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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

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    Oliver Twist Birding

    Avid readers will have worked out by now that I’m most definitely not a morning person. Which is unfortunate, given the amount of bird ‘life’ I miss out on by virtue of being a barely- functioning shell of a man before about half ten. My ‘birding hard reset’ though seems to have worked wonders...
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    Timing Is Everything & A Birding Hard Reset

    So much for the joy of being out...... Following my moan- fest in Dunbar I was desperate to get back out, find space and time, somehow and somewhere. I had booked a couple of days off work to give me a (very) long weekend, and had a set-in-stone plan to visit the Sma' Glen. The 'plan' if you...
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    Citadels And Symphonies

    I can often be a bit grumpy. I’m happy to admit it, I often revel in it, as a joke my kids bought me one of those mood bracelets, and have since expressed concern about what I’d be like without it. Sometimes, though, my grumpiness is well warranted. I love being outdoors, and I struggle with...
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    Pigeon- Counting In Leith

    You should never believe your eyes….. My Aberlady trip had been, er, a bit of a challenge and I was determined to get back out as soon as humanly possible. And by human, I mean as soon as the competing demands of employment, wife and mini- Sandpipers allowed me. Now, I do love a challenge and...
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    Broken Biscuits Birdwatching

    Sometimes as a birder, you just have to grin and bear it.... I've realised I need to stop listening to my mate Bill. Sure, he's a repository of a lifetime's worth of birding knowledge, and is damned good company to boot, but his other- worldly luck with birding sets an exceptionally high bar...
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    The Hundred Day Cough & The Never- Ending Month

    Jeez, how long did January last?? My last post was labelled January: The Beginning. This one should probably be called: January: The Second Beginning, but that’d be too direct and nowhere near cryptic enough for my liking. My good start to the year had filled me with confidence, and wee bit...
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    2024: The Beginning

    And so…. It had finally arrived. The New (birding) Year. The anticipation, the build- up, the planning that seemed to have started in the autumn when Birding 2023 had become awfully difficult. All came down to one day…… ….which was spent at home, ticking species from the garden feeders...
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    Green Sandpiper 2024

    As with previous years, I'll aim for 10 miles or less per tick. Anything on foot locally or via public transport will score zero miles; anything done because I was out doing something else anyway will only have additional miles counted.
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    GreenSand's 2023

    Well, its that time of year again, when Green Sand realises he's a fortnight behind schedule for posting his 'That Was The Year That Was' retrospection. The levels of disorganisation...... A good friend of mine, who has suffered listening to me going on about my birding year, suggested that...
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    Surprises And Satisfaction

    Periodically, I go through an epiphany that its not all about ticks, and I should stop complaining and just enjoy being birding. My inner monologue seems to take the persona of either a nagging spouse or a disappointed parent, it seems. Which is fairly surprising since I don't have either...
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    The Dracula's Castle Approach To Birding

    Its been another while.......where has the time gone? One of my favourite comedians is Billy Connolly. Genuinely pant- wettingly funny guy, and one of his rambling monologues has stuck in my mind for years. Why, in vampire movies, do the plucky gang of heroes almost always wait until dark...
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    Memories

    Its been a while...... Remember my new year resolution to post more often? Yeah, well, about that. Been an eventful time since I last posted. Some good birds and birding, some wonderful mindfulness time outdoors, and a lot of sadness. Firstly, the good stuff. My sense of adventure has...
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    The Wealth Of Our Knowledge

    My rich vein of 'getting out' actually continued a couple of days after my visit to the clouds in the Sma' Glen. Avid readers will know that I have some fairly set habits and beliefs, with this extending into what I described as twitching birding sites. Some insinct tells me that I need to...
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    The Rhythm Of The Year

    I'm pretty sure that to a lot of folk it seems that I wander about with my head in the clouds/ up my backside, lost in my own thoughts. Ruminating about things, predominantly wildlife, the environment, the state of the planet, and at this time of year how bloody hard it is to pick warblers out...
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    Addicted To Spring

    "I'm going to Turnberry for divers next week if you fancy it....." __________ Some of you may have noticed that I occasionally do wacky things that go beyond the normal Green Sand eccentricity. Plans (if there even are actually plans) will go awry and only a combination of luck and prayer...
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    The Slow March To Spring

    .... and it was all going so well. It serves me right, to be fair. All smug and self- congratulatory last time around, 'Making Hard Work Look Easy' was just begging fate to intervene. After my more-successful-than-I-Could-Have-Hoped-For day in East Lothian, the rest of February into March was...
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    Making Hard Work Look Easy

    Perception is everything. We can tell a lot about birds (and other wildlife too) by their 'jizz', that enigmatic, hard-to-be-precise-about mystical ability to recognise things by their general impression. We all have it to some extent, some much more than others, and I can't imagine there's...
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    Perfection Of The Simple Things

    I mentioned a while ago that what I love about the late Autumn and the (relative) wind down of the birding season is the chance to make plans, set goals, and generally get excited about the oncoming new year and the chance to begin it all again. I'm probably not alone in enjoying the darker...
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    Green Sandpiper 2023

    01/01/2023 At Home, Uddingston (from the living room window, feeling sorry for myself....) 1. House Sparrow 2. Coal tit 3. Blue tit 4. great tit 02/01/2023 Baron's Haugh RSPB 5. Long- tailed tit 6. Magpie 7. Carrion Crow 8. Blackbird 9. Bullfinch 10. Fieldfare 11. Mallard 12. Teal 13...
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    A Very Green Sand Year

    I'm about 2 weeks late in doing my tale of the year, which in itself is a very Green Sand thing. You'll all know by now my posts are often on a theme, with details of trips and observations thrown in to illustrate them. I'm not much of a journal writer- I've tried and failed- so Lord help any...
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    You don't have to be mad.....

    ....but it helps. The old cliche, usually seen on the wide of coffee mugs or desk name plates, gently mocking where we work. The eccentricities of office working, and the different personalities contained within, got me thinking of how others perceive us birders. Don't get me wrong, I'm fey...
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    The Rich Tapestry Of Birds

    Been a while since I last posted folks, so, where was I? Chances are, I was in the East. I swear, my dodgy guttural Lanarkshire accent is going to start changing if I spend much more time on the East Coast. I'm not sure that the world is ready for a hybrid Cambuslang x Musselburgh accent...
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    Evolution of a birder

    I really don't post blogs as often as I should. Maybe its because I'm a themes kind of blogger rather than a detailed trip report kind of guy. Don't get me wrong, I wish I could do the trip reports that Stonefaction does, but never find the time. Maybe the 'themes' approach suits my...
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    The Racing Post Birding Assessment

    I used to occasionally put a bet on horse racing. I come from a family of gamblers- not high- stakes gambling, but a family where the menfolk would go to a betting shop to stick a few quid on that day's horse racing, or occasionally go to the dog racing at Glasgow's Shawfield stadium. Working...
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    The Engine Splutters....

    Strangest thing, I hadn't realised its approaching 2 months since I last posted a blog. The idling engine of my birding year has gradually become a 1987 Fiat Panda- still functioning, but purely as a technicality. A mixture of family stuff interfering with proper bird life, plus sheer bad luck...
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