View From The Shed by Volunteer Shaun - GOING A BIT OFF PISTE

GOING A BIT OFF PISTE

Normally my basic ideas for one of these blogs starts with some oblique reference to a bird that has been seen in my local Dearne Valley patch this week. Then my thoughts meander wherever they will for a bit and I finally sit down to the work of bashing that mess of ideas into something that I hope is vaguely entertaining, informative and somewhere under a thousand words.

This week is different. I haven't been here so in truth I have no idea what has been spotted back at home. I've been on my jollies. I'm a child of the sixties so for most of my childhood memories of winters past feature snow, and lots of it. Fast forward to the current century and the amount of snow that we see in my part of England over the darkest and coldest months of the year has declined dramatically. My enjoyment of it hasn't diminished at all though, so every few years or so I take a holiday to someplace that there's a better chance of seeing plenty of the white stuff. Norway perhaps or Canada. This year's lucky destination was Bavaria, in the German bit right up against the Czech border. That's where I was last week and yes, we did get snow. About two metres of it in some places. I was in Old Man Volunteer Heaven.

Of course me being me I took my binoculars along on the trip. It was a family holiday but it would be daft not to take in a spot of birdwatching while I was there. Naturally, as the wilds of Bavaria are very different to the wilds of Barnsley where I live, I expected to see a host of very different birds. The place where I was based was technically an Alpine region so I was looking forward to seeing Alpine Chough, Alpine Accentor and Brambling, all relatively common birds around those parts. I even made the mistake of telling lots of visitors to Old Moor that these were the birds that I was looking for.

You can guess what's coming. I might go away from home but my normal rules of birding still apply.

Travel in hope.
Have a wish-list but don't really expect to see any particular bird.
Take delight in every creature that you see.

So of course, on my trip through some absolutely magnificent natural scenery I saw not a single one of the birds that I thought would be complete shoe-ins for the region. I missed out on every one of my target species that I'd told people I was looking for. Nor did I see a Spotted Nutcracker or a Crane, both potential ticks on my journey. Every goose that braved the sub-zero temperatures was either Canadian or Greylag. Every duck was a Mallard or a Tufty. The most exotic 'small brown job' that I spotted was a Tree Sparrow. And even though I had all the snow that even I could want, there wasn't a Bunting performing even a single bunt among it. The most common birds that I found were Buzzards, hundreds of them. It seemed that every garden had its own pet one hanging around, waiting to say, 'Guten Tag' to tourists like me.

Was I disappointed? Yes, a little. All of the birds that I missed out on would have been great spots. But nature has a habit of taking from you with one hand and giving to you with the other. How could I be too downhearted when the journey that hid all those 'expected' birds from me delivered a magnificent flock of Crossbills at eye-level when I was high up on a tree-top canopy forest wooden walkway platform thingy (a more technical description of it can be found here)? Or a pair of White Storks picking their way delicately through a flooded field? Or even a magnificent Osprey looking down into a lake as we thundered past him on the Autobahn? I'm pretty sure that Kraftwerk didn't have that gorgeous but deadly creature in mind when they penned their magnum opus. Maybe they should have. So I didn't see what I wanted to but I saw some glorious birds that I wouldn't have seen at home and I had a simply marvellous time in a totally different environment. Isn't that the whole point of travel?

For those of you keeping score, that Osprey means that I've seen 84 bird species in the first ten percent of this calendar year. That's not a massive amount by some people's standards but it's a reasonable haul by mine. Maybe this year I'll finally complete the mythical #My200BirdYear challenge? Perhaps, perhaps not. It'd be a nice achievement but it's much more important to enjoy the birds that I see and make sure that there's a home for them in the future.

I'm stalled at 25 species on the Birda RSPB Winter Waders and Waterfowl Challenge. It finishes at the end of February but I'm still hoping to see a few more before then. Maybe there's something new for me to spot on this week's sightings board?