to one of Bransbury’s top recommendations, Herdsman Lake. He wasn't wrong, nor was his information out of date. Ducks alone added blue-billed, musk, hardhead (aka white-eyed) and Australian shelduck to my world bird list. My 2003 holiday had already given me grey teal and Australian shoveler, so they just joined the trip list. So too did great crested and Australasian grebes, great egret, Australian pelican, white-faced heron, purple swamphen and Australian ibis. Rufous night-heron and yellow-billed spoonbill, however, were also lifers. This was just the waterbirds.

Before leaving them, one enigma remained. My Morcombe guide contains black-winged stilt (himantopus himantopus) but my computer software, Wildlife Recorder, only allows me to enter white-headed stilt (himantopus leucocephalus) to an Australian trip. In other words, the programme counts it as a separate species to the Old World version found in Europe and, very occasionally, Britain. It seems the jury is still out on this one and three other sub-species around the world. You see? Even when you think you’ve nailed a bird, the fluid taxonomic situation can unhinge it.

To confuse matters further, the white-headed stilt is far more likely to have black on its head than the black-winged. Is everything clear now? ⇐ ⇒

Redditch Garden Birds

2009-07-19T16:39:00.005+01:00

A song thrush has treated me with early morning visits to Dave’s Walkwood garden. The usual fare is blackbirds, including one juvenile that pecks at nearly everything in sight – I guess it'll learn – so it’s good to see this speckled member of the same family. I associate it with the first inkling of the massive population decline in birds. Ten years ago those headlines seemed to solely concern song thrushes until a dismaying cohort of other species joined them – skylark, yellowhammer, marsh tit, grey partridge, bullfinch, corn bunting, inter alia, and now even house sparrow and starling.

Walkwood does hang on to a few marsh tits, bullfinches, sparrows and starlings, more so in the winter. In July the most obvious birds seem to be wood pigeons, the jumbo jet of the back lawn. As I type, a jay flies across; a few days ago, a family of three manoeuvred through the coppice over the road.

Having bred for the year, black-headed gulls are back on the school playing-field and regularly lope over the house. A sparrowhawk – a female, it was so large (too much to hope for goshawk in these parts!) – flap-flap-glided past as I pulled in from shopping yesterday. And of course I see the usual tits, finches, corvids, dunnocks and robins. We don't need to worry about them.

Do we?

Feb: A New Kiwi Bird (but not a Kiwi!)

2009-07-18T21:28:00.003+01:00

From Auckland’s Ponsonby Road to the Northern Motorway is a short but intricate journey, especially when night makes street signs hard to see. I think I managed a reasonably direct route and so found myself bowling over Waitemata Harbour and then up the North Shore district. For this the darkness wasn't a problem and I soon got on to the Albany road. Then the lights ran out and navigating to Coatesville became a challenge.

Finding the home of my old Bristol University friend, Tony, was even more so. I had to get out of the car a couple of times to search out house numbers. Just ten miles from downtown Auckland I seemed to be in the bush.

I always get there in the end though and Tony and his exuberant dog greeted me. I had worried about recognising him after thirty-odd years. I needn't have. The fellow facing me could have just stepped out of the JCR at Wills Hall, circa 1975. Life down under had clearly suited him.

I met his wife, Kathy, a northern lass – well, northern from my Winchester perspective – and unloaded what I needed from the car when an unexpected sound broke the air. My New Zealand bird guide describes it as “more-pork, more-pork”.

I don't know. Perhaps I never hear these things the same way as others. Anyway the bird was easy to identify as an owl and on the North Island that means only a morepork. OK, I guess if you're going to hear the call that way, why not use it as the name? It works for chiffchaff; it works for hoopoe; and doubtless many others. It worked for me that night – lifer number 1046. ⇐ ⇒

Warwickshire Birding

2009-07-17T22:27:00.006+01:00

Well, I got my tripod – a nice Velbon Sherpa with a one-twist action to lock and unlock panning and tilt together. What an improvement! I'd had to use two hands before. I left Focus Optics, chuffed as hell. Then guess what?

I only dropped the fucker again. In a brief half-hour I'd forgotten that on this model the legs didn't all extend together, which I did want: it cuts out the cross-struts. Anyhoo, I parked the tripod, thought I'd got it balanced and biff! However, I don't think I've damaged it or the scope, God willing.

I gave the whole combo a trial run at Coton, the Warwickshire adjunct to Kingsbury Water Park. Very sturdy it was too. I had no trouble picking ruddy ducks and pochards out from the tufties at the far side of the lake, but couldn't turn any of them into scaup.

Dozens of swifts and sand martins skimmed the water’s surface, which was heartening, especially the swifts. A sedge warbler kept up its crazed song and occasionally flitted into view. These all filled a pleasant dry hour until black clouds started to lour over Tamworth. I scuttled off not too long before another downpour of tropical dimensions descended from the heavens.

I will need that cagoule.

Sharpen those Sea Bird Identification Skills!

2009-07-17T09:15:00.004+01:00

Hey, I get a mention as a volunteer in a sea bird survey press release. It’s only two weeks away. Yikes! I need to get my skates on. For starters, I still want a new tripod. I’m sure it will be necessary, so I’m taking myself off to Focus Optics at Corley today. I may even sneak in a visit to Kingsbury at the same time. It depends on the weather.

Which, continuing the metaphor, leads me to the second skate. I’ll need some protection against wet weather, especially given the present deluge conditions. I don't think my weedy little poncho will stand up to a good Cornish battering. I’ll be after one o’ they there spiffy Gore-Tex cagoule-type thingies. Ah, Jim lad! Oops, I'd better cure myself of that before venturing west.

Hopeless Poker Strategy: Shoving Under the Gun

2009-07-14T10:37:00.003+01:00

I think I've answered my dilemma about being the poker tournament short stack.

Wait. Bleed to death if necessary. Just don't blow all the hard work by shoving any two the hand before the blinds hit, where you need either everyone to fold, or luck. Given the loose tables I play, the former is unlikely, so why not trust to the luck of cards to come? I did just this in my latest tournament.

I was down to three big blinds but, under the gun, let a trash hand go. My reward? AQ as the big blind with one raiser and a caller. I couldn't have been happier. My hand made, I trebled up and kept the same policy right into second place. I know this is just one instance but I've done it before and seen others do it often enough that it looks almost +EV (i.e. in the long run it will win money).

I'd got to this parlous state after breaking one of my cardinal rules. I'd hit the ignorant end of a straight on the flop and bet out. I got one caller. An innocuous card on the turn prompted another bet and another call. Then, disaster. The river made possible a higher straight.

I'd worked out a while back that it always pays either to bet on or check and call. An opponent chasing that straight could never make it pay long-term, even if they took all your chips on the river. The stacks in a tournament aren’t big enough. Therefore, if you’ve not given them the odds each time, you're +EV to commit everything on the river. And when you add the possibility of a bluff into the equation, you're well quids in.

I checked. He shoved. I folded. He showed AK and my straight had been good. I felt sick. He may truly have thought he had the better hand but basically I'd been suckered. The only reason I'd folded was my previous dismal run. I didn't want yet another early loss. That's the way fear works in this game.

Birds & Poker Web-site Links

2009-07-13T20:39:00.017+01:00

I figured I'd share a few of these plus the reasons why I like 'em.

Fatbirder: you mean you don't know about the premier wild birds site?

PokerNews is a good overview of both poker tournaments and strategy.

Birdingpal finds local birders to guide you round a new patch.

The RSPB has a good bird identification tool.

Surfbirds allows you to compare your bird lists with others.

And talking of listing, Wildlife Computing sells the computer software I use.

The BTO sponsors the more scientific study of British birds.

BirdForum: well, it does what it says on the tin.

A great site for finding and identifying British birds can be found at BirdGuides; but you do have to sign up for most of their services.

The Pokerbird

Pokerbird Has Moved

Believe in Lucky Cards

Don't Worry About the Size of Your Bankroll

Call a LAG Only with a Great Hand

Texas Hold'em Isn't Proper Poker

Play Cash Games

Play Many Casinos At Once

Don't Play with Play Money

Call a LAG Only with a Great Hand

Take No Notice Of Note-Taking

Choose the Biggest-Bonus Poker Room

How To Be a Bad Poker Player

It's Really Happened

Approaching the Ultimate Limits?

Semi-Bluff Reraising: A Winning Poker Play?

Common Scoters, Bittell

Do Ya Feel Lucky?

Redwings & Fieldfares, Upton Warren

10 Species You Can Kiss Goodbye

Australian Roads & Shopping

Impressionist Mandarin Duck

Buzzard Brings Down the Curtain on Big Sit!

Big Sit! Score Struggles to 17

A Slow Start to the Big Sit!

Free Games #1: The Big Sit!

Scottish Icterine Warblers

Moon Crash vs. Chicxulub Crash: Away Win

Newsletter

The Rhythm of Nature

An Albatross-Eye View

Another Excuse for Gun-Happy Morons to Wage their War on Birds

Great (White) Egret, nr Pershore

1999: Fulmar and Sandwich Terns at Lyme Regis

Movie Star at Arrow Valley Park, Redditch

The Meaning of the Chiffchaff’s Autumn Song?

Mute Swans, Upton Warren

Great Tits in Walkwood

Protecting Poker Hands on the Turn

Another Environmental Yardstick: the McFarthest Spot

The Berlin Wall for Wildlife

Long-Billed Dowitcher, Chew Valley

Osprey at Chew Valley Lake

21 Robins A-Singing in Walkwood

Another Magnificent Victory for the Men with Guns

Why Not Gun Down the Gunmen?

Three Things I Never Knew About Raptors

Pulborough Beats Mizieb Any Day

Don't Worry about the Alien Species?

The Only Casualties in this War

On Flying Away from Malta

Death in the Afternoon

A Maltese Attitude to Hunting

Hunting Birds on Malta

Malta Ain't So Rustic

Another Critically Endangered Species Found

Playing the Perfect Poker Path

World's Smallest Parrot Filmed

Marsh and Willow Tits

Immigration Crisis Over: Swallows Leaving

International Vulture Awareness Day

Our Population of Ruddy Ducks

Are We All Running as Big a Scam as Madoff?

The Sea-Watching Volunteer

Extinction is for Ever

Raven, Redditch

Shearwater Spectacle on YouTube

Making a Website with ASP.NET and HTML

Nanotechnology: Don’t Worry, Be Nosy

Grey Phalarope, Witcombe, Gloucestershire

Black Terns, Upton Warren

Frankenstein: Cause for Complaints

Movie Birds – Charlie’s Angels

Eeny-Meeny...

Greenshank and Birdfair, Rutland Water

Sabine’s Gull, Upton Warren

In US Alone, 30 Birds Killed every Second in Window Collisions

2008: Whither from Perth?

Solving Bird Collisions

Holdem Poker Strategy: Protecting Top Pair