Thursday, April 10, 2008

Praying for wind

Having blown a silly amount of money on a new scope a couple of weeks ago, i've been waiting for an opportunity to try it out properly. Unfortunately, ever since I bought it, Portland has been uncharacteristically calm, and there hasn't even been a hint of a good seawatch on the cards. Almost every evening, BBC weather is forecasting moderate SSW winds for the next morning, and every morning, its calmer than a gnats fart, so, apart from yesterdays Little Crake twitch, i've always left the scope gathering dust in the corner.
Being the supersticious lot that they are, the Portlanders have been blaming the scope for the calm weather. I'm half expecting to come back one day and find "Kowa" scrawled out and "Jonah" written in its place.
Yet again, theres a bit of onshore wind apparently coming tomorrow, so i'm hoping that this will finally be the time to christen the scope (Little Crake doesn't count according to certain seabird obsessives)

If there is no wind tomorrow, then i'm going to start advertising my self as a 'Storm suprresant', so the next time the Caribbean, or somewhere else warm and birdy is facing a Hurricane threat, they can hire me to fly out with my scope to set up on some random headland, and hey-presto, the storm will abate, could be quite a lucrative business that, though it may result in me never seeing a decent seabird again for the rest of my life.
On second thoughts, I might just have to ditch the scope, or get it exorcised or something, my one goal in life is to see a Fea's Petrel from an English headland, and if something doesn't change soon, I may go disappointed.



Rock Pipit on the East Cliffs this afternoon. Amazingly, we haven't had a single littoralis here yet this spring.

















One of the many foxes roaming the Top Fields. This was one of the few occasions where I regretted swapping my gun for a camera!!

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