A couple of years ago, give or take a few months, my grand-daughter Emily, destroyed my laptop and external hard drive when she inadvertently spilled my beer onto the keyboard. I've had several IT guys give their considered verdicts, and attempts at recovering my lost data, but zilch - I feared that I'd lost the lot! Now I'm sure that there are many who already know where this is going - but being such a technological dullard, the salvation isn't as obvious as it would be to someone with a brain cell between their ears? It is true that, for the time being, I have lost many of my document files (including many that were written as an initial attempt to write "that book") - but my photos were saved from this savage attack by the beauty of Picasa Web Albums - a Google facility which I knew nothing about until very recently.
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| Firecrest at Westcliff |
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| The Oare Marshes KWT Res - Long-billed Dowitcher |
Here, unknown to me, are all my images from the "Non-conformist" efforts and also a huge amount of material that I gathered whilst just keeping a personal diary. I am now, therefore, enjoying my time by looking through the huge number of images, reliving some good times, thanks to a piece of wizardry that I have absolutely no idea about.
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A bird that doesn't appear on my Kent (or UK) list - I quite simply couldn't truly accept
the credentials of a very common captive duck - as nice as it was! |
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My Alpine Swift - discovered flying above North Foreland Gold Course and "twitched"
by many of the county faithful plus others from further afield.
We don't suppress everything on Thanet |
I've used a few images today, but rest assured that there will be many more "blasts from my past" as I cobble together future posts to keep up this ramshackle blog!
Dyl, your last couple of posts feature at least four birds I've never seen anywhere.
ReplyDeleteI was a rubbish twitcher.
I was once fishing Croxley Moor and noticed a birding crowd assembled. The fact it was a full blown male Red-Backed Shrike, still wasn't enough to move me 300 yards from my Chub fishing to view it, despite the only other RBS I've seen being a juv.
Only interested in finding birds if I'm honest. I don't care for known situations and second hand. I won't fish for known fish either.
A vast expanse of the unknown, unappreciated and unexplored is my area. The LAA losing the Queen Mary reservoir's fishing rights was a shame. Four and a half miles of bank and just me.
Rich, you're singing from the same hymn sheet. I couldn't be bothered to cross the road to see someone else's birds these days, although I am not in any way anti twitching - just don't want to do it myself any more. The same with my fishing, although I enjoy the odd social with my son and his friends at the local commercials, I harbour no desire to catch known fish (Carp in particular) or fish the "big fish circuit" as I did in my past.
ReplyDeleteMy move to Kent was a deliberate one, assisted by Unilever (my then employers) and the fact that birding was better in Kent than Manchester (the alternative option if I wished to remain in their employment?) Now that angling, once again, has taken centre stage; it is a fantastic coincidence that East Kent is also well blessed with countless venues where I can seek the challenges of my various projects without needing to resort to out compete my fellow anglers. I have still to meet another eel fisherman and can only recall a dozen or so other pike anglers since I returned to fishing in 2011.
This exchange might well provide the spark for a future post? All the best - Dyl