James's blog
Why do I go birding?
Because most days it feels like a wonderful gift; for nigh on fifty years thus far - a fulfilling life experience.
Should we care about the label?
It matters not whether we are considered bird-watchers or birders, ornithologists or bird-lovers, bird-spotters or rarity hunters, tickers, twitchers or listers.
Are there 'philosophical implications'?
The gift of 'birding' has encouraged me to focus daily upon dynamic meditation; the interplay of the human mind and nature. Specifically to concentrate upon the way this interplay should enhance our life, both as humbled individuals and in the greatest groups.
 Lesser Kestrel: Photo Jormo Tenovuo, www.jtenovuo.com
Before humanity's insatiable needs lay waste the farthest corners of our world a few more will be born who'll follow 'the way of birds'. And although they have only ever been a tiny percentage in any one human generation these birders, or ornithologists, will have helped document man's deepest disaster. Planetary degradation. Even though today's birders, like people everywhere, must register unwelcome change from a standpoint, or benchmark, made in the halcyon days when they themselves are young.
Out of all the great bird orders of our world one - the falconiformes or raptors - has probably suffered most from mankind's ecological ambivalence. As hunters of flesh raptors are seen as competitors for 'our' resources; simultaneously admired or hated right down the ages. However out of all the raptors, one species the Lesser Kestrel (Falco naumanni
 Little Greenbul (Andropadus virens): Udzungwa, 1880m. Photo © 2007 Louis A. HansenPerhaps the noisiest, definitely the most secretive, avian denizens of the Minziro forest pools are the several pairs of brilliant White-spotted Flufftails (Sarothrura pulchra
 Firecrest: by Peter Latham
It's so deeply ingrained it seems impossible to recall how birds became my raison d'etre. Yet perhaps it is possible to suggest how it was James fell in love with "the skulkers". Certainly it became confirmed one soft and sultry evening in June 1965. That evening a boy not yet ten was on hands and knees crawling through the tangled leafy gloom of a sallow grove, on so-called waste land, in Solihull on the outskirts of Birmingham (which is the centre of the English midlands). There he disturbed a pair of pale yellow and delicate olive trochilus Willow Warblers, as they were anxiously feeding flimsy green caterpillars to their unseen young, hidden within a tussock in a tiny thatched roof nest. The adults eyed the quietly crouching child with well-deserved suspicion (for in those days I was still a bit of an egger), yet soon, calling with the softest of bisyllabic "hooo-eets" they accepted my presence and resumed that most essential duty. Early next spring, on the drizzly Saturday morning of Easter (Easter day that year was April 10), he went with a school friend to search for dun-coloured Water Voles which, in those distant days could be found without fail, along the secluded river Blythe where it meandered around the far corner of Bruton Park.
 Paradise Flycatcher: Udzungwa, 1880m Photo © 2007 Louis A. Hansen.
As a British bird lover; born and raised as empire was being seamlessly reconstituted across the Atlantic; it has taken me until quite late in life to begin to embrace those things which cannot be changed. Yet now it seems only proper that a globe consuming empire should be dissolving at break-neck pace, together with our polar ice caps, after scarcely five decades at the helm. Collapsing into a darkness equally as fearsome as that which befell any imperial predecessor.
Blog-ordinate - Arusha - December 19, 2007
We on Mount Meru wait for our essential nurturing rainfall; it's been nearly a week since the last liquid visitation. However humidity's increasing and Met.officers predict falling temperatures (max. 25 C) and heavy thundery showers for tomorrow and Friday - at 3 degrees south - cool fragrant rain for our longest day.
As I write this, trying not to look out from my window, Streaky Seedeaters, anticipating the hike in moisture, are building a nest with withered grasses in the same tree as last year; a Mediterranean pencil cypress that was briefly occupied by some Bronze Mannikins two weeks ago before someone, probably one of the gangs of hooligan Speckled Mousebirds, destroyed the nest.
Each morning when I walk around the garden checking on the work by the nightshift of the almighty I find something of considerable interest. Today a new African bird came to the garden, one painfully long overdue.
A male ruby-eyed Black-backed Puffback (a small afro-shrike in the family Malaconotidae) calling loudly "chek-weeo - chek-weeo" as very carefully he worked the hedge tops searching for decently large invertebrates in the Grevileas and Kei Apples (both are exotics at this location - yet both are of considerable value to birds). So often the new birds (no matter their provenance) arrive seemingly overnight, or else at very first light.
 Snake Eagles: photo Dominiek TimmermansAmazingly, exactly a year after the mystery Snake-Eagle was at Osugat (on December 15, 2006), Dominiek Timmermans and I 'were found by' another very similar looking bird yesterday December 14, 2007 in almost exactly the same place. Bubble number 1 in the photo. It disturbs me a little that I have not seen a similarly marked bird (i.e. "a Short-toed type"), despite 'checking every eagle', in many weeks in the field in the intervening year anywhere in Tanzania, (including forty-five days birding here at Osugat).
 Helmeted Guineafowl: photo Anabel Harries
In praise of damp, of wet, of gorgeous gloaming greyness.
Before the first bird sang cell phone two-o-nine "peep-a-peeps" to force me out of bed. It's my birthday and overnight there's been rain. Quite a lot of rain. At long last - so let's thank all the gods imaginable!
Yes. For the third night in succession it's been raining in the darkness. Better than that, yesterday the fierce rays of the equatorial sun could scarcely touch the earth and so never pierced the soil. We were protected by great grey blankets of cloud, rolling off Mount Meru. Wrapped there by oceanic breezes, around the volcano's lofty cone.
 GB Point: photo Martin Goodey
Each autumn, during my retirement in the late seventies and early eighties of last century, was given-over to worshiping the gods of migration. My personal homage to birds and to the greatest wonder of the known world - evoked by 'vismig' - by visible migration. I was indeed fortunate in being able to decide to enjoy my retirement before taking-on work! Clearly, at least so far as I could see, life on earth was not going to get steadily better and better as the propaganda machinery of the dominant western culture relentlessly sought to proclaim. It seemed to me that anyone with a serious interest in our living planet, in nature and wildness, could not fail to appreciate the consequences of shocking information that was being revealed on an almost daily basis. Anyway, my departure from normal life took place in 1977 and followed a period of great disillusionment which set-in during my self-imposed incarceration at a highly respected medieval university in eastern England.
I vividly recall one dull day at the end of October in 1976. On a grey street in that fine historic city of spires, one formerly surrounded by the richest wetland in all of England, both now far away in space as well as time, a postcard appeared in my hands from a good friend whom I had first met at Easter 1970 (on a Young Ornithologists ten day trip to the Neusiedlersee in Eastern Austria). The card was an aerial photograph, taken from the south, of a tiny island of celtic fields and heathy moor adrift in a soft blue sea. There was Horse Point of Agnes, an isle who had through no fault of her own became known as Saint Agnes, in the Isles of Scilly. Here our family had once spent our proper holiday in the late summer of that same year i.e. 1970. Horse Point happens to be the southernmost land, a lichen-crusted granite tor (an eminence of rounded, weathered boulders), in all of post glacial Britain.
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