Join our zoo community

A review of BirdFair 2019

Discussion in 'United Kingdom' started by DesertRhino150, 18 Aug 2019.

  1. DesertRhino150

    DesertRhino150 Well-Known Member 10+ year member

    Joined:
    15 Jul 2010
    Posts:
    2,822
    Location:
    Essex
    I visited the 2019 Rutland BirdFair over the weekend – often described as ‘Glastonbury for birdwatchers’. I figured I would put down what I thought about the happenings over the three days I was there, along with some interludes of events outside the BirdFair.

    Day 1 – Friday 16th August
    We set out bright and early from Essex at 9am, fully expecting the journey to take about two hours (the norm for the journey to my late grandparents’ house, in the town of Oakham literally next to where the BirdFair takes place). A couple of hours of roadworks later, we arrived at 1:05, having just missed the start time to one of my most-wanted lectures of the weekend about the likelihood of the black woodpecker colonising Britain. A disappointment, but there were still a couple of lectures I wanted to attend today and there was still the rest of the BirdFair to walk around.

    For those who haven’t visited before, BirdFair is comprised of a number of very large marquees, each filled with dozens of stands. Some stands sell wildlife artwork, some represent wildlife organisations, some sell optical equipment such as binoculars and telescopes, some sell books but by far the most common things for sale are tour holidays. So I spent most of the afternoon pocketing free brochures for holidays I couldn’t possibly afford. But on the plus side, if I happen to find over £6,500 just laying around and wanted to spend it on a trip to northeast India looking for clouded leopards and golden, marbled and fishing cats, I know exactly who to talk to.

    At 3:30, so began the first talk on my wanted list I could actually attend; this one looking mainly at the progress of the two beaver projects in Devon. The information about both the free-roaming beavers on the River Otter and the fenced project elsewhere in Devon are I believe publically available elsewhere – certainly the information about the fenced project I had read before. What was new to me was a map showing the fenced, licensed and unlicensed released populations of beaver. For example, I did not know that as well as the single fenced population at Ham Fen in Kent (helped in part by the Wildwood Trust) there are at least three further free-living populations in that county, as well as wild beavers in the Somerset Levels.

    Emerging from the beaver talk, we headed straight to the neighbouring lecture marquee for a talk about the conservation potential for native birds in BIAZA zoos. It sounded very interesting on paper but ultimately it didn’t particularly enthuse. The talk was essentially about improving signage on native birds around zoo grounds and enclosures and managing said zoo grounds for birds. There just didn’t seem to be enough substance to it to really generate much interest from me. I’m sure people less zoo-y and more birdwatch-y than me enjoyed it though. With that, I left the last talk I would attend today.

    Before heading off for the night, we walked around some more marquees and in doing so found the stand for the British Arachnological Society. This was the best stand in the entire BirdFair in my opinion and from talking to some other visitors on the Saturday, they felt the same. The reason for this, I think, is fairly clear – unlike almost all the other stands this one had a large number of tanks and tubs housing live arachnids from Britain. There were somewhere between fifteen and twenty species, some of which were simply on springs of plant otherwise open to the air. The species I noted included candy-stripe spiders Enoplognatha ovata, a wasp spider Argiope bruennichi, tube-web spiders Segestria florentina, cellar spider Pholcus sp., a large house spider Eratigena atrica, a garden centre spider Uloborus plumipes (a recent arrival currently restricted to garden centres), nursery-web spiders Pisaura mirabilis, a cucumber spider Araniella sp., a fencepost jumping spider Marpissa muscosa, walnut orb-weaver Nuctenea umbratica and garden orb-weaver spiders Araneus diadematus, wolf spiders Pardosa sp., a money spider Linyphiidae sp., a noble false widow spider Steatoda nobilis, harvestmen and a couple of pseudoscorpions in a tiny petri dish. All seemed to be being kept long-term and on the third day a number had been fed. I went back to the stand on all three days and it was packed with people every single time.

    By the time we left it was raining sideways and my shoes were ruined. It was always intended that this weekend would be my shoes’ last hurrah, but the events of today meant that tomorrow I would need to get some new footwear.

    Day 2 – Saturday 17th August
    Started out today by treating ourselves to breakfast out at a garden centre on the other side of Oakham, just into Leicestershire (called Gate’s Nurseries, if anyone is interested) and also used this as an opportunity to buy some new wellingtons to replace both my trashed shoes and my old wellingtons, which I had left outside in the rain a couple of years back and subsequently went mouldy. Along with this, there was some captive animal interest – the restaurant overlooks a large paddock with a lake home to a single black swan. There was also an aquatics centre with some interesting fish, although most of them were fairly standard pet-shop fare. With that done, we raced back over into Rutland and pressed on to BirdFair.

    The first talk today has a shoo-in for being the most interesting of the lot. It was about the planned reintroduction of the wildcat to England and Wales and was being done by a researcher working with the Derek Gow Consultancy, which is responsible for a lot of water vole and beaver reintroductions. The half-hour talk covered a lot, including why they should be reintroduced (the habitat and climate is actually more amenable to wildcats in southern Britain – they don’t particularly thrive in cold coniferous forests), how the reintroduction will counter the threat of hybridisation (basically establish a big core population to swamp any feral cats), showing the breeding facilities at the Consultancy site which currently houses three pairs, talks about the planned import of wildcats from continental Europe to add to the current Scottish wildcat breeding programme and finally the two areas considered by a feasibility study to be the best for a reintroduction – mid-Wales (roughly where the Vincent Wildlife Trust are reintroducing pine martens) and Devon and Cornwall. A lot of good technical information about a project that is not shying away from working with zoological collections – a big tick in my book!

    Much of the rest of the day was spent moseying around the marquees, picking up more brochures for unattainable trips to far-flung corners of the earth. One thing of interest was a second stand with live animals although on a couple of passes the stand was unattended and so never attracted the crowds that the BAS stand did. The stand was by A Focus on Nature, the UK’s youth nature network. The first tank held a number of Roesel’s bush crickets Metrioptera roeselii, the second was home to at least two European tree frogs and the third was home to Eurasian harvest mice that remained stubbornly out of view each time I passed the stand.
    The other main thing of note today was that, while we were moving the car across the swamp car park to be closer to the entrance for an evening event, I spotted a large flock of gulls rising in panic and then settling again. On seeing what at first appeared to be a large gull, I managed to get the binoculars on it and found it was actually an osprey, a descendent of the very successful reintroduction project at Rutland Water.

    The final thing planned for today was an evening event, listening to a number of speakers talk about the World Land Trust for its 30th anniversary. Because we booked the ‘deluxe’ version, we got to sit in a tent next to the main event marquee, have a very pleasant meal and then swan off to the front few rows. We ended up in the second row from the front and was rather surprised (putting it bluntly – for a split second you could have seen the whites of my eyes from the moon) when two of the speakers, Nick Baker and Bill Oddie, who I grew up seeing on the television, came and sat in the row directly in front of me. Add to that Mark Carwardine sitting just a few seats down in the same row as me and needless to say I was as happy as a pig in stuff. The event started with an introductory recorded video by Sir David Attenborough, basically saying how the World Land Trust’s modus operandi is an excellent conservation strategy that was pretty revolutionary when it started thirty years ago. What followed was essentially a series of anecdotes from broadcasters and conservationists about their travels to sites helped by the World Land Trust – Nick Baker talking about Paraguay, Bill Oddie about Armenia, Simon Barnes about Zambia and two women conservationists from Ecuador and Kenya. You also had Simon Watt (the founder of the Ugly Animals Preservation Society among other things) doing some conservation-related comedy. After a very enjoyable evening, we headed back to our lodgings for the night, ready for the final day of BirdFair.

    Day 3 – Sunday 18th August
    After packing up and loading the car, we first decided to head off to the Lyndon Nature Reserve along the south shore of Rutland Water, hoping for a better view of the ospreys than the flyover the day before. We arrived at the centre and were allowed free entry to the reserve, courtesy of the wristbands fastened to us. First of all, I made a note to check the feeders out the back of the visitor centre as on previous visits I have seen tree sparrows on these feeders. Unfortunately, these birds were a no-show today with the only visitors being a handful of regular garden birds – blue and great tits, greenfinch, goldfinch, chaffinch and magpie. We then undertook the kilometre-long walk down the visitor trail to the osprey viewing hide. Along the way there were some interesting insects, but no birds of note. On arriving at the osprey hide, the most obvious birds were a flock of about thirty cormorants sat in a dead tree at close range. I’ve never really watched cormorants before – they were actually very interesting to watch, especially in a big flock, with lots of squabbling and courtship displaying going on. There was also a single stock dove in the dead tree. On the water were all your standard waterbirds, often in big numbers – mallard, tufted duck, mute swan, coot, moorhen, great crested grebe, while in the air were again fairly typical birds you would see flying over a lake – swallow, house and sand martin, a few common swift, some common terns and black-headed gulls. As for the ospreys, there were definitely at least two. One spent the entire time perched midway up a large poplar tree on the opposite bank while the other flew in and landed on the artificial nest platform. Views of the ospreys complete, we headed back to the car and set out to BirdFair for the final time.

    The main reason for coming back today was to see a talk by Simon King, an old favourite in our home. His talk, called Killing Time, was a meandering but very eloquent talk that started with his experiences of filming and photographing predators in Africa – lions, crocodiles and cheetah (the latter of which was illustrated by the sequence he filmed over six months of cheetahs hunting ostrich for the BBC series Life). It then moved on to the story surrounding his filming of the San Bushman hunting scene from the Life of Mammals, again illustrated by playing the scene in question. And then it moved on to talking about the lack of respect and disconnect shown towards animals used in factory farming and how human appetites in general are threatening biodiversity. While this sounds like it could have easily descended into a sermon on veganism, he made the point that if done appropriately, at low intensity and with respect to the animals, animal farming can be very good for the environment – using the Knepp estate as an example. This was another fantastic talk, up there with Saturday’s talk on wildcats as the best talk of the weekend.

    I killed some time by looking at the biggest of the book stands. Ultimately I didn’t buy any books myself as we had got three books on the Friday due to an oversight and didn’t have space in the car to haul back any more. Certainly this didn’t stop me from browsing and there was, as usual, a lot on offer. There was ‘Neotropical Birds of Prey: Biology and Ecology of a Forest Raptor Community’, a huge doorstop of a book that with the discount, cost £40 but looked in amazing detail at the lives of fourteen species of raptor and owl that live around Tikal in Guatemala. There was also ‘Amphibians of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East’, a complete guide of all the frogs, toads, salamanders and newts of the Western Palearctic, all illustrated with wonderful photographs (although for the probably close to a dozen recently split species of tree frog, you could basically use the same image seeing how closely they resembled each other). That is just two of the dozens of books I browsed over the course of BirdFair. Having finished at BirdFair we headed back to the car and set off for home.

    One thing I haven’t really mentioned about BirdFair that is always fun is being able to spot presenters you recognise from the television, so as well as the aforementioned Simon King, Nick Baker, Bill Oddie and Mark Carwardine, I managed to ‘tick off’ sightings of Nigel Marvin, Jonathan Scott, David Lindo and Mike Dilger.

    Another thing – on the way back we passed the turnoff for the little Bugtopia zoo. We had talked about it earlier before heading to Rutland but ultimately it didn’t happen. Maybe next time.
     
  2. TeaLovingDave

    TeaLovingDave Moderator Staff Member 10+ year member

    Joined:
    16 May 2010
    Posts:
    14,735
    Location:
    Wilds of Northumberland
    You do indeed; me, so that you can pay for me to go on said trip ;)
     
    DesertRhino150 and ro6ca66 like this.
  3. DesertRhino150

    DesertRhino150 Well-Known Member 10+ year member

    Joined:
    15 Jul 2010
    Posts:
    2,822
    Location:
    Essex
    WalkingAgnatha likes this.