The perils of the alldayer

 Since recovering from the sleepless rigour of the September alldayer I've been considering the theme of my next post. I could write at length about competitive birding, is it a good or bad thing? But the problem is the "at length" part. It needs a book to do it justice.

Nevertheless, here are a few thoughts. Birding can undoubtedly be competitive if you want it to be. In the 19th century it was who could collect the most skins. In the late 20th century twitching developed, who could collect the most ticks. An offshoot is regional and patch twitching which is the same but with tighter boundaries. Alldayers are a natural progression and introduced the welcome concept of teams. Whose patch is best?

One obvious problem is the lack of a referee. Imagine a football match with no ref. A goal is scored and the forward turns round and says "you know what, I think I could have been offside. I won't count the goal". That's competitive birding, it relies on self regulation. But you can't go up to a team member and tell them they've got it wrong. All you can ever ask is "are you sure?" 

We had a couple of awkward moments, amicably resolved, and the final result was correct. I'm sure every team will have had similar issues.

A provisional list of the leading sites was posted on Twitter yesterday. Morton Bagot was not on it. We don't even make the top 20. Naturally I don't mind. It doesn't bother me that Earlswood, just up the road scored 77. I didn't care that they saw a Little Stint. We've never had one, and perhaps we never will. I'm not bothered.

I'm so not bothered that on Sunday I drove the whole eight miles to look at it. I twitched it, or at least I tried to. It had gone overnight. Nooooo! It'd only been there a week.

The consolation prize

I met up with Matt Griffiths and John Chidwick. They pointed to the two Ringed Plovers it had been with and told me the news. A casual scan across the reservoir revealed several Sand Martins, two Wigeon, and a Coot. There was a Greenshank somewhere, but I'd had enough. Patch envy, another peril of the alldayer.

It's easier than mothing though. I walked into the living room this morning and a little moth was sitting on the ceiling. I didn't recognise it, and have since discovered it is not identifiable from a photo.

Acleris laterana/comariana ag

Luckily, there's no such thing as competitive mothing. Yet.