The majority of my birdwatching involves cycling around the north eastern quarter of Peterborough. There’s Star Pit to the north, Eye Green and Tanholt Pit further east, as well as Flag Fen, the Power Station Area, Fitzwilliam and Millennium Bridges . My wife refers to this pastime as “touring the local flytips”. I will admit that this urban fringe, aka “edgeland” is perhaps not the most scenic area of England, but this patch can be very productive in terms of birds.
The flat terrain and dedicated cycle tracks are well suited to this form of birding. I call it “cyclobirding”, and I’m surprised more people haven’t discovered this combination. Birding is very popular, cycling is very popular, but the intersection of the two is a minority interest. Lycra is not recommended for cyclobirding, especially for gentlemen of my age. All my data since 2008 has been entered onto the BTOs excellent Birdtrack website. I have over 1000 complete lists for this area, a suite of 17 sites.
In the current lockdown, I have been able to continue visiting these areas in the course of my daily prescribed exercise. Maintaining social distancing has not been too much of an issue, but with the good weather throughout most of April, and a lack of competing leisure time attractions, there have been many more people about than usual.
It’s not the prospect of rarities that primarily motivates me, it’s mainly the regularly occurring but often scarce species that get me out of bed in the morning and onto the saddle. For example, on checking my birdtrack data, I found that I have at least 10 patch records for quite a few notable species. This includes wetland specialists such as bittern, water rail, little ringed plover, kingfisher and mandarin duck. Passage birds include greenshank, wheatear and common sandpiper. Passerines of interest are corn bunting, grasshopper warbler, tree sparrow, grey and yellow wagtail. Regular raptors include marsh harrier, red kite, peregrine and hobby. But if I were asked to name my favourite patch bird, I would probably say green sandpiper. I’ve recorded this lovely white rumpled wader in my patch area over 100 times. Sadly though, records have declined significantly in the past three years.
I’ve met some interesting people in the course of these 1000 visits. Recently I talked to a young man with a bicycle and binoculars. He told me that he took up cyclobirding when he was unable to drive his car due to a broken arm. He got to realise the advantages of birding by bike and carried on doing this regularly after his arm healed. On another occasion, I was approached one morning by two 13 year old lads who asked me what I was looking at through the telescope. In the spirit of encouraging youngsters to take an interest in birdwatching, I showed them the green woodpecker that I was watching. I was subsequently distracted by another sighting (sparrowhawk I think) and when I turned back to look at the green woodie I noticed that one of the boys had swung my scope around to focus on a bungalow. I asked him what he was looking at.
“There’s a far more interesting bird in there and I think she’s just getting dressed”. The other boy sniggered and pleaded with his mate to let him see.
Outraged, and feeling somewhat “in loco parentis”, I gave them both a stern talking to and quickly departed from the scene.
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| Main sites in my birding “patch” east of Peterborough |
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