Siskins

"What are they?" he enquired.

"Siskins," I replied, smiling.

"Hmmm," he said. "I'm not so sure. Goldfinches, maybe."

"There are a few Goldfinches," I said. "But most of them are Siskins."

"Hmmm. Greenfinches, possibly."

I checked the back of my camera and said, "Definitely Siskins - there's a female here with that pale grey streaked breast. In any case, a member of staff said that there were Siskins in the alders by the bridge, and here they are: bridge; alders; Siskins."

And then I thought: Why are you having this conversation? Trying this hard to convince someone who's determined to contradict what you say, even though he has no reason to be so dismissive? And has his own equipment in any case, so ought to be able to image them at least as well as you can? Above all, why are you coming across like She Who Protests Too Much? Have some self-respect, woman. You've been doing this long enough not to need to flaunt your impostor syndrome like an Oscar-night evening gown.

So I stopped talking, and walked away. With my photos of the Siskins. In the alders. By the bridge.

This encounter aside, I had a brilliant day at Slimbridge, where despite a deeply unpropitious weather forecast it only rained once, and I increased my year count to 86 species, which is at the upper end of my expectations for late January. My second photo shows the rainstorm that came through the reserve on a brisk south-easterly while I was safe and dry inside the South Lake Discovery Hide, and left the waterfowl looking like they were all hoping to reincarnate as some other kind of fowl completely. "Are there any Pochards here?" asked a new arrival to the hide during the storm. Why yes, there were: those faint grey and orange blurs at the back of the image were a line of Pochards, waiting out the weather as close in to the marginal vegetation as they could get.

I won't be posting a shot of the "lifer" that swelled my year count today, on the grounds that the much-photographed, and generally quite confiding, Glossy Ibis that's now been at Slimbridge for over a week had taken itself off this morning to commune with some sheep a field's length away from the access road, and my record shot has probably fewer than a hundred pixels on the bird. So here's a photo taken a few days ago by one of my owling mates, so you can see what a first-winter Glossy Ibis looks like. One of the things I learned today is that while all the good close-ups I've seen of this bird had educated me in exactly what to look for in terms of shape and colouring, none had fully equipped me to recognise it out in the field, because it's very much smaller than I'd been expecting. For some reason I'd thought it was a majestic creature, maybe about the size of a Grey Heron, but in fact at around 80cm long it's more the size of a Bittern. For reference, the soggy and unhappy first-winter Spoonbill in my "context" rainstorm image is a little bigger than the Glossy Ibis, and was considerably closer than the Ibis deigned to get to me today.