It was nice being popular... and Emma Wray naked.

Normal number of hits per day ~30. At least 20 of which have googled 'Emma Wray naked' (Try it!). Post something about Slender-billed Curlew and the whole world (or about a thousand of them) come to your door.

Alas I have no plans to maintain my new found popularity.

BUT there hasn't been any Ivorybill activity for a while, so I thought I could add my bit. Remember when the paper by Hill et al published 'toot' noises and sonagrams from the Florida woods that they suggested could be IBWOs but I suggested were a better match for baby White-tailed Deer?

Posts here and here.

My problem, at least one of them, is that I have never heard baby deers and a search of YouTube came up with nothing. Well now it doesn't come up with nothing. Check out this one.

I have no idea if these are White-tailed Deer or some other sort of deer (someone please advise), but made sonagrams anyway of the bleats from 1.37 to 1.42 and this is what you get.

Eyeballing them, they are a better match for the Florida 'toots' than they are for the archival IBWO recording (see the second of my postings above). But on the other hand, they don't sound the same as the 'putative kent' noises published by Hill et al here and here. Allwing for differences in microphones, equipment, etc. I have difficulty believing that the 'putative kents' came out of a deer. Not as much difficulty as I have believing they came from an IBWO, but all the same...

Birding too. Is there no limit to my talents? Teatime in the rain. I remember as a young boy birding round Flamborough and one of the older hands (we shall call him 'Andrew' to preserve his anonymity) told me that rare birds don't turn up in the rain, that I should go and have a cup of tea and he would let me know when it was easing off. Well, I learnt my lesson there. So at teatime, in pissing rain and an easterly breeze, I went out birding to hoover up the harvest of flycatchers and warblers that would be waiting for me. 2 hours and 1 Willow Warbler later, I was on the seawatching bench, still in the pissing rain and visibility down to, well, I could see my toes. In 30 minutes... 3 Arctic Skuas (Parasitic Jaegers), 1 Great Skua (Huge F*ckoff Jaegers), 12 (!) Northern Gannets, 7 Manx Shearwaters. However the birds were tanking past so fast in the tailwind, and in such haze and poor light I realised that if, for example, something good came past, I was never going to get enough on it to get a description through. Which is a shame, cos actually something did come through in the half-visibility that looked pretty good, but it got away and we never speak of it again. I mean it.