When no news is bad news

I love birding in Norfolk - you can’t quite beat the feeling of walking down the Titchwell West Bank Path with waders calling all around you and the autumn wind heralding the start of migration. I used to come here every year with my grandparents; my grandad got me into birding from the beginning, and this reserve holds some of my most treasured birding memories. 

The West Bank Path at Titchwell Marsh, overlooking the reedbed

Birds or not, there's just something about being at Titchwell that means I love every visit. Yet I miss the excitement and unbridled optimism that I had here as a 10 year old on every single trip. I know that it’s still in there but has been beaten and aged by pragmatism and experience. The fact is that now when I visit Norfolk I know what’s around and I know what has been around for the last few weeks, if not months. There's no doubt that news services are one of the best things about modern birding - I recently wrote a post expressing this sentiment. However, they do mean that I'm always acutely aware of my chances of finding any particular bird.

Arriving at Titchwell as a child used to be like coming down the stairs on Christmas morning and opening presents not knowing what I might find. I used to race for the sightings book not knowing if I’d look down to find a Red-necked Stint had been showing well all day. Whereas nowadays it’s more like I’ve inspected the parcel under the tree for the preceding few weeks, assessed the size and weight and am aware of what it might (and also definitely doesn’t) contain.

The old adage that 'no news is good news' doesn't apply. No news means lots of birders out there, coming away with nothing to show for their efforts.

 

With the risk of this post becoming far more pessimistic than I usually aim for, I need to explain why no news doesn’t have to be bad news. 

When I started down the West Bank Path with no new sightings on the board this year and saw the many people walking back down the path, I sighed. If so many people have tried and failed, what are my chances of finding anything?

But then I realised that everyone finds themselves somewhere along the ID spectrum; perhaps some of the people on the path couldn’t ID a Curlew Sandpiper, maybe fewer could ID a White-rumped Sandpiper and even fewer a Semipalmated Plover. If one was there, would it have necessarily even been found yet?

I've always loved Curlew Sandpipers, and still do. They're one of my favourite birds and I always stop to admire them. They used to be the pinnacle of a Norfolk holiday, my #1 target. However nowadays as I arrive at Titchwell, I can't wait to see one, but my mind dreams of a loftier prize.

A stunning Curlew Sandpiper at Titchwell

Birding starts with a very steep learning curve when commoner birds are more exciting and harder to ID, but once we’re through it some of us find ourselves guilty of taking our foot off the pedal. The great thing about birding though is there’s always more to learn. 

I’ve spent years dreaming of finding a rare wader like a Semipalmated Plover, it’s slightly ironic therefore that as I was scanning though tens of Ringed Plovers at Titchwell this year I realised I wouldn't be completely sure what I was looking for if I did find something different! It could be so easy to overlook a rarity as difficult as this one.

The best thing we can do is to have the rare bird ID skills to change that if we’re lucky enough to one day be in the situation where we can use them. And of course, it's the birds that would require such skills that could so easily have been overlooked for the preceding days or weeks! They could be waiting out there for you to find, despite the "no news".

Everyone has their own 'birding level' - a rarity that could have passed them by without them knowing. Perhaps for you that’s Marsh vs Reed Warbler, Collared vs Pied Flycatcher or possibly even the calls of rarities passing overhead unseen. Maybe you’ve found one of these birds and just not known! Despite that being quite a frustrating prospect, it reminds me of some of the things I love most about birding - the excitement of the fact that you never truly know what might be out there, and the fact there’s always more to learn to expand the range of species you could fine.

It seems to me that these two things are two of the key skills in self-finding birds - optimism and knowledge. The latter is one we can work on, at any time, to improve our fortunes in self-finding, whether that's by birding as often as we can to get to know the common species, studying the literature or ideally a combination of both.

After that, all one can do is hope that the Birding Gods give you the good fortune of having to put your hard work into practice.