On Sunday, news dropped on the bird news services of a Great-tailed Grackle down in Hampshire. Now I consider Hants to be sufficiently close that I am prepared to go for more speculative twitches and am less strict about requiring my chance of connecting to be very high. Not that that seemed to be an issue with this bird as it was showing down to a few feet in a car park by the Solent in Calshot. There was of course the thorny question of "was it tickable". Now, by strict BOU standards it was never going to be accepted. Grackles are not really migratory so this bird was almost certainly ship-assisted, with it's proximity to a major shipping port underlining that point. All this meant that had this bird been any distance away, such as the one in Wales last year, then I would not have contemplated it. But this one was relatively close and also I am more and more finding myself departing from BOU listing rules, as I have written about in previous posts. So was I going to see it? I decided I couldn't be bothered to go that afternoon but as I had a fairly free day on Monday, I would go and see it after I finished my morning client session. That fact alone gave me a personal measure of how I was loosening my adherence to strict BOU standards. The truth was also that it had been a while since my last outing and I quite fancied a fairly easy, fairly short distance twitch. That, as much as anything else, tipped the balance and I made my plans for the next day.
Overnight, the bird identification was changed to Boat-tailed Grackle which didn't really make much difference to me as I'd not seen either before. This did, however, prompt me to do some research on the various Grackle species in the US which was very educational - see the end of this post. Anyway, the bird was still there and after my client session finished, at around 11:15 a.m. I got my gear together and headed off on the journey down to Calshot in Hants. With the Sat Nav saying 1 hour 50 minutes, it was a fairly straight-forward journey without any issues. Just as I got to the village of Calshot itself, I passed a row of houses that looked strangely familiar. Suddenly I twigged: I'd been there for the Spanish Sparrow back in 2012 - I thought the name Calshot sounded familiar! Anyway, today's target was right on the coast along a thin peninsula of land that jutted out into the Solent. With cheap car parking at the Calshot Activity Centre right next to the bird it was all pretty straight-forward.
I got out of the car to find it very breezy and, having encountered frequent showers on the way down, I decided to dress up warm and even put on my waterproof trousers and my walking boots. Then it was a walk of no more than 100 yards to Calshot Castle where, rounding the corner I was greeting with a gaggle of birders crowded around one end of a picnic table with the oblivious Grackle at the other end, trying to get into an unopened supermarket sandwich packet.
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| The Boat-tailed Grackle contemplating how to open a Tescos sandwich |
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| The crowd paying homage to the Grackle, who seems untroubled by his audience |
To say the bird was approachable was an understatement. You could get as close as you liked, though it was wary enough to not take things out of peoples' (well, LGRE's) hand when offered. It would feed off bits of bread which it would wash down with rainwater trapped in tarpaulin puddles on the cover of a nearby boat and generally looked pretty happy. I took a variety of photos before it seemed to get tired and skulked off for a nap behind some wire fencing where there was a lot of stored containers, effectively out of sight.
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| The Grackle with Calshot Castle in the background |
This was a cue for myself (and lots of others) to head to the Activity Centre café for a drink and something to eat. After that, I went back to check on the bird which was still asleep so I had a little wander around. There were a few gulls along the shoreline including a Med Gull and a couple of Oystercatchers. The location looked ideal for Black Redstart but I couldn't see any on any of the buildings. Calshot Castle, complete with its own little moat, was a very interesting building that was worth taking a look at. This is one of the things that I like about birding: it randomly takes you to places that you would never otherwise go and visit and I do admit to a great fondness for rather windswept and desolate locations such as this.
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| Calshot Castle complete with a little moat |
After a while the Grackle woke up and started moving about again, offering more point blank photo opportunities. I contentedly took some more shots before deciding that it was time to head off again. So it was back to the Gnome mobile (after paying the £2 for parking) and then back home to Casa Gnome, arriving back just after 4pm, very pleased with my little sortie.
Grackle Info
So what about Grackles in general and the thorny question of to tick or not to tick? So here's my executive summary of these birds. They are divided into Common Grakle, with Purple and Bronze sub-species, and the larger Great-tailed and Boat-tailed Grackles. Grackles don't really migrate much though Common and Great-tailed do tend to move further south in the winter. Common covers much of the US, though is not really seen in the western states; Great-tailed covers much of the south-west and central area whereas Boat-tailed is only seen along the eastern and southern coasts, usually very close to the coast apart from the Florida peninsula where it is seen inland. In terms of ID, Common is smaller and therefore easily identified on that basis. Great-tailed and Boat-tailed are hard to distinguish with the differing head shape being the main feature: Great-tailed has a much flatter head whereas there is more of an angle between Boat-tailed's forehead and the bill. There is some eye colour differences amongst some of the Boat-tailed subspecies which can help separate the two where they overlap in distribution. This is why it was that only when photos were seen by US birders was the ID firmed up from Great-tailed to Boat-tailed. So the fact that this Boat-tailed Grackle was hugging the coast line literally 50 yards from the shoreline was typical for this species.
Listing Info
In terms of listing, the rule for the BOU seems to be that if a bird is probably ship assisted and it doesn't normally migrate then it's not accepted. Birds that are probably ship-assisted but which do normally migrate a reasonable distance, usually get the benefit of the doubt. In my own time I've seen Dark-eyed Junco, White-throated and White-crowned Sparrow all suspiciously near large ports on the south coast and it's highly likely that they at least travelled some of the way by ship. So this rule is somewhat arbitrary but if you are going to have rules about what to count then this is as good a rule as any.
Now, as I have stated in previous posts, I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with BOU listing criteria and have been thinking more and more about my own personal listing criteria. The tipping point for me has been this move to the new AviList definition of species, which no doubt makes sense from a scientific point of view but just seems to me to mean that I'm haemorrhaging ticks. I thought about it and reaslised that using species to define what to tick is a somewhat arbitrary rule, albeit one that makes for a reasonable starting point. From an "end user" point of view, I am not in any way motivated by science. What I am looking for is an excuse to go on a birding outing where there is a good chance of seeing something new so I can satisfy my "collecting" itch, and where I get to enjoy nature and to visit all sorts of interesting places. I am of course free to decide for myself what I am going to tick. So personally, it was more than worth the trip down to see the Boat-tailed Grackle and I am more than happy to include it on my extended personal birding list.
