Started with giving young master Ray a lift to Dawlish Warren so we could dip the Kentish Plover. Not that we knew that, though the news that a birder [who shall remain nameless] with "a Brit List around 440" who had Kentish as a bogey bird was coming down from upcountry for it did not bode well. Neither did the fact I was going for it. I have a real talent for missing Kentish Plovers. Yeah, doomed from the start...
As dips go, I've had worse ones, and witnessing various local birders [who shall remain nameless] extracting the mouse from young master Ray is always entertaining.. ;)
I eventually tore myself away to head up to far and distant Chew Valley Lake, there to drool over all the Shiny Things at the annual bird stuff day [or whatever]. There were marquees and everything. And an owl.
I annoyed the Swaro guy by comparing the new ELs to my HDs and seeing that, while the ELs focussed much closer, the FOV was pretty much the same, there was a little edge distortion in the production models [none in the handmade ones I saw in 2008], the balance is still too far forward [makes them droop], and all in all I prefer my Leicas. This pleased me quite a lot. The Zeiss camerascope thing was very impressive [no sign of new Diascopes though]. The new Leica scopes, while gorgeous to look through, had a couple of significant flaws - no pull-out sea spray hood, and a pointless zoom. Why is it pointless? Because with a FOV almost the same at 50x as at 25x, why use 25x at all??? A 2x zoom just doesn't make sense... The EDG scope had a camera attached to it, also a veeeery long foot, so all I can say is it felt good to focus with!
Primary objective was to annoy the Manfrotto rep about tripods. I like my tripod a lot, but it is a pain in the shoulder sometimes. Manfrotto guy was not annoyed at all - he even gave me brochures. He also had a shiny new Gitzo birding head, which will apparently be out 'in the summer'. Those Gitzo tripods are very nice, aren't they?
Bird-wise, there wasn't much happening outside the usual there - lots of sailboats and fishermen burning around helped with that. I missed the morning Garganey, and didn't hear a whisper about the Shorelark [grrr...], so after a very late lunch I decided to toddle home via the Levels.
This turned out to be a Good Idea.
At Shapwick, I managed to arrive as most of the crowds were leaving, and it got very peaceful, very quickly. The usual bevy of warblers sang their collective hearts out, and overhead Swifts, hirundines, and Hobbies swooped. A low-flying Bittern was just the start of the fun, as I got to make a [rather overdue] Life Sound Tick! "Boom!" :D [Yup, I heard a Little Bittern boom {or rather, whuff!} before a Great Bittern..]. The first damselflies were out and about, and given the balmy temperatures, you could almost think it was summer... Two species of harrier were a surprise [ok, the latter was - pulling a 'fly across the path' routine]. I really like it up there of an evening. Despite the mozzies.
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