Sunday November 1 - reality check

 The new month dawned fresh and mild. October is in the rear-view mirror and Dave was able to join me for this morning's tramp round. 

Over the last few weeks I have been spoilt locally with rarities like Red-flanked Bluetail and Pallid Harrier, while Dave managed to twitch a Yellow-browed Warbler on the outskirts of Coventry. Even Morton Bagot came to the party, in a small way, with a Quail.

It would be nice to think that all this excitement will continue, but let's face it, it won't. Windy days are particularly unforgiving here, and we had almost nothing to show for three hours of effort.

Obviously there were birds, but they struggled to brighten the day. Four Cormorants flew over, five Stonechats remain, a Grey Wagtail was around the Morton Brook, and the hedgerow beyond provided shelter for 15 Greenfinches, scarcer here of late.

Not a Red-flanked Bluetail

We did detect one noteworthy bird. As we kicked through the weedy field in the faint hope that the Quail might still be here, we independently identified a single call note as belonging to a Brambling. It didn't call again, and we didn't see it, but there had been several small parties of Chaffinches flying west so it seemed not unreasonable to count it.

This gives me the opportunity to mention that I have completed The Project. Ever since the BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) devised an on-line data entry site called Birdtrack, I have been an enthusiastic supporter. All my records of birds have been entered into their database since 2005. But I go back a lot further than that, and although I have also always submitted stuff to County Recorders, the raw data was only in my notebooks.

Not any more. The Project involved submitting all my old records back as far as the day I started writing stuff down into Birdtrack. So they now have all my records since November 1978, and I get a lot back.

I can, for example, tell you that my first Brambling was at Blackpill in Swansea on 24 January 1979, and that today's was my 311th record. I can also tell you that since my first visit to Morton Bagot in 2007, I have recorded 97 here, and that I have seen at least one on the patch every year to date. However, the best years were from 2010 to 2013 when arable farming dominated, and the maximum count of 43 came on 30 November 2011.

I am truly the nerd's nerd.

And having got that out of my system, here are some horses.

All I need now is a new project.