Friday 23 March 2007

19th March - Snow Goose etc

I was sat wondering why society would force me to wear a suit, take my earring out, brush my hair and shave just so I could look the part for a meeting I had to attend later in the week. We do live in a society that does judge people by how they look. Still we have to do what we have to do sometimes.

My mind is often active with random thoughts, probably a bi-product from my miss-spent youth! I got to thinking about time travel, the ethics of this form of travel have been covered in great depth in such philosophical and educational infomercials as Timecop and the Minority Report. However to put this into a birding context if you had a time machine you could quite easily travel back in time to find rare birds before the actual finder finds them (I think that makes sense). So you armed with your time machine could potentially have a huge finds list. However this would of course be very unethical and in the end you would be branded a stringer. As who is going to believe you could have found a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker on Scillies before you were born?...................food for thought or complete B**lcks I don't know!

.....................................................Meanwhile back in relative reality.................................................................................................................................I got a call from Craig as he was heading out to look for the Snow Goose that ad been present in the solway area for a few weeks. As I had an early start at work I was able to go with him! We visited the usual goose sites (Salt Coates, Anthorn, Border Marsh etc) to no avail. We then took the road along the edge of Skinburness Marsh where after a short time Craig picked out the Snow Goose in with c400 Pink-footed Geese. Although the bird was fairly distant, the views were fairly good!

1 comment:

Harry said...

Hi Tristan,
Ah, but you could limit yourself to finds within your own time birding, and make sure that you get others to see the bird in order not to be branded a stringer.
There would also be scope for going back, checking sites on spec, finding and photographing, say, a vagrant Passenger Pigeon, and then getting the present-day BOURC and BBRC to retrospectively accept it as a national first once you returned....
H