It's ten years ago since I decided to buy a decent digital camera. My mate Pete Moore recommended I bought a Canon 7D & 400 mm lens. Pete also helped me get up to speed on the best settings for this combination. My first trip out was eventful as I was photographing a Kingfisher at Middlebere, when news broke about a Pallid Swift at Christchurch. I ended up getting thrown in at the deep end with trying to photograph a Pallid Swift in flight that afternoon. This was my first Blog Post.
I've written another 885 Blog Posts since that first Blog Post. For this tenth birthday Blog Post, I will pick my favourite Blog Post from each Blog year. This is a particularly hard task as there are so many Blog Posts to choose from.
I'm not sure how I managed to get out Birding in the first year of having the camera, as I managed to create 229 Blog Posts during the first Blog year. I took a year off between contracts to travel to the Andamans & mainland India in Dec 13 to Jan 14, quickly followed by a short nine day trip to Morocco & Western Sahara in Feb 14, a week in Israel in Apr 14 and a three day trip to Croatia in May 14. With so many Blog Posts to chose from it is difficult to work out a favour Blog Post, so I've based it on this photo of four Wild Asses walking across a salt pan at Desert Coursers in Gujarat, India.
I was still taking a break between contracts at the start of the second Blog year, but that was because I was about to head off on the expedition ship, Braveheart, to Pitcairn Island, Henderson Island and remote French Polynesian islands. Pitcairn and Henderson Islands had been high on my list of places that I dreamt of visiting, with Pitcairn Island for its history of the Bounty mutineers and neighbouring Henderson Island for its endemic species. However, I never thought would be possible to visit this remote British dependence, until I saw Wildwings were offering a two week trip on the Braveheart to Pitcairn and Henderson Islands and some nearby French Polynesian islands with a few days on Tahiti. I booked up as soon as I saw that trip advertised. One of the other attractions was the opportunity to land on remote uninhabited islands in French Polynesia which were the home to several more island endemics: the highlight of which was obvious the enigmatic Tuamotu Sandpiper.
It is a different subject for my favourite Blog Post of the third Blog year. I had spent a fair bit of this Blog year working on a long contract in Winchester & that limited my travelling. But there was an opportunity for a mini break to Ireland with Dave Gibbs & Paul Chapman that Autumn for a Royal Tern. After getting good views of the Royal Tern, we headed down to The Dingle for the evening where Dave & Paul planned to run a moth trap. There wasn't room in the accommodation for the three of us, so I headed off and found a B&B in the nearby village of Annascaul. By chance this is the village with the famous South Pole Inn which was owned & run by legendary Polar Explorer, Tom Crean. Crean travelled to the Antarctic three times with Scott & Shackleton and he was one of the three men, along with Shackleton & Worsley, to cross the South Georgia mountain range. He is one of the unsung heroes of the Golden Era of Polar Exploration and his story is as inspiration as Shackleton's story in my eyes.
The fourth Blog year was a quiet year where I was having to focus on the Winchester contract. There was no opportunity for foreign travel. I will stick to the historical theme of the last Blog Post. I drove past the Fovant Badges in Wiltshire in Apr 17 & this was a good opportunity to see the new Badge that had recently been carved into the down. The lost London Rifle Brigade Badge had been re-carved, one century after the Badges were originally carved. The others were created by the regiments who were training in the area before they were sent to the First World War trenches. Sadly, for many soldiers this area will have been the last part of England that they spent a lot of time in. It's great to see that volunteers are spending the time to not only look after the existing Badges, but to re-carve one of the lost ones.
Finally, the contract came to an end & I was free to travel again in the fifth Blog year. I planned a three month trip away, started in Colombia on a Birdquest tour with my late good mate Brian Field. I then squeezed in a couple of weeks on my own exploring Chile before flying to Ushuaia and boarding the Oceanwide Expeditions ship, Plancius, for a seven week trip from Ushuaia to Holland via South Georgia, Tristan da Cunha, St Helena, Ascension Island and Cape Verde. It is very hard to pick a standout day in such an amazing and varied three months. Ultimately, it would have to be a Blog Post from the time spent on the Plancius during the Atlantic Odyssey or West African Pelagic. On this trip, I saw about forty percent of the World's Seabirds, twenty-six of the ninety one Cetaceans and four of the seven species of Sea Turtles. I also got to visit another couple of remote British dependencies. I think the highlight Blog Post has to be the one where we saw a group of Flying Squid. I wasn't aware that Flying Squid existed, until we saw them & I'm glad to have got a photo of one group.
I spent most of the sixth Blog year working on another long term contract back in Winchester. Again, there was no time for foreign travel, so the Blog year was mainly local Birding and other Wildlife. But I couldn't resist the opportunity to spend a weekend on Shetland twitching the Tengmalm's Owl. For me, this was one of those mythical species on the British List which I never thought would occur again, let alone give Birders a chance of seeing it. It was one of the memorable twitches, but it was spoilt a bit by bad behaviour from two unknown twitchers that evening.
The main event of the seventh Blog year was the C19 outbreak, especially losing the whole of the Spring to the lockdown. I was restricted to blogging about #BWKM0, Birdwatching at Kilometre zero which was a hashtag that was used a lot for Birders watching from home. However, the standout trip for me was my last carefree pre-C19 twitch to see a long staying Hermit Thrush on St Mary's. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to day trip to St Mary's to see it over a weekend. Eventually, I bit the bullet and took a day's unpaid leave on about the last nice weather day of the year. I saw it just in time as it departed a few days later.
Continuing to work from home was the one positive of the second year of C19. I was doing a lot of local Birding, but it took me some time to get back into the twitching and I ensured that the handful of twitches I went on were conducted in a safe way as far as C19 was concerned. So, masks in garages & shops and no lift sharing. The stand out twitch was to Tenby in Wales to see Wally, my first Walrus. However, I wasn't expecting Wally to be upstaged by a very showy Harbour Porpoise who put on a superb display that evening.
The nineth Blog year saw me take early retirement from the IT world and look forward to more Birding opportunities. I managed two enjoyable and C19 safe mini-breaks to Ireland to see the Egyptian Vulture & a Northern Harrier, with the showy Baikal Teal on the Somerset Levels on the first trip & the Least Tern on the second trip. But the best day of the Blog year was another memorable twitch to the Scillies for the Blackburnian Warbler. This was upstaged on the way back by finding a Loggerhead Turtle on the return journey: there less than two hundred & fifty UK records.
The tenth Blog year finally saw the return to overseas travel with a spate of C19 delayed foreign trips. It started with seven weeks returning to Indonesia with Bird Tour Asia trips to the Banda Sea & Remote Moluccas. I then had a few days Birding in Sulawesi, Bali & Java looking for Birds I had missed in the sixteen weeks I had spent over three long visits in 1991 & 1992. In Jan, I was travelled again with a week in Argentina before rejoining the Plancius & heading for the Falklands, South Georgia & Antarctica. In the late Winter, I was off again for my third trip to New Zealand looking for & seeing my last three Kiwis before joining what was to be a badly run and very disappointing West Pacific Odyssey from New Zealand to Japan, where the ship failed to put basic rules in place to manage a C19 outbreak onboard. The result is we were not allowed to land at Truk in Micronesia or on the planned Japanese islands. I will provide more detail of how badly Heritage Expeditions mismanaged the trip when I get around to sorting out the photos. For now I will not recommend anybody travels with Heritage Expeditions. Having completed all the C19 delayed trips, I managed to squeeze in a bonus trip to Angola with a couple of good mates, Phil Hansbro & Richard Carden in June. Again it's going to be hard to select a single Blog Post to adequately sum up the year. But in contrast to the disastrous Heritage Expeditions trip, the Oceanwide Expeditions cruise to Antarctica was a delight & another well-run trip with this excellent & professional expedition company. I've not had chance to sort out the photos, but I will leave this as my favourite photo of the trip & one of my favourite photos of the last ten years.
These are only a few of the 886 Blog Posts that I've written to date. There are many more Bird, Cetacean, Sea Turtle, Butterfly, Dragonfly or other Posts. I hope this has wetted your appetite to explore other Blog Posts which can be searched for on date or using the species lists on the right hand side of the Blog. Finally, thanks for helping to generate the over six hundred thousand Blog hits over the last decade. Hopefully, the next decade will be as varied and enjoyable as the last decade.
