Kev's Christmas Bird Count: Day Five - Re: Cant (and mopping up afterwards)

Dagnabbit. A Christmas Bird Count week near Christmas is a pain. Christmas gets in the way. Christmas food shopping to be precise. Unless you want to go at night when half the stock is probably sitting in cages in the delivery bay.

Grit teeth, Hempstead Valley Shopping Centre here we come. After checking in with the council's roving Rangers responsible for our small clumps and patches and, yes, the remnants of the great Hempstead wood near the centre had some mop ups available. Park up, walk ten minutes, bag the CWs, go fight the crowds, home, unpack, write a thank you note to Ranger Mark, sorry, to Santa, saying 'Thank you for my Nuthatch and Treecreeper..'.

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(Google search 'Count Week Results' to pick one at random and, oooo, yes, I like manatees -
Manatee County Audubon. Bradenton Circle. 

"Sixty-one men and women participated in the Bradenton Circle Christmas Bird Count as part of the 121st National Audubon Society annual birding survey.."
(Men and women. Not out and out birders. All levels. All playing. 61 for a circle. Imagine getting 61 birders to agree to thrash the north Kent marshes..)

"Teams tallied 158 species and 52,836 individual birds.."
(The team score isn't the focus. Yes, you can compete intra-circle, but the uber-team result is the important one..)

"An additional five species were recorded during the count week, which was three days prior and following (Count Day).."
(Five! Just five?? Wowsa. Of course, my mock CBC had just one team of one out in the field (team name 'The Dense Thicket') which made the rest of the week vital for a high score. If I went mental I could get another 45, 50. If I pretended I wasn't a Billy-no-mates by stealing any Circle sightings for my CW from the various Social Media sources, I'd get a couple of dozen of those to evidence fun that could be had, but 5. Respect to those 61 Manatees. They'd done their prep properly and thrashed that circle on Race Day.)

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This reearch knocked some of the wind out of my sails. Witnessing some high levels of disturbance on Count Day itself had also left me with little motivation to go mad for it on the three mop up days. Today's mop up wasn't going to be a race in any way. It was going to be a stroll over on Sheppey. Somewhere I liked.  And if it only got me a couple of additionals, so be it. Had three days to score five like my new heroes, the Bradenton Circle crew, that'll do. (That was their 2020 report in the link above, you bet I'll be checking back in the New Year to see how they do: Go Go Bradenton!) 

I'd mentioned Minster in my 'What to do in November' post, when talking about Great Crested Grebes. ("And there can be good numbers off of Sheerness-Minster in the slack between the DWC and shore - this area is not covered by any WeBS count at present.") And a non-birding chum was going to Queenborough and Minster this afternoon. Lift time.

I got dropped off (and would be picked up) from the Seathorpe Avenue car park. My chum knows me well. If I'm watching Medway's Deep Water Channel I'll be closer but down at sea level- around Barton's Point. If it's a skua day (before you get excited, yes, it can be better than Grain but nowhere near as good as Shellness), I'll go a little further east to Minster Leas for a bit of height and a few close-ins, but for a decent scan of the distant waters/flats between the DWC and shore, the Cant, I'll go for extra height. The car park is only up at around the 35 metre mark, but makes the difference.

The Deep Water Channel has a flow that influences moving birds, especially those heading into the Medway itself. But these waters are Thames- the tidal flow is east to west. I tend to think of the Cant's shallow waters as a bit of a sheltered haven between the deep water flows and land. Why the Grebes like it. But the northern edge has big shell beds. Today the 'Bay Daniel', a local fishing boat I know well from my Queenborough visits, was out trawling over the area. There should be birds out there, and there are.

But birders often don't bother. Distances (and easier honeypots nearby). I'll admit it, I always enjoyed it here, but it has got better since I upgraded from a fixed wide angle x30 to a zoom to x70. Speck-tacular results. I only went that high because I do spend so much time on distant scanning on the Medway. And I'm never disappointed if I don't get crippling views.

Looking straight out, the view is north-east, so the distant buoys are some four miles off at the very start of the Medway DWC. Four miles is scary to most. But as the BTO say, from a clear viewpoint experienced WeBS counters can do common flocks at four miles. And rafts of Common Scoter were out there today. They're hit and miss, but the Grebes are regular, and many are usually only up to a mile offshore, usually in rafts of up to around 40. The challenge is digging out a different one, but today there was a Slav just east of the car park. That'll do.

Between the grebes and the scoter you'll pick up on flighting divers. Not everyone's cup of tea, but finding birds on the water a tad harder as they're usually prone to being more spread out, and individuals are easily missed if you don't scan carefully and slowly. Among the expected Red-throats, a single Black-throat loafing close enough in for the x70. This wasn't the expected bird, Great Northerns are usually second commonest. No complaints from me.

I got a trio of CW birds (a Kittiwake sailed by the Daniel Boy) in an hour. It was a relaxed birding hour, no racing. That's how a mop-up trip should be. Pleasurable.

I'd thought hard about making some more distant trips to thrash the circle. I'd never achieve it, and now I was thinking I didn't want to. It has to be a team effort. 60 more birders needed for an enjoyable race and chase.

When do we Brits ever mop up? The most famous, most important mop up was after the Bird Atlas 2007-11. The introductory chapters explain all the hard work that went into organising the effort. The BTO costs the total work involved at 1.5 million pounds. Some of that went on data capture and engagement and problems encountered and lessons learnt are laid out (3.9, p.62) The program had to be adapted to by way of an extended Roving Record submission module (and data manipulation magic worked to match for all areas) because 30 counties and regional bird clubs continued fieldwork for their tetrad atlases by one to two years "taking advantage of the momentum in observer effort".

Well, some of the counties whose minutes were public at the time spun it another way; effort was needed to cover some big gaps and small nos of birders acted as hit teams. What if that momentum had come earlier?

The 2nd national Atlas was '88-'91. This was 20 years on. If the aspiration is to repeat 20 years on again, then some time to go. Or is there? The Atlas also says first initial planning meetings took place in 2001. Exactly 20 years ago.

How can we get more momentum earlier? Surely those 30 clubs would like to achieve results in time? Could perhaps a few county CBCs in the next few years give more birders a taste of fun both racing and then chasing missing birds? We often list January 1st, and see county write-ups that muse over the missing. A game week late December, that goes for it, that celebrates the end of the year? (That gets a heck of a lot of scouting done for our better-loved January 1st year-list racing starts?

We've never gone in for CBCs. But could we get pay-offs from squaring the circle? (And I'm thinking 10km squares here..)

There's other positives that I'll muse on tomorrow whilst out in the field..