Bird's Eye View

I’m a member of an RSPB bird group on Facebook. For those not in the know, RSPB stands for the Royal Society of the Protection of Birds. Now, I’m in this group because I just want to see the little tweety birds or the big talon-y birds and go, “Oooh, it’s a Perigrine Falcon. Well spotted, you’d get 50 points for that in my Eye Spy book!”

That’s all I want to do. Surely that should be all anyone wants to do in any social setting. But no. This is social media, so it descends into a massive snobbery thing from the geeks who want to tell off the amateurs who don’t know what a pigeon looks like to the same snobbery geeks being jealous when someone spots something exotic that they haven’t seen before so they try to discredit it.

“Oh, a Leucistic Nightjar. You must be in France.” I.E. your bird is foreign, so your spot doesn’t count. Only they don’t say, “You must be in France.” They say things like, “Admin, can we have a rule that anyone who sees a bird has to put the location – otherwise they get banned?”

Surely we can all congratulate each other on Leucistic Nightjars. (I’ve made that up by the way. It's just that nightjars were the only other bird that also got 50 points in my Eye Spy book.) Why can’t people just be nice? It doesn’t matter if my bird is a rescue hen and your bird is a resurrected Dodo. Just a “Well done” would do. It’s not the bloody Olympics.

Anyway, I’ll shut my face now. Suffice to say the Winter Sale’s coming to an end soon, so if you’ve got this far there’s the secret EXTRA10 code which I’m not shouting loudly about yet. But it will give you an extra 10% off everything on our website – even if it’s in the sale. In the meantime, I’ll crack on watching blue tits with my binoculars.

Have a great week all!
X Deb