We asked several of our writers the same questions. Here are the answers to the one above.
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Anything involving crowded places or long transfers usually annoys me, but I put up with much more than I would normally do when birding. Malaria and seasickness, for example, put a damper on the working day, but hardly affect a day’s birding. Funny how that works (Peter Penning).
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Unpleasant experiences while birdwatching are—thank goodness—rare. But they do happen: there was a guest over eighty years old who collapsed in the heat and had to be carried out of a former training ground. Since then, I have made sure my guests drink regularly. Another unpleasant episode, in retrospect, was the fact that—while we were acting as volunteer wardens for a small seabird island on the Baltic coast of the GDR (East Germany)—we were being eavesdropped on by a combat diver from the East German Navy, acting on orders from the Stasi (East Germany’s secret police). It was only after German reunification that a colleague—who also volunteered on the island and had applied to emigrate to West Germany during the socialist era—learned that we volunteers had been spied on by this combat diver while sitting around the campfire in the dark. The bird island was located on the Baltic coast, which was a border zone. The combat diver was lucky, given that after a few beers by the campfire, we didn’t always walk all the way to the toilet… (Rolf Nessing).
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This is a tough one, but ignorant and inconsiderate birders and increasingly photographers who don’t have the bird’s interests at heart are unpleasant. Too many new photographers are just interested in getting the shot and the likes on social media (John Hague).
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A long morning involving heavy rain, mud, and mosquitoes, while the bird I had come to see remained completely uncooperative. The bird stayed dry, which somehow made it worse (Fitzroy Rampersand).
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I had a couple of experiences with criminal elements while birding; I survived (clearly), but in the situations it was very touch-and-go. Both instances happened on consecutive days, with the same client, seeking the same species: White-tailed Goldenthroat (Faraaz Abdool)
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Getting in the worst rain I ever experienced in the middle of the Norwegian tundra, with no shelter in sight. Hiked through it for hours; all my clothes were soaking wet, pants ripped from the weight, water overflowing out of my rubber boots, all my optics (scope, binoculars, camera) fogged up from the inside. Took more than a week to dry out again. 0/10, would not recommend (Jochen Roeder)
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Lucky for me, I have not had any unpleasant experiences (yet) while birding. There have been some wasp stings, mosquito bites, sweaty weather, rainy weather, and talkative fellow birders, but that is part of the deal (Mary Alice Hayward).
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Flash floods near Eilat. There is only one road leading north, and if that road is closed, the city is cut off from the rest of the country. That was two days before my return flight from Tel Aviv (Peter Hinow).
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In March of 2023, I took a month-long birding trip to South India organized by an American man who invited a variety of, as it turned out, random people. It was indeed a birding trip and advertised as such with a great supporting itinerary. We had an excellent guide who I had birded with before in North India. I knew only 2 others in a group of eleven. On the first half of the trip, a bunch of things happened to cause a variety of unpleasantries that most trips will have of one sort or another. As the first part of the trip came to an end, and just prior to the extension to the Andaman Islands, one of the trip participants announced one morning at breakfast, “I really don’t get this whole birding thing.” Clearly not something a birder would ever say. After this, and as we headed off to the Andaman Islands, the group dwindled down to 5 participants—the trip organizer, his wife, and this married couple that included the woman who made the pronouncement of “I really don’t understand this whole birding thing.” I was the participant bringing up the rear. From then on, and it is impossible to explain and write all of the behaviors here, this married couple staged a coup d’etat so complete that the trip turned into chaos. They demanded hotel changes, different locations, different activities, and were the ugliest Americans I have ever experienced in my life. I felt very bad for our field guide, who did his best to hold things together. I supported him as much as I could, but let’s face it, there wasn’t much I could do. He said to me, more than once, “In my 20 years of guiding, I have never had clients like this.” I knew he was telling the truth. There are times when I think I would like to return to India to bird the very northern parts of the country with this same guide. But then I remember this 2023 trip, and it sends shivers down my spine (Catherine Carroll)
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It would be easy to say that being charged by a bull elephant while on foot in Okavango was the most unpleasant, but looking back it was really rather more exciting than unpleasant. There are a few other contenders for most unpleasant experience, but the winner has to be the time when drunken thugs decided to chase the vehicle I was driving during a 24-hour bird race in Kent. It was shortly before midnight, and we were travelling in our BMW 325i to our first destination when the erratically driven Yugo (a nasty, cheap car that sold briefly in the UK) appeared in my rear-view mirror. The driver of the Yugo tried to get ahead of us and force us off the road; it failed, but did pursue us all the way to Canterbury police station. We fled into the building; our pursuers suddenly realised where they were (they were not very intelligent) and accelerated away, only to be stopped three minutes later by a police car. Some months later, they appeared in court, where I was required to give evidence (David Tomlinson)
Photo: White-tailed Goldenthroat, Hector Bottai, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
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