B...is for....

It was a chance phone call yesterday that saw me down at the RSPB's Greylake Reserve in Somerset this morning. That call from my friend and erstwhile colleague Brett Westwood involved a well overdue and quite long gossipy catch up, which ended with a discussion over the Baikal teal which has been at Greylake all winter. This bird should be in East Asia but somehow made its way to Britain possibly two years ago, given a handful of sightings across a number of areas in southern Britain, of what is thought to be the same individual. This bird has now been accepted as a bone fide British record by the BOC and as such is now added to the official list of British birds.  Brett mentioned he's keen to see this vagrant from the Far East, however living in the Midlands it's a long drive down, and it wasn't visible when he led a birding walk to Greylake recently. I said I'd have a look over the weekend and report back to him.

I woke up to heavy rain on Saturday morning despite the forecast promising sunshine. Should I go, or stay indoors and sulk? In the end I went. It's about twenty miles to Greylake and I arrived around 11am just as the sun began to break through. My heart sank however as the car park was packed, I managed to squeeze into the last space with a feeling of dread. Images of camouflaged middle-aged men with huge lenses fixed to cameras, tripods be-topped with telescopes and the general chaos of twitchers came to mind.  However I was here, there was nothing for it, I headed towards the hide and viewing screen.

My fears were borne out. I couldn't get anywhere near the viewing screen for what looked like a traffic jam of green shopping trollies loaded with paraphernalia. I tried to get near but a dozen birdwatchers were well dug-in and definitely not moving any time soon. Massive scopes pointed outward through the gaps, cameras too, various bits of equipment littered the floor, flasks and sandwiches in evidence, and, the owners glued to their phones oblivious of what was happening on the reserve.

Failing to push my way to a viewing place, I turned tail and headed to the nearby hide itself. That was a little better, still burgeoning with birdwatchers but I managed to find a suitable corner to peer out of. I looked around, not one birdwatcher was actually watching birds, they were all either in huddles around a scope chatting (and moaning there was nothing to see) or on their phones looking for something, from which the constant pinging would suggest they had found. Do birdwatchers not watch birds through binoculars these days?

I don't mind any of this at all but they do tend to stay in one place for hours hoping for that elusive photograph, in doing so preventing the casual visitor access to their inner sanctum. I'm big enough and ugly enough to barge in but it is intimidating I feel for those less robust.

I settled down. Beautiful views of snipe just outside the hide, Greylake is a good reserve for these lovely waders. Beyond the snipe hundreds of teal, wigeon and mallard, some shoveler, a lot more snipe and a handful of other birds such as moorhen and gadwall. A good number of lapwing too with their lovely call regularly piercing the landscape. Beyond the main scrape great white egret, little egret and grey heron plus the usual smattering of corvids perched on fence posts. It's been a while since I've visited Greylake and the one thing a birdwatcher must do here is scan the pylons which march across the wetland. No perched peregrine this time but a lovely kestrel right on the top in the sun.

It was at this point that a conversation struck up between my nemesis birdwatchers over how few birds there are to see from these hides these days? One bemoaned that "[at Greylake] it's the same birds I see every time I come, it's the same at Catcott, it's just wigeon, more bl##dy wigeon everywhere". I refrained from adding to their discussion and so having had enough of all this I got up and left the hide to escape the conversation bemoaning common species. 

As I exited the hide however a 'chip chip' sound caught my ears. Bearded tit, or moustached reedling as the phenomenal birdwatcher and photographer Carl Bovis referred to them a few years back. Given the males sport a moustache rather than a beard, I like that name, better than bearded reedling. Now, I've learnt a technique when watching these beautiful birds, as they are ventriloquists. That call never seems to come from anywhere near the bird and so what you do is watch for a reed stem in the surrounding area to begin wobbling and then look down to about a foot or so above the water. There, if luck is with you, you'll find the bird, as it creeps along in a direct line foraging from reed to reed. I followed this one for a good ten minutes but it never gave me a good enough view for a photograph. Interestingly not one birdwatcher passing me, as they exited or entered the hide,  asked what I was doing peering intently into the reedbed. Eventually the bearded tit flew off, in doing so startling a Cettis warbler into its exploding song.

While watching this activity my ears picked up that the air was being filled with what I can only describe as 'snap, crackle and pop' to use a well known rice based cereal slogan. It took me a while to tune in before I realised it was individual reed stems either drying out in the sun or expanding in the sun and as they did they popped. I've not heard this before but as a sound recordist it fascinated me. I should imagine however if I turned up with a microphone to capture it, all would be silent.

After this immersion into that reedbed soundscape I fancied a walk, therefore retracing my steps I joined the waymarked reedbed-walk where once again I heard the 'chip chip' of bearded tit, this time however they were invisible. In this part of the reserve people too were invisible, just one chap out looking for grey heron. 

The twenty minute walk terminated in a willow screen which offered some cover from the few birds visible out here, great white egret, four greylag geese, mute swan and a marsh harrier. At my feet however a pond skater caught my eye. The sun was warming the water in a ditch by the viewing screen where I then noticed a swarm of winter crane-fly scudding over the water surface. There are around ten species of Trichoceridae flying in the winter in the UK, they're poorly recorded so there may be many more species yet to be discovered in the landscape. Some observers call them simply winter gnats, I'm amongst that body of observers, lacking the knowledge to identify down to species level. It then struck me that despite the aforementioned conversation possibly still going on at length in the hide, Greylake was providing a number of interesting things to see. 

Many years ago when the social media platform Twitter was gaining popularity I organised a 'Tweet-Up' of like minded natural history buffs. We spent a day on the Somerset Levels, including coming to Greylake where a superb entomologist Richard grubbed around in the undergrowth and in doing so discovered a number of species not known on the site at that time, including a freshwater snail which if my memory serves me well, was new to Somerset. These were good events to be part of, and those species we recorded were submitted to the relevant biological records office. Citizen science in action. It's sad these events fell by the wayside after a few years,  not least as today I'd have enjoyed having someone as phenomenally knowledgeable as Richard alongside me to put a species name to my 'winter gnats'.

I'd been here now for three hours and whilst enjoying being out in the fresh air and sunshine, it was time to call it a day. However on my way back to the car park once again I heard the 'chip chip' of a moustached reedling. This time I took some time following the wobbling reeds as they shimmered along a ditch, and after a dozen or so images of empty reed stems and nothing else, I was finally rewarded with a photograph of the male reedling as it appeared, all too briefly, into the open. This was the icing on the cake for me watching this bird, a species now becoming established in Somerset albeit still with small localised populations.

I had one final B to add to my list of B's I'd collected today, Balkai teal (reason for visit, absent), Birdwatchers (many), Bearded tit (lovely) and finally Beetle. This green ground beetle was crawling across my rucksack as I packed it up. I tried to key it out as a Harpalus affinis, the right size and shape, but this species is one of dry sites, a wetland seems a little too moist a habitat for it.  Then I thought maybe Carabus spp. but they are much larger. Once again my lack of knowledge is letting me down with beetle identification. 

There's so much to learn, or in my case, forget, but I'll not forget this wonderful visit to Greylake. As for the Baikal teal, well it was on the reserve today, though not somewhere the public had access to.