Waxwing Statistics

A post title which I think both immediately attracts, and immediately disgusts. If you've just read that sentence though, clearly the lure of Waxwings is greater than the potential boredom of bird-related stats. As you know, I'm a big fan of patch stats, anything vaguely listy, and you can count me in. So, the 19 Waxwings that I bumped into at the end of my street this morning, less than a minute after leaving my house, represent my seventh patch sighting of Waxwing. Of those seven sightings, two have actually been from the house, and the birds this morning did the decent thing by flying back down my street and over my house to get themselves on the house list for a third time. So in addition to three house list sightings, one of the sightings was on an adjacent street as I was on the school run, so almost counts for the house list. A further sighting was actually at the school as I left one morning, and the sixth and seventh were two twitches in quick succession to a berried-up housing estate near Wanstead Park in 2011. In total, I've seen 94 Waxwings in Wanstead, so the 19 this morning represent a fairly significant percentage at exactly one fifth. Stop me when I'm boring you....

So there I was, trudging towards the bus stop. Er, I mean striding briskly towards the bus stop, eagerly looking forward to my day at the mines. Mug of tea in hand - this is not normal, I was running slightly later than planned - I had nearly reached the bus stop when my razor senses picked up trilling. Sure enough, a flock of Waxwings circled overhead and chose to alight in the tree opposite me. Quick as a flash I gently placed my mug of tea on a convenient wall, took my bag off my back and extracted my camera (I am beginning to carry my camera everywhere - blame a certain Black-headed Gull in Canary Wharf.....). Lens cap off, ISO up, exposure comp up a bit and bingo, they were mine for all eternity. I even managed to get a signpost saying Wanstead in the frame. Then they flew off. I had just enough time to confirm that they had gone over the ever-expanding cone of house airspace, and then the bus came and I had grab my tea and leg it. Suprisingly the day went downhill from exactly this point.