2nd January 2012

A bright and bracing morning saw three Collective members undertaking the The Concrete Track walk round the back of the dunes. Although fairly unremarkable birdwise (highlights being a Little Egret down Low Road and a single Common Buzzard) this route has apparently provoked a move to include the adjoining westward parish of East Somerton in the Winterton Bird Spotting Collective recording area. This would naturally require an Extraordinary General Meeting to approve the renaming of the Collective as The Winterton and East Somerton Bird Spotting Collective, which, as I'm sure everyone would agree, would turn us into a laughing stock - it doesn't exactly trip off the tongue does it? It would also risk souring relations with the East Somerton Collective (if they exist) as they might not want to be merged even though it would open the floodgates to a greatly increased list for them ie Gannet is still a very rare bird in East Somerton. On the other side of the coin we could only think of White-spotted Bluethroat as being a gain for Winterton.

As mentioned above the suggestion to incorporate East Somerton comes not from aggressive empire building but merely the fact that The Concrete Track and the Pallid Track both straddle the border requiring observers currently to pocket their pencils when they leave the avian paradise of Winterton. To my mind the obvious and surely infallible solution is simply to carry two separate pieces of paper in the field and record the Winterton birds on one and the Somerton birds on the other...

The debate, as they say, is sure to run and run.

PS Apologies to any hard working and diligent employees of bird information services who may have had a bit of shock when seeing White-spotted Bluethroat in bold earlier on in this post. Whoops, just done it again!