Its a bird counting day today - as part of the UK wide British Trust for Ornithology bird survey I am counting birds on a 2 km square (called a tetrad) of Flanders. This is hardcore birding, an intensive, sense altering, in another world experience that just blows your mind. All you have to do is to count all the birds so why is it so intensive ? Well to tune in to the birds everything else goes out of your mind. Your eyes are drawn to every twitch of a twig, any speck in the sky, each wing flick. Your ears become like man holes in the side of your head scooping every bird sound, sifting and processing it and then putting a name to it.It was warm and muggy and I started off trying to separate towering skylarks and plunging pipits along the grassy edge of the Moss. Working my way onto the dome the cottongrass twinkled in the heat haze like stars on a frosty night and suddenly there was a different sort of tweeting. There sitting in the grass was a young reed bunting nearly left the nest - proof of breeding, tick box. Ears ready and receiving I kept moving, further on a "peep chuck" signalled a whinchat, finally pinned down to the top of a bush, further still the scratchy phrases of 2 whinchat males singing against each other across an expanse of bog. A cascading torrent of willow warblers song contrasted with the chaffinches clatter. A brief reeling of a grasshopper warbler, a trilling blast from a wren and a few heat smothered flutety notes from a blackbird all made it into the notebook. At the lochan a wall of willow warblers needed sorting and in all the noise I nearly missed the funny hiccuping bit at the ned of a tree pipit song flight. In the distance a pheasant squawked, overhead and then landing close by a couple of redpolls churred. So at the end of the set 2 hours I stumble blinking off the moss, shake my head and re-enter the real world remembering to close down my ears so as not to be deafened by the first loud sound and look forward to the next count.
And in between the birds the Moss had other offerings, large heath butterflies bobbling across the moss looking for nectar, common heath, 4-dotted footman and grass wave moths zig zagging the bog, a huge rattling golden-ringed dragonfly and much less welcome and proving that it isn't all perfect out there the first of the years clegs slipping their needle mouth parts under the skin.
