2008: Herdsman Lake Land Birds, Perth

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

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

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

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

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.