What is the world coming to? When you ask artificial intelligence to generate a post title, it produces the sort of rubbish title that disfigures the article you are reading now. All I wanted to do is show you my top 10 of spectacular birding experiences…
1. Serengeti of the Skies. Batumi in Georgia is well known for the annual raptor migration, when millions of Accipitridae fly past. Raptors are of course very boring, but at Batumi the sheer numbers provide the excitement – it must be absolutely captivating. I want to go there.
2. Trawlers at the Cape of Good Hope. I have visited the Cape fishing grounds, it’s amazing to see thousands of albatrosses, shearwaters, petrels and storm-petrels fight over the discards from fishing trawlers while you need to be simultaneously making sure the Cape Fure Seals don’t bite off your hand.
3. Murmuration of Starlings. The lovely Common Starlings roost together because they seek safety in numbers, exchange information or just like showing off. YouTube has several videos of murmurations, which are so much better than some right-wing nutter talking about lizard people.
4. Penguin Colonies. A million well-dressed birds. I would dress up in a tuxedo and risk hanta-virus to watch this spectacle.
5. Istanbul. Every autumn Western Eurasia’s migratory birds fly over this ancient city. You can watch Levant Sparrowhawk in some mosquito-infested forest, or you can sip a Turkish coffee and watch hundreds fly past before your coffee is cool enough to drink.
6. Red-billed Quelea. After the domestic chicken allegedly the most numerous bird on the planet. Seeing a swarm (these are no longer to be considered flocks) of them drink at a waterhole is just amazing. There’s beauty in numbers. Local farmers do have a strikingly different opinion of them.
7. Bar-headed Geese. The only reason to climb Mount Everest I can possibly consider to be valid is to watch Bar-headed Geese fly over me. Nothing underlines the futility of human endeavour better. No, correction, they could defecate on the mountaineers from up high.
8. Emu War. I love the Australian people and I love their birds. I therefor can not think of anything more entertaining than a war between them. Especially since the Emus won the war. A spectacle I wish I had witnessed.
9. Roaring Forties. The Flying Dutchman, a mythical ghost ship, was doomed to sail forever after one of its crew had killed an albatross. Fishing vessels from a multitude of nations kill albatrosses routinely but the creation of ghost ships seems to have stopped. Two specks of light in this darkness: the Roaring Forties still provide a lot of spectacle for those brave enough to weather the storms and some nations like South Korea are really addressing the bycatch problem.
10. Falsterbö. Or any other migrant funnel. In autumn, being at a place where the water narrows, mountains squeeze in the landscape or where there is just nowhere else to go but that little patch of forest: those places can offer spectacle upon spectacle. Rarities, large numbers, you name it.
Picture credits:
Emu War: Public Domain via Wikemedia Commons
Emu: H. Zell, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Murmuration of starlings: Tanya Hart, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
All other pictures from the 10000birds archive.
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