Setting Off From Sandwell valley

Wednesday 4 May 2011

Big Green Day - lastest news

A fabulous email from Susan Rowe yesterday detailed how she'd taken on the mightly Lee Evans. Sue and her birding partner, Tina Perry spent their Green Big day birding around their patch - Tring, Hertfordshire. In fact they walked 12 miles birding at such locations as Tring Reservoirs, some nearby flooded chalk pits, the woods on the Chilterns and the tops of Ivinghoe Hills; all with their local nature reserves. Sue said that local birders were brilliant in helping her and Tina and to add spice to the day, the best known British twitcher, lee Evans was in friendly competition with them both, he using a car - carbon twitching. 
Now neither of the girls would call themselves listers or twitchers but they ended up giving Lee a good run for his money. Lee, the gentleman that he is, gave the girls lots of advice prior to their event, with suggestions for their route and where to find those tricky extra birds. Good on him!
Now the girls I hear celebrated the day with a good bottle of wine [is there any other sort?] and toasted both their success and the Royal Wedding.
How did they get on?
Well both Lee and the Sue-Tina combination finished the day with 84 bird species each; a tie! Brilliant and full marks to both teams for their efforts.
It's great to see that Sue and Tina are the only UK reprentatives [at the moment] on the official Big Green Day website :

http://greenbigday.org/

Have a look and see.

Now please with only days to go before the end date of may the 8th, consider doing a Green Big day this weekend.

We're going to be doing ours on Saturday at the fabulous Upton Warren nature reserve in Worcestershire. Black terns are there today so here's hoping they stay around for the big day.

It's going to be a great day. John, Phil, Dave, Mike, Des, Paul will be there very early to get things going. Gert will be walking the 4 or so miles to get there and I'll be sleeping in the hide the night before to be there to get things going at midnight Friday.

Bacon sarnies and birding in great company. Brilliant.

As usual we're going to be in competition with Belvide reservoir in Staffs, where Steve Nuttall will also be doing a Green Big day.

So please, if you can, register on the Green Big day website and get another UK flag on their map of the world!

All the very best and well done Sue and Tina!

Gary

2 comments:

  1. Alright Gary,

    Been planning my big green day this sat gonna be going round on my bike near me around my campus and a nearby wood, reckon I'll get nearly 80 species so game on!

    Cheers
    Tim

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  2. Go for it Tom
    At Upton Warren I think Crofty holds the record for how many species in a day, 80 odd. here's hoping the rain falls and we beat it! If you could register then that's be great Tim.
    All the best to you mate.
    Gary

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