Bonus dip post!

As you will have surmised, I have been away from home a fair bit of late - 'tis the season of visiting relatives. Thus it was that shortly after arriving on the Isle of Wight on Christmas Eve news broke of a seriously mega Yellow Warbler very conveniently in Kent. As in conveniently not on Shetland or where these things normally arrive. I say 'normally', but you know what I mean. Convenient for someone who lives in London and could get there in under an hour. Except I wasn't in London.

I am not the kind of die hard twitcher who then and there would have said "Something has come up", ditched the family, and got back on the ferry to the mainland. Die hard twitchers don't have families. Instead we proceeded to the the family festivities and I largely forgot all about it for a couple of days. I did note however that it was still there on Boxing Day when we came back and what is more there was a bonus Scops Owl in the same county! Having advanced my UK list by precisely zero birds this year by failing to twitch any rarities at all, perhaps 2024 was finally going to come good! Thoughts of a two tick day began to form....

I was working on the 27th, plus we had yet more family plans, but both birds remained in situ. So far so good. I started composing the blog post in my head, what a triumph, yet another two tick day, 2024 rescued, my UK list nearing 460 etc etc. Ha! I should have known. The title of this blog  sadly post isn't one of my misleading ones. So yesterday I waited on news of the Warbler, and when by early afternoon this was not forthcoming I decided I would drop in anyway on the way to the Owl. Cutting to the chase I spent roughly four hours in the car and the only things I saw were 500 green-attired people sporting roughly a million quids worth of optics. And I saw them twice.

It was the usual affair, a huge crowd of people, all chatting away, reminiscing about previous successes given today's failure. None seemed particularly disheartened, they were there as much for the social scene as the bird. That's not me, which is a shame, but I can't bring myself to be part of that scene. Never have, never will, I've always been on the periphery, and this year I've not even been on that. I still recognised a few people though. Four to be precise. Two from Wanstead, one from Walthamstow, and a popular mobile DJ from Buckinghamshire. I gave it an hour milling around, tried a few spots further down the track as frankly the bird could have been anywhere, and then gave up, eager to get down to Broadstairs and tick Scops Owl. Surely that would be there, it had been there a week apparently....

It wasn't. Perhaps the previous evening when it had been chased around a field and lit up by spotlights had put it off, who can say? Certainly not I. So I spent a couple of hours freezing my ass off on a dark cricket pitch listening to the same chat I'd heard earlier that afternoon from the same people, saw nothing, and drove home. Some afternoon. As I contemplated my life choices on the M2 I realised I hadn't exactly dropped everything to rush out. What else would I have done that afternoon? Nothing I expect. I'd been working on my Brazil trip report, and at some point I'd have done a bit of cooking that I now have to do today instead. I probably would have started drinking at around 3pm rather than 7.30pm, so a lost opportunity there, but apart from that I hadn't really wasted the afternoon. Or rather I would have wasted the afternoon anyway, and so only the method of wasting it had really changed. Oh and for completenesses sake I spent £30 on fuel and destroyed the planet that little bit more. Do I regret going? Of course I do! I hate twitching in crowds, and I hate dipping in crowds even more!  So if either of these birds is seen again, what am I going to do?