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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

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  1. Dave Ball

    Two people break 10,000 species, and on the same day? Can it be?

    Come on, there are worse sources 😯
  2. Dave Ball

    Name a Bird You've Photographed

    157. Great Shearwater
  3. Dave Ball

    Name a Bird You've Photographed

    While we’re in this Gull/Tern area, let’s have a Skua. 24. Pomarine Skua Edited to add number (think 24 is correct)
  4. Dave Ball

    Birding and football

    Chesterfield: Crag Martin ;)
  5. Dave Ball

    The popularity of birdwatching by country

    I wouldn’t worry too much. It was much the same in the Sixties - probably worse.
  6. Dave Ball

    Enjoy living in a place with a low bird density?

    “Cope” as a noun seems to be a recent neologism amongst those ‘down with the kids’, I’ve frequently seen it used, as ‘copium’ (cf. opium) of Russian attempts to polish the turd that is the performance of their armed forces. As a more-or-less retired Bedfordshire birder my sympathies are with...
  7. Dave Ball

    Inaccessible bird species

    Anything on North Sentinel? Anybody know? Anybody ever looked? Anyone want to look (not advised)?
  8. Dave Ball

    Garden / Yard List 2023

    That’s very skilful how you’ve posed that crossbill with its bill hidden behind a twig so we can’t question your ID as Scotbill. Reminds me that the large-billed Crossbills I saw in Scotland in 1983 were before (I believe BBRC say) any Parrots turned up there, so they must have been Scotbills ;)
  9. Dave Ball

    Average age of Bird Watchers

    ...but - you’ve got to have an intelligent conversation occasionally ;) Seriously, I often used to talk aloud when birding on my own, but it was always ‘thinking aloud’, not holding a conversation with myself. I think that vocalising the interior monologue that is continuously going on inside...
  10. Dave Ball

    Mothing Equipment RFI

    I think trapping people is illegal, even in Essex ;)
  11. Dave Ball

    Biggest crowd for a U.K bird.

    Gyr Crakes “History of Dipping Part 2”, on his cartoon page here (third or fourth one down): http://www.gyrcrakes.com/cartoons Sums things up quite well ;)
  12. Dave Ball

    Garden/Yard List 2022

    ...or lie in the garden and cover yourself in small mammals ;)
  13. Dave Ball

    Anyone else like Birds AND planes?

    Air-dropping birders on Bryher?
  14. Dave Ball

    Why don't we use What3words for bird sightings?

    Don’t forget selling beer in pints. More seriously, Streetmap.co.uk not only gives you the excellent 1:25000 OS map centred on the location*, showing paths including right of way information**, and things like buildings and watercourses and lakes, but will also zoom out to the 1:50000 map and...
  15. Dave Ball

    Birdguides, Twitter or...?

    The problem with the free view of Birdguides is that I believe it doesn’t differentiate between positive and negative news. So the message you saw when the bird wasn’t present might have read, in full, something like: [Full date and time stamp] Purple Heron in [county where Kev is] [site Kev is...
  16. Dave Ball

    What makes a birder...well, a birder?

    Agreed.
  17. Dave Ball

    Why is a Robin Redbreast, not called a Robin Orangebreast? As the underpart of a Robin is actually coloured Orange not Red!

    I seem to remember a proposed English name change (possibly in Not-BB): “Robin” to become “Northern Orange-breasted Robin-chat”
  18. Dave Ball

    Brent Goose with transmitter?

    I found molt in Svalbard after breeding in Greenland remarkable, but knowing how counter-intuitive great circle routes can be (to those of us brought up on Mercator projections), I plugged random locations in NE Greenland and Denmark into a great circle calculator, and got this screenshot (which...
  19. Dave Ball

    ABA Introduced Species Question

    Yes, this is how it normally works. The interesting question raised by the Munia is the status of a bird with an established population in a neighbouring country which then occurs as a vagrant. The British List actually has a(n empty) category for this, C5 - from the BOU: C5 – Vagrant...
  20. Dave Ball

    UK Dragonflies & Damselflies 2021

    I wondered if that would be the case. Seems to have been quite an influx of Lesser Emperors in the last few days.
  21. Dave Ball

    Butterflies In Gibraltar

    Monarchs are established on the Canaries, is there also now an established population in southern Iberia?
  22. Dave Ball

    Avian misnomers

    This made me curious, so I googled ‘Menetries Warbler’ on my iPhone (6, so quite old) and found it easily enough on Wikipedia, which offered both spellings, with or without the accents, in its entry. I then switched to a French keyboard, which is one I sometimes use to get accents (Icelandic is...
  23. Dave Ball

    Anyone else like Birds AND planes?

    Yes, it said on the BBC East News tonight that the air ambulance will use the grass. Assuming this is correct, presumably the matting is mainly to deal with wet conditions, which aren’t happening at the moment - IIRC the local weather forecast said only 2.9mm of rain so far in April.
  24. Dave Ball

    Suppression vs reporting; birders’ obligations during lockdown.

    Surely it was standard practice, once a model had become a bit battered, to use it to stage a crash, bombing or strafing run. That plastic used to burn with a nice black oily smoke ;)
  25. Dave Ball

    Suppression vs reporting; birders’ obligations during lockdown.

    When I worked for an aerospace company we used to joke that if the QA department did their job correctly, all the parts would have the same lifetime, and when that was reached the aircraft would fall apart in mid-air ;) Apologies for heading off-topic, though I’m not sure just what is off-topic...
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