ISLAND 'ADVENTURES' OF A HAPPY BIRDER : BRITISH BIRDS EDITOR ROGER RIDDINGTON

BRITISH BIRDS EDITOR WOWS HIS LINCOLNSHIRE AUDIENCE

The Shetlands - fabulous birding location

IN his 40 years as a birder, long-serving British Birds Editor Roger Riddington has been able to watch  (and often find) some memorably rare species.

His UK list includes the likes of such "showstoppers" as Siberian rubythroat, rufous-tailed robin and white-throated sparrow.

Many of these sightings were either on Shetland, where he lives now, or during his five years on Fair Isle where he worked at the iconic bird observatory - first as assistant warden to Paul Harvey, then as warden. 

Roger still remembers with horror his first journey to Fair Isle on board The Good Shepherd - the boat which serves as cargo vessel and ferry.

"It was the worst journey of my life," he says. "The sea was rough and the crossing took three hours.

"By the time we arrived, I was so ill I couldn't even lift my rucksack from the boat to the quay - not a very good impression to make on my arrival!"

LBC chairman Phil Espin (left) with  Roger Riddington and a copy of  Fair Isle Through The Seasons of which Roger is co-editor

Thereafter things could only get better - and they certainly did.

 In a captivating hour-long presentation to the annual meeting of Lincolnshire Bird Club, Roger recounted many of his birding "adventures" in the most northerly parts of Britain.

But he evidently also retains happy memories of where his birding all started - at Willoughby, near Alford, in Lincolnshire, which he still visits as often as possible to see his parents.

To this day, he has retained diary records as far back as January, 1979, when he had garden encounters with the likes of woodcock and fieldfare.

Although he was mostly on his own when he found and watched birds, encouragement was always forthcoming from fellow-villager the late Ted Smith whom he described as a "fabulous all-round naturalist and conservationist".

In his early teens, Roger joined the Young Ornithologists' Club, the junior section of the RSPB, and enjoyed reading  their publications plus the annual reports of the Lincolnshire Bird Club.

One article that he particularly recalled was an account by Graham Catley of an olive-backed pipit that had occurred at Saltfleet in October, 1980.

From 1982, Roger extended his birding range by means of a trusty drop-handle sports cycle on which he made regular day trips to Gibraltar Point Bird Observatory and sometimes as far as Cley in Norfolk where the youth hostel at Sheringham might  be his overnight base.

A highlight of one of these trips was his sighting of a little whimbrel at Blakeney on August 29, 1985.

In autumn of that year, Roger left Lincolnshire for Oxford University where he studied Geography, subsequently doing a postgraduate doctorate on movement and dispersal patterns of the great tit. It was also at this time that he trained to become a ringer.

After seven years in the city of spires, he was "desperate to get back to the coast" and, in 1992, he wrote to every UK bird observatory to check if any positions were available.

The only two to reply were Cape Clear and Fair Isle, and he decided to take up the offer of vacancy for assistant warden at the latter, starting on April 21, 1994.

Roger describes the island as "a microcosm" of Shetland. It is best-known to non-birders for being included on BBC Radio's Shipping Forecast and for its distinctive knitting patterns.

"But please don't ask me about knitting,"he joked.

Time was when residents would have fed on seabirds and their eggs to eke out an often meagre existence.

Fishing from traditional yoal boats remains important, but crop growing has mostly died out - largely because the offshore oil industry has brought relative prosperity and foodstuffs are imported to the  shop on the island (which also has its own school).

In summer, the island is served by two light aircraft per day as well as The Good Shepherd IV postboat.

But transport is susceptible to the vagaries of the weather. If it is persistently bad, the island can be cut off for days.

The first bird observatory - consisting of old naval huts   was co-founded in 1948 by George Waterston who had bought the island for £3,500.

Since then the huts have been replaced by various buildings, some of them plagued by leaking rooves and poor electrics and plumbing, but the current building is, in  the words of Bill Oddie, the "birders' Hilton".

The present  observatory building (photo: James Gentles)

Wardens work hard across a range of census, ringing and other duties.

Monitoring the gannet colony is particularly challenging because ropes are often required to reach their nests - not quite abseiling but not far off it.

Along with fulmars, gannets are doing well in this part of the world - attributable to their extensive foraging range. This capacity may also be helping storm petrels to increase.

For puffins and guillemots, prospects are less bright, especially since the decline in stocks of their preferred prey, sandeels, which  were hit by overfishing in the 1980s and more recently, according to Roger, by climate change.

"I loved the seabird work,"said Roger. "When I left Fair Isle, I missed that more than anything

"Once you've had a taste of guillemot smell, you can't get enough of it!"

Any downside? Yes, ringing puffins. With feet strong enough to dig burrows, they can lacerate the hands.

"For that reason, I used to hand them over to the trainees!"

Because of winds and lack of cover, mist-netting is seldom an option on Fair Isle, so the excitement tends to come from checking what surprises the heligoland traps might yield.

According to Roger these traps regularly require patching up because they take such a battering from the elements.

Highlights of Roger's first Fair Isle year, as assistant to Paul Harvey, included bluethroat, rustic bunting and two real crackers - a brown flycatcher and a "magical" paddyfield warbler.

Bluethroat - a regular Fair Isle visitor

 In subsequent years, there were more stars including lanceolated warbler (now regarded as "a Fair Isle special") and Pallas' grasshopper warbler.

But Roger reckons he derived just as much pleasure from little bunting ("one of my favourite birds"), from seeing "carpets of redwings in autumn" and from noting the steady annual increases in visits from  yellow-browed warbler.

"Yellow-broweds are now probably among the most common warblers,"he noted.

"Sometimes there can be as many as 50 or 60 birds at a time."

A keen sports fan (he has supported Manchester United since Tommy Docherty was manager), Roger used to find playing football on Fair Isle a welcome diversion from birding - but, because of the weather, it was only possible in

summer.

"I used to fancy myself as Franz Beckenbauer screening the back four," he said wryly.

Since relocation to Shetland, home now  to Roger and his wife, Agnes, is  a place called the Pool of Virkie in a house which the couple were prompted to purchase partly because of its superb views and partly by what he took to be an omen on their second viewing - the spectacle of an olive-backed pipit rustling around among the irises in the garden.

Of Shetland's capital, Lerwick, he commented : "Like other places in Britain, it has its share of empty shops and  charity shops.

"But you can buy a car or a boat - it has all the amenities of a big city like Horncastle!"

He continued: "The weather isn't great, and there's very little natural woodland, but it is very beautiful with some great, sandy beaches."

Nowadays, he reckons his enjoyment at "seeing" rare birds has, to some extent, been replaced by that of "finding" them.

A notable example was a Ross's  gull. "I'm not a great gull enthusiast but you can't beat a Ross's gull," he quipped.

Another, top moment came as he was driving in his van and encountered a collared flycatcher.

"Being a birder encourages you to drive slowly," he noted.

Other discoveries have included a green-winged teal and a Kentish plover - only the second record  for Shetland.

And there have been many more breathtaking sightings - White's thrush ("a mythical bird"), western Bonelli's warbler, Blyth's reed warbler, Turkestan shrike, Caspian reed warbler (only the second for Britain) and pied-billed grebe (a first for Shetland and his 400th species on the island).

Another ace species was a yellow-rumped warbler.

"For a while, it messed with my head," he said. "Its identification characteristics are not  particularly difficult, but I was not very familiar with American species."

Not to be too macabre, while monitoring the beaches, Roger has also made some surprise corpse discoveries - on one occasion, a Brunnich's guillemot and, on another, a great shearwater.

He also carries out regular WeBS counts for the BTO, and he is a skilled sketcher - as evidence by his study of a red-backed stint that he watched one memorable day in July, 2000.

Roger is the magazine's long-serving Editor

Roger said almost nothing about his work as Editor of British Birds, except that arrangements are flexible - with the benefit of  using a  laptop computer he is not confined to compiling the content  in the office at his home.

However, he did reveal that a forthcoming article will focus on the red-necked phalaropes that breed on Fetlar and have been discovered, as a result of geolocator-tracking, to overwinter not (like their Scandinavian counterparts) in the Arabian Sea but off the coasts of Peru and Ecuador.

Migration surprise - red-necked phalarope in non-breeding plumage

 Since Roger started out four decades ago, the birding world has dramatically changed.

When he saw what was only Britain’s third thick-billed warbler on Shetland in 2001, he was able to share the experience with just three  other observers.

When what was the fifth British of the same species occurred in October, 2013, it was witnessed by hundreds - many of whom had arrived by chartered light aircraft.

Roger acknowledged that Shetland was often bleak in winter because of low daylight hours, rain and wind, so he and his wife aim to get away to the Mediterranean for between four and six weeks.

Does he have a favourite bird? Probably the raven.

"They're  fantastic birds," he enthused. "The males are so in-your-face if you come anywhere near their nests.

"And what other birds can fly upside down and tweak fulmars' wings?"

Roger was thanked by LBC chairman Phil Espin for his engaging and inspirational talk, and there was a round of applause from the 57-strong audience.

Roger, following his talk, with  members of Lincolnshire Bird Club

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