Bird and Wildlife Fair, Pensthorpe

This morning Linda and I are joining Sue and Peter at Pensthorpe for a wander around the Bird and Wildlife Fair. This is the first time in 25 years that we've attended a 'mass birding event', the last occasion being when Lin and I and our fellow 'Cley Casuals' Bob and Martin received our prizes for coming first in a national 24-hour bird race. (The 'prizes' were a couple of really crappy books about tropical seabird breeding statistics, which Bill Oddie had signed!) Looking at the photos, how much has he - and we - changed! That was at the Rutland Birdfair, which, I suspect, was a much larger event than this will turn out to be!

On another note: Linda and I popped out to Winterton yesterday in response to a report of five Bee Eaters on the RBA birdmap (lite) We spent a pleasant enough couple of hours wandering about in the hazy sunshine, seeing neither Bee Eaters nor any other birders. Later, of course, it transpired that the birds were fly-throughs that had been reported by a single observer: despite this, the birds remained on Birdmap all day! Possibly, in the future, RBA  might consider noting the 'fly through' aspect of such reports on the map's 'pop-up' labels... Things worked out well for RBA, though: I capitulated and ordered one of their Swift Alert pagers: the first one we've owned for twenty years!