Natural Selection

Hoopoe family earlier this year in Porto Santo

I spent most of last week birding around the Barrow area. I set off on the Sunday late morning working my way round Morecambe Bay via a couple of convenient good birds available. One of these was a Hoopoe on the beach at Aldingham (the other was a Pectoral Sandpiper at Leasgill).

As I walked from the car park at Aldingham I saw the Hoopoe flying strongly across the beach in front of me and into trees. I wasn’t desperate to see it any better than that on a fairly dull day, and left without thinking too much about why it was flying to roost with daylight to spare. Later I twigged it had clearly been disturbed.

I was passing on the Monday and decided to try again as it was reported as showing well. I joined the people watching and had perfectly good views then it became alert. Without putting my bins down I knew someone must be getting too close, and sure enough a photographer flushed it and it headed some distance to the same trees as on the Sunday.

I dropped by again on the Thursday after checking for gulls nearby. Everyone on site on this occasion was behaving impeccably giving the bird plenty of space, but those who’d been there a while related that they had remonstrated with a woman who had basically been kicking the Hoopoe up and down the beach. At least one local photographer said the same day that they were not visiting again as the disturbance was off-putting.

Meanwhile a Facebook group for Cumbrian bird sightings I am on had a polite request from the moderator for people to stop posting pictures of the bird unless they were novel. It’s fair to say that the response was at best passive aggressive, at worst disrespectful. Novel became construed as, among other things, alert posture and flight shots. In other words behaviours created by the disturbance of the bird.

It wasn’t difficult to get a record shot of the bird. If you really wanted to get close, sharp shots you could lie in wait on the ground as some people did. I don’t understand the half-arsed middle ground where people want a better picture than their gear and / or patience will deliver, and are quite ok wilfully disturbing a creature unnecessarily for Facebook or Twitter likes. Scores of people enjoying a scarce visitor in a place it was clearly feeding well should have been a win-win, unfortunately for me and many others it didn’t really feel like that.

The Aldingham Hoopoe, photo by the author who doesn’t really care it’s not frame filling