пятница, 28 сентября 2012 г.

Party time for friends who like to get the bird; This year marks the 70th anniversary of the West Midlands Bird Club which began as a group of five who met to talk about their hobby but now has some 2,000 members. - Sunday Mercury (Birmingham, England)

IT'S hardly surprising that 'the ruddy duck affair' ruffled a few feathers in the placid world of birdwatching.

For 25 years the handsome little duck had been the blameless emblem of the West Midlands Bird Club.

Then suddenly other bird-lovers wanted it shot at dawn for being too promiscuous.

The problem was that the ruddy ducks had been flitting over to Spain and breeding with their rare white-headed cousins. According to the purists that was just not on and the ruddies had to go.

The Midlanders were unusually vociferous over what they saw as the avian equivalent of ethnic cleansing by those who wanted to wipe out their mascot.

But the bird club is not normally a noisy organisation by nature, preferring to get on with its own affairs without making waves, which is why most people may not know that it has made a tremendous contribution to the wildlife of the Midlands.

'We are not just a bunch of nutty birdwatchers. People take us very seriously,' said Alan Richards, doyen of Midland ornithologists and bird club stalwart.

This year the West Midlands Bird Club really does have something to make a fuss about - its 70th birthday.

It all began in 1929 with five friends getting together in Edgbaston to chat about birds and that's the way it stayed for a long time.

The original quintet asked a few friends to join but by 1935 there were still only 15 of them.

Only after the end of the war in 1945 when the doors were thrown wide did the club really begin to expand until today it has 2,000 members with branches in Birmingham, Stafford, Solihull and Tamworth.

Comedian Bill Oddie, who has just been elected president, said: 'I can honestly say that the West Midlands Bird Club provided the incentive for all my birdwatching throughout my so-called formative years in the 1950s and 1960s.

'It was widely acknowledged then to be the biggest and best bird club in the country. It still is.'

Bill began his own birdwatching career around Bartley reservoir on the outskirts of Birmingham. He went on to be one of The Goodies and is now a celebrity birdwatcher.

Alan Richards has also made a career out of birds as a respected author and owner of Aquila, one of the country's premier wildlife picture libraries.

Alan, from Studley, Warwickshire, is now 66 and has been associated with the club for 50 years -17 of them as chairman.

Perhaps the biggest contribution that the club has made to ornithology is its annual reports, stretching back to 1934.

'We take great care and we know the information is right. It's not just any old rubbish,' Alan said.

This painstaking record of what has been seen and where provides the solid scientific data that produced Birds of the West Midlands in 1980, a book now due for a millennium update.

The reports chart every little change. The once common song thrush is now rare, for instance, while newcomers like common terns are well established at Kingsbury Water Park. And would those five pioneers have ever imagined that one day there would be peregrine falcons flying round Birmingham city centre?

The club also has a full programme of field trips and indoor meetings and produces regular bulletins to keep members in touch with what's going on.

Bird club volunteers also run major reserves at the Staffordshire reservoirs of Blithfield and Belvide, while the Ladywalk reserve, established in the very shadow of the old Ham's Hall power station near Coleshill, has turned an industrial wasteland into a haven for little ringed plovers that occasionally resounds to the boom of the rare bittern.

Alan said: 'Birding has changed since I began. You just used to just watch birds but now it's all pagers and hotlines and twitching.

'For some people it has become highly competitive, rushing to see as many species as possible. I like to see a rare bird as much as anyone but I've never been a twitcher.

'It's a pretty narrow sphere of interest and not many people have the time or the money to rush off to Shetland one day and the Scillies the next.

'It costs as much to do that as to pay to go abroad and see dozens of the same bird in their natural habitat.'

Ruefully, he admits that it is harder these days to get people involved in the routine work of compiling surveys and reports and generally monitoring the health and welfare of wildlife.

But he added: 'We have to remember that birdwatching is also a recreational thing and should always be fun.'

However, those 70 years of solid work mean that the club now speaks with authority.

As Alan said: 'We have negotiated with South Staffs Water over opening Blithfield for birdwatching and talked to British Waterways Board at Belvide and PowerGen at Ladywalk.

'We attend public inquiries and are consulted by local authorities. For instance, we have just been involved with Warwickshire County Council over the pounds 200,000 remodelling of one of the pools at Kingsbury Water Park.'

The place to find out more about the West Midlands Bird Club is at the 5th Birdwatchers' Summer Fair at Middleton Hall near Tamworth on July 3-4. Television naturalist Chris Packham is among the star attractions along with a host of top international wildlife experts.

The event includes the Wildlife Photofair with everything you ever wanted to know about cameras, lenses, wildlife and how to get the perfect picture.

The West Midlands Bird Club will be there organising guided walks around the grounds and to nearby Dosthill gravel pits.

Are you a bird enthusiast? What's the attraction? And what do you think of the work done by groups like the West Midlands Bird Club? Write to Talk About, Sunday Mercury, 28 Colmore Circus, Birtmingham B4 6AZ.

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