Bert

Not going out.

It was a dark and blustery start to the day, courtesy of Storm Bert, but milder than it had been. The day started with a crowd of gulls loafing on the school playing field including thirty-odd black-headed gulls, a common gull, eight herring gulls and just the one lesser black-back. 

A couple of goldcrests graced the back garden — a male and a female but I'm not sure they'd be pairing up just yet. Even so, the male was making sure that he was showing plenty of the bright orange streak in the middle of his crown, it was that that first caught my eye when I was scanning the rowan bush.

A dozen spadgers were at the fat feeders, a couple of males were checking the blackcurrant buds for aphids. I'm starting to get to grips with the new dynamic of the sparrow tribes, which is starting to settle into something not unlike the old one, which worked for more than a dozen years so must have some advantage to it. There's been a swap around of birds so if I don't see them coming in I'm still not sure which group is which until I see one of the individuals I can recognise. The counterpart of the old Team Silver has a two- or three-year-old cock sparrow with bright silvery cheeks, two younger cocks with pale yellow-grey underparts and light cheeks (they've moved teams and can be confused with some of their old teammates if the angle of view's not right) and a female with almost white underparts. That of the old Team Tawny has two cocks with dark steel-grey underparts and cheeks not a lot lighter, a couple of cocks with yellow-grey underparts and cheeks and a dark female I keep thinking is a dunnock when I first see her. This morning's breakfast club was the new Team Silver.

I looked out on a day full of possibilities as the rain turned heavier and the wind whirled it round the garden at 45° from the vertical. All the small birds hunkered down in the rambling rose (which I'm really going to have to chop back hard this Winter so the fence panels can be replaced). I went back to bed and got a couple of hours' bonus kip. It's not often me and the cat do hygging but today was one of them.

I'd found one of the missing notebooks the other day when I was "tidying up." (This usually involves moving one pile of paper from its original big pile of paper to another.) Today would have been a good day for inputting the records onto BirdTrack and having a look at the statistical results but the BirdTrack servers are down this weekend for essential maintenance. I could just add the records on the app and dump them wholesale when the servers are back up but I like to check my work as I'm going along, it's too easy to get into autopilot and start making mistakes. It's going to be a hard slog to work through as it covers a few years when I wasn't doing much birdwatching and it's going to take a bit of detective work to get the years right but it'll be worth it to get the gaps filled in.

This is the sort of weather for checking out a gull roost. Somewhere in Greater Manchester there'll be a Caspian gull or two and there'll be half a dozen yellow-legged gulls doing the rounds. The hardy gull-watcher could be in for a jackpot. I wished them luck.