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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Parker" data-source="post: 1814638" data-attributes="member: 77503">Hi Steve,Sounds like you missed out on the "good scene" by a couple of years. Things had started to go downhill by 1985. I remember looking for a Dusky Warbler on the Scillies which was in some Bracken on the North side of St Marys. Instead of staking the place out so called birders were wandering through the bracken trampling it down & obviously not seeing the Warbler. I think the numbers of tossers on the Scillies that year & the following years started to ruin the scene & the Golden Winged Warbler was the final nail in the coffin.If the Cley resident you refer to is still living in Cley then I've a good idea who it is & he's never been that friendly & thinks he's a cut above the rest of us.As far as hitching goes I suppose it depends on your luck. Although I've had a few bad experiences,on the whole I was very lucky & when hitching over night cuold beat the train 9 times out of ten.I hitched down to The Barbican, Plymouth in Jan 82 for the Franklins Gull. I set off at 1645 hrs from Leicester & was there at 2200 hrs, you could only beat that by an hour if you drove down in a car back then.In one of my earlier posts on this thread I mentioned a bad experience with the old bill while hitching. So to balance things out I did have 1 good experience with the Police & that was near Plymouth. There was a Forsters Tern near there in October 82 but to get to it you had to drive 10 miles into Cornwall to a roundabout then 10 miles back towards Plymouth, on the other side of the river. So I was standing at the roundabout at about 0600hrs thinking I'd probably only get a lift from another birder. Then a copper pulls up & does a spot check on me, one of many. After he's satisfied I'm not a criminal he says "I'll be back in an hour or two if your still here I'll give you a lift"  Half an hour later he's back & gives me a lift right to the site, nice bloke.Though my experiences of hitching have been more posative than negative I know a few friends have had some really bad stuff happen. one friend whos already bean mentioned by others on this thread, Punk John Pearson, ended up in more than one cell on his travells. So I guess it comes down to a mixture of luck & what you looked like.A couple of other people have commented on twitchers that have just started birding & don't know their common birds that well. People buy the best optics & automatically think they are birders & as the more experienced of us know this is far from the truth. There is nothing like learning & seeing all the common stuff first & then when your competant enough going to see the rarer birds. I'm sure people still bird in this way & good on them if they do. Don't get me wrong birding is a hobby & can be enjoyed in whatever way you enjoy the most & as we live in a free Country (an illusion) we should be free to enjoy our hobby the way we like it, providing we put the birds wellfare first. But it can be annoying going to see a bird & have people stringing anything they see as the bird in question.I went up to Lincs to see the Black Kite 2 years ago, one of my bogie birds. I was surprised at the incompetance of the birders present. Gulls, Crows, Buzzards & a Marsh Harrier were all claimed as the Kite & some people wouldn't listen to reason & left having seen a Marsh Harrier that went onto their list as a Black Kite. I hadn't been on a twitch since the Steppe Grey Shrike in Northampton in 97 & was astonished at the very poor level of id skills.End of rant.Cheers, Neil.</blockquote>

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