Memory Lane: Red-tailed Shrike, Bempton Cliffs July 2nd 2022

One of the most important qualities to cultivate as a mature and well-balanced individual is the ability to laugh at yourself.  Though the memory I'm writing about is only from four years ago, the complete lack of skill involved in my birding and especially my photography makes me laugh at myself whenever I reflect.  I've come a long way since the summer of 2022, and it's good to remind myself of that sometimes.

I bought a camera in 2020 during the lockdown, and a bit of online searching suggested that a Canon 7d mkII would be a good fit for me, along with a 400mm prime lens.  I had no experience with a camera at all before that, and no clue how to take, process or show digital photos.  I'd used my phone through my scope a couple of times, but that was such an underwhelming experience (again, operator error - the tech is good!) that I'd all but given up on trying to get any photos of birds that way.  I remember my first day out with the camera, excited to have frame-filling images crisp and clear, point and click, instant success.  No concerns about light, blur, bird behaviour.  I wasn't totally naive - I knew it would be difficult to aim and capture mobile targets that prefer to stay distant - but I hadn't really anticipated what photography results look like.  Nobody posts the "before" shots, the in-the-field images that are often a small shape in the centre frame that needs cropping to five or six times magnification.  I just saw my distant blobs on my view screen and assumed that I was just a terrible photographer, that the recommendation of 400mm lens was woefully underpowered.  I began to think I needed at least 800mm.  I deleted photos of dozens of species before I realised that taking the photo was only the first part of a process.

There were frustrating days where I carried that heavy camera miles and miles and never took a photo worth keeping, but there were probably an equal number of days where I took some decent pictures but got rid of them because I didn't know how to crop.  For a year I left it in storage, only picking it up when I was going to a location that had a feeding station so I could get the frame-filling views of Nuthatch and Bullfinch that made me feel like I was able to capture a decent picture.

Early July 2022 arrived with news of a Red-tailed (Turkestan) Shrike near Bempton Cliffs, and with the Black-browed Albatross (which I'd seen in 2021) still on the cliffs I decided that a bit of a pilgrimage was in order.  This was still a month before I made any birding friends, so I set my satnav and was on the road solo at 4am.  This was the last thing that I got right on the whole day, a comedy of errors that still makes me feel embarrassed today.  It's fair to say that I didn't check the available information properly when I set off, and I parked at a mysteriously empty Bempton Cliffs carpark where I've never had any phone signal to be able to check the location of the pin for the bird.  I walked slowly along the cliffs in the reserve until I got a data connection, and found that the Shrike was actually a mile away back along the narrow road where there was no parking.  I walked back along the road and completely missed the turning for the farm track that was the initial location for the Shrike.  Moving further from the pin, not able to see anyone else, flustered by my failure to follow basic instructions and a map I was soon lost on a farm track I'd picked based on my own aesthetic sense of where a shrike might want to be - that is, pretty much an uninformed and random pick.  Almost an hour of wandering had given me a dozen Yellowhammers and good views of Tree Sparrow, but no crowd of birders, no shrike, not even an appropriate farmhouse to ask at.  I chanced upon a birder walking purposefully away from where I was heading and asked him if he was looking for the shrike.  He said yes, and strode off, forcing me to shuffle faster to keep up.  I saw the path he was heading down and thought to myself, "no way it's down there!" but I had no other options, so I followed on.

Within ten minutes we had reached a pretty decent sized crowd and I was excited to see the shrike having wandered within half a mile of it for so long.  Another failure of comprehension was that birders needed to pass through a farm yard and the farmer was charging a tenner for people to access it.  I had a tenner on me, I thought, so got into the small queue to put my cash in a bucket held by a member of the farmer's family and then at the last moment realised that my ten pound note was in my car, a mile of winding farm paths back at Bempton Cliffs.  By this point I was thoroughly fed up, having carried camera, binoculars, scope and water for so long, I was beginning to feel like I was such an inept birder that I shouldn't even be there to see such a good bird.  Trudging back to the car, retrieving my money, clomping back, getting lost again before following other birders to the farm, I finally made it into the yard and stood looking at a hedgerow 80 metres away where there was absolutely no sign of a Red-tailed Shrike.  It popped up, shouted by someone a bit further down the hedge, but I was damned if I could get my eyes on the bird before it dropped down the rear of the hedgerow.  I rolled my eyes and swore.  What was I doing here?  The crowd was beginning to feel intimidating - I was on my own, sorely lacking in fieldcraft and luck, and even though I knew rationally that nobody was judging me, I felt like every other birder there must be laughing at my ineptitude.  I suppose some people are possessed of such self-confidence that they never feel that social pressure to fit in, to be like the crowd, to not stand out, but I suspect that a lot of us have had that same feeling of imposter syndrome and just wished to be away from the crowd.  I almost gave up and left.

I had to really double-down on my determination to see the bird after all the back and forth, and I'm glad that I did, finally getting it in my binoculars.  What a bird!  What a beauty!  So well marked and colourful, a really stunning little predator catching bees in the hedge.  Around me were thirty guys with huge cameras, clicking away, making appreciative noises about the light.  I felt like such a pillock lifting my second hand Canon and taking shots that were so distant that I couldn't really tell if I had the bird in frame at all.  I didn't stay long - I felt so out of place and out of sorts.  I left that day feeling despondent having missed the Albatross and failed to get photos when everyone around me was seeming to succeed.  Being able to look back at myself and laugh at how objectively daft I was being does help, and it's something I strive to remember whenever I feel that pressure in my mind now.

Three weeks later, the Red-tailed Shrike was still there and I had met up with a local birder here in Manchester who was keen to go and see it.  In the days after the initial buzz about the bird word was passed around that there was a path from the RSPB reserve that would take you to the shrike without having to pay - I learned that day to always check access and paths before you travel to see a bird.  This time was so different.  I had company, a clear idea of how to get to the bird, and experience of its behaviour.  We watched that shrike for well over and hour, just seeing it hunt and watching how it observed its air space.  I still struggled to take photos, and deleted almost all of them, but I'd finally learned about processing photos, cropping in to show the detail that the camera can pick up even if my eyes couldn't.  The single photo that survived my long, slow, ridiculous learning curve is the one at the head of the page: a terrible picture in almost every respect, but one that gave me the motivation to at least keep trying to take more photos.

I suppose my take away from this is that birding rewards and requires perseverance, and that asking for help is definitely the way to improve as a birder.  A couple of friends have expressed frustration recently with their lack of success on various twitches and I found myself mentally smiling; nearly all of us have been there, felt like we just couldn't connect with a bird no matter what we did.  It's just that we don't share our failures and dips when that failure is the result of our own mistakes.  We only share dips when we missed the bird and it was the fault of the bird!  But every birder has messed it up at some point - I was just fortunate back in 2022 that I had so many birders to follow to help me succeed! Keeping going, persevering is a key trait of birding success, and I would say that the ability to look at self and laugh is just as crucial.  

Oh, and reading the bloody instructions beforehand really, really helps.