Birdfair Saturday - Behind The Binoculars

It was one of my most anticipated weekends of the year for us this weekend.

It was the 2015 Bird Watching Fair at Rutland Waters. Due to a myriad of different reasons we had a complete change of plans for this weekend. By a stroke of good luck we managed to find a motel just fifteen minutes away from Egleton. Normally you can't get within miles of where the show is as all the accommodation is booked up a year in advance.

It was with some trepidation that we arrived at just before nine o'clock last night. But we seem to have landed on our feet. The motel was clean, the bed comfortable enough, nice powerful shower and a nice looking diner next door.

We were at the show ground with very little problems just before ten am, and I was somewhat over excited, at one point I thought Dawn was going to put reins on me. There were so many people to say hello to and so many talks to go and see, and we only had two whole days to do it all in!!!

We made our way to the Events marquee for our first talk of the day, or rather quiz of the weekend. It was the annual Question of Stork. There was no Mike Dilger on the Saturday as his BBC filming had over-run, so we had no repeat of his mime round, which is always quite something. As always it was great entertainment.

One of the great things about Birdfair is the amount of people dashing from the lecture marquees to try and get between two talks. We had to do the entire length of the fair to try and get to one in the Anglian Birdwatching Centre. We made it just in the nick of time. We had gone to see an interesting presentation on birding in Gambia. I visited there a long time ago for my honeymoon for my first marriage. It was a wonderful place and I would love to go back there again, but this time we my birding hat on. I have often wondered now I have taken up this hobby in the last ten years what I actually saw whilst I was out there when I had no interest in the subject. The hotel we stayed in was geared up for bird watching. It was great seeing places like fishing village ofTanji on the coast on the screen and thinking I've been there. It is one of the greatest places I have visited on Earth!

It was then another dash to Lecture Marquee to see an utterly brilliant talk by Dominic Couzens on Extreme Animals, or Extreme Heat as he started with. It was absolutely scorching by this point. I have no idea how many buckets of sweat we lost sat in the tents all day. Dominic's talk focused on lots of incredible facts about wildlife, and it is definitely going my Christmas wish list this year.

It was time for a spot of lunch, and I finally met up with Jo Hemmings. Jo is a media psychologist that regularly appears on day time TV discussing a huge range of topics. We became twitter friends a long long time ago now, first over Big Brother as she loves a bit of reality TV and then I discovered her bird watching writing credentials. We have tried to meet over the past four years and failed dismally, but we made it! And we shared a drink, the odd wasp, and plenty of chat over the lunch break!

The afternoon continued in the vein of meeting up with old friends and visiting as many stands as we would. It was great to bump into and chat to the artist formally known as RSPB Conservation Director, Mark Avery, Matt Merrit from Birdwatching Mag, Kelvin from BTO Cymru, Phil Gatley, all the girls (and one fella) from the BirdFair House, Jackie Garner in the Art Marquee, I finally put a face to the twitter feed of Phil Walton on the Birders Against Wildlife Crime stand, we are not related, but we decided we do share a rather cool surname!

The final talk of the day was in the Authors Marquee, where we went to see Mark Avery (left) and Keith Betton (right) talking about their new book "Behind The Binoculars". The book is basically interviews with well know bird watching people on what inspired them to do all that I have done and achieved in life and conservation. They were joined on "stage" by Ian Wallace (centre right) and Debbie Pain (centre left).

Ian Wallace is a wonderful raconteur, and I am fairly sure I have seen him at one of the WOS conferences I have attended. He most certainly doesn't sit on the fence about anything, and this made for a wonderfully lively ten minutes debate. Debbie Pain. Debbie is the Conservation Director for WWT (and it would explain why I had seen her around too, I must have bumped into her at Slimbridge from time to time). The whole thing was very reminiscent of Hay Book Festival, I hope the Birdfair organisers take note of this and do a few more of these panel/ conversational type events in the fringe marquees. They can be more interesting than the endless list of people basically plugging a book (Mark's company excepted if he is reading this!).

It was a great way to end day one of our visit, we popped outside and got our traditional book signed by Mark and then it was back to the motel to wash all the sweat from our pores and go for a fantastic meal in the diner next door ... the best thing about your day one visit to Birdfair is that you get to do it all again the next day ...