My peregrinations were taking me along the Hobbs Beach Track and away from the island’s wooded section, where my target passerines lurked. I retraced, peered into the empty little penguin nest boxes on my way and headed uphill to the trees. I didn’t get that far before my next lifer, not a passerine, but a duck.

Even New Zealand‘s mobile waterfowl had a hard time against the coming of Man. Most of them could fly but their principal predator, the swamp harrier, hunted from the air. It was more effective to freeze and let camouflage do the work. This is futile in the face of a dog, cat or a mustelid. What’s one of those? It’s a stoat, weasel or ferret. They’re all totally alien to the country and they’re not exactly pets gone wild. Nor are they farm animals.

Get this. Some idiot decided ferrets would control rabbits.

Even bigger idiots introduced them to do this and, as with the Queensland cane toad, that’s about the last thing the creatures did, preferring instead to go for sitting ducks – literally. So the brown teal is now critically endangered; there are fewer than 1,000 in the entire world. They’re as good as extinct. There’s really no way back from that low a number.

Oh, some people – very fine people – try but the future history is written. Rising populations of all the world’s endangered species does not fit with 7 billion human beings, doubling every 50 years and doubling its per capita resources grab even faster. Something will have to give, some choice will have to be made. A crunch, environmental not credit, will come and the smart money is on Homo sapiens to muscle its way to the top of the pile. We’ll sacrifice the lot before being the last to go down.

So, while it could, my life list went up by one with a pair of brown teal lurking on the edge of a pool in New Zealand’s biggest zoo. I didn’t feel guilty about ticking them, nor any of the other survivors, in those circumstances. There wouldn’t be another chance.

And the ducks were where they were supposed to be. A few centuries earlier I’d have been tripping over them. Just like our ospreys, red kites and sea eagles, and California’s condors, all of which are also on my life list. They look like success stories now but the spectre of the crunch looms for them too. ⇐ ⇒

Yellow-browed Warbler
(Phylloscopus inornatus)
(Hugh Venables) / CC BY-SA 2.0

Eight years since my last sighting, at Louth in Lincolnshire, and with only three other records before that (all around the same period), this little gem is rare indeed. Yesterday’s bird behind the Stratford Hide was perfect for spotting its striking supercilium, but even more its two wing bars and black-and-white pattern to the tertials. I was glad it had hung around through the cold snap because I’d delayed since New Years Day, when it was first reported and ringed.

Part of the reason has been not buying a permit for 2012: the office just hadn’t been open when I’d visited. But I fixed that, at a cost of £18 now. That’s a 12.5% rise on last year. So much for a 4.2% inflation rate.

To start getting my money’s worth, I spent a while in the hide, from which a female garganey floated with the usual teal flock. That made identification a little easier but it’s not hard really. Some say that the facial markings and hence its paleness are the most distinctive but I find the contrast between its flanks and back to be more obvious. There’s a definite demarcation line. The larger bill is another difference but tough to judge without a yardstick.

I have seen garganey (twice) at the Lake. Not the warbler though, which is also a Somerset bird for me. Also not on my Chew list, to my surprise, were nuthatch and siskin, which a wee stroll downriver from the dam provided. They took the total up to 122 – just two behind Upton Warren! I’d gone for yellowhammers that I’d heard about but they were not in evidence.

Another book that reiterates The Long Emergency‘s telling of the abrupt Younger Dryas climate change. Elizabeth Kolbert writes that 12,800 years ago the warming from the last Ice Age suddenly chilled for another 1,200 years. Then in a decade the temperature rose by 10 degrees plus. When the system switches, it switches fast.

Just before all this sea levels had been rising by one foot per decade. Catastrophic it wasn’t at the time but it would be for our coastal communities if repeated now.

Here’s an interesting argument from later in the book: a director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative equates the business of paying to reduce emissions with paying to abolishing slavery. The slavers back then stated that doing so would raise the price of cotton, and it did. Sounds familiar? My interpretation: doing anything will cost money and those who use that as a counter-argument have the same mindset as the anti-abolitionists.

Not part of Kolbert’s argument at all but something that occurs to me now: if civilisation is shattered by environmental catastrophe, what are the survivors likely to do with those who promoted it? Would they get the same treatment as war criminals? Or worse, given that their actions would have been the more disastrous? Something to temper the pro-industrial argument at the very least.

Anyway, I digress. A well written tome that will change nothing, such is our entrenched position. What we need is a book that sees past the dieback and delivers a blueprint for that.

This is a bit of a crappy photograph taken on my iPhone, which is not a patch on the old Nokia (that I’m selling on eBay – hint, hint!) but it records my 115th species for the town. The list now overtakes my tally for Cupertino in California.

Greylags are surprisingly uncommon in North Somerset – so much that Chew Valley is my closest location for seeing them. Only slightly more common are merlins, one of which flew fast and low along a Portbury Wharf rhyne on the day of the swan-terrorising dog. Goosanders are rare too so today’s striking drake, also in the Marina, was a treat.

I’d struggled to identify one at Chew in the middle of last week as the light faded and then in even worse conditions at Heron’s Green picked out a scaup. “Nice one!” for Somerset species number 176 – just two behind Angus.

Apart from the great crested grebe, locally the highlight was finally catching up with one of the black redstarts that have been reported round Portishead Pier and the beach below the Royal Hotel. For me it was a brief glimpse of one of the males for my first sighting since about this time last year. The species is a bit of a town speciality: five of my seven UK records cram into the last two years.

Not on my 2011 list at all, three purple sandpipers showed at Battery Point despite bloody anglers now being a permanent fixture there. Bloody anglers also managed to kill off the great northern diver at Cheddar Reservoir but not before I’d added it to my county list. Also new for Somerset was an obliging ring-billed gull at Chew Valley Lake, near Woodford Lodge. According to my OpenOffice spreadsheet that makes 175 for the county and Birdstack agrees. Phew!

Further afield, last week Upton Warren played host to flying snipe; an unsuccessful search along the Salwarpe for a reported lesser spotted woodpecker did turn up a kingfisher. On the way up Slimbridge provided the usual Bewick’s swans, white-fronted geese and golden plovers but the lesser scaup was elusive.

At the beginning of the month I did something that has never occurred to me in nearly ten years of scope ownership. I turned it on the heavens and a unique clear night revealed Jupiter’s four moons and equatorial bands right from the backyard at Pokerbird WHQ. Definitely one of the 1,001 sights to see before you die.

Ever wonder how injured birds come about? Here’s a clue. This afternoon at Portbury Wharf this sequence of pictures shows one possibility. Apologies for the quality: the action was fast and I only had my phone.

The black blob is a dog and it pretty much does a circuit of the pond in pursuit. The owner (he said he wasn’t but we’ve all heard that responsibility-evading excuse) initially tried to disassociate himself but came back when I turned the camera on him. Abuse was all he had to offer – typical dog-walker.

The very prosaic great crested grebe brought up my hundred for the local nature reserve. Prosaic yet pretty, especially in breeding plumage, the species is also new for my car-free list, according to the fading Birdstack.

Not so. The website’s demise has forced all my records on to an Excel spreadsheet (OpenOffice actually) and from this I can calculate that the grebe is as high up as number 36. A walk way back in 1996 down the Itchen Way from Winchester to Eastleigh was responsible but I knew I’d also seen plenty during my residence within binocular distance of Upton Warren.

This new version of the list also adds pintail, ruddy duck, water rail, golden and little ringed plovers, jack snipe, black-tailed godwit, greenshank, green sandpiper, willow tit and brambling – 11 species for a revised total of 158. All but one were from Upton in the 1997/8 season. That was in the days when you could still see willow tit somewhere; it used to be regular on the feeders at the Moors Pool.

Nevertheless, great crested grebe is new for Portishead, which brings the town up to match Cupertino‘s 114 species. Mountain View is still way ahead for the conurbations with 135 and Edinburgh(!) is second on 120.

Today has been the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch and, unlike last year, 52 Phoenix Way has manifested an entire bird – to whit, one magpie scavenging under the roof tiles and gutters. That’s the kind of creature you get when you cover the land with tarmac, etc.

The Lyndhurst Hotel marked the start of the Strzelecki Track and the tarmac ended not far down it. A sign in the road-train area told of conditions for sections of the route – all open when I was there. So the way was clear to Mount Hopeless, the Moomba oil fields and southern Queens­land. Hundreds of kilometres of dirt roads plied by monster trucks bowling through the heart of Australia. Directly north the same traffic ran up the Oodnadatta and Birdsville Tracks to Marree, where they diverged for the Northern Territory and western Queensland respectively.

This was Bransbury‘s direction for chestnut-breasted whiteface. A great many grasswrens – streaky brown relatives of the fairywrens – also had restricted ranges up there, as did the gibberbird. The name alone made this honeyeater a prize for me and I was right at its limit. But not this trip. I missed most of the localised endemics, which is not a surprise: it takes Australians considerable time and effort to add them to their lists.

No, I had to turn back but did so pre-breakfast to see what birds were up and about early to scrape a living from the desolation. It’s not so desolate: enough precipitation falls to keep a low layer of scrub and the recent rains had left roadside pools and ditches full of water. One held my next lifer, a bird more accustomed to estuaries so it was a long way from home although Morcombe notes that the hoary-headed grebe is nomadic. This is in sharp contrast to most species in its Podicipediformes order, which are not known for even their short-distance flying prowess. They walk even less readily, being apt to fall over because their legs are set so far back. They’re designed for swimming and diving. So a roadside pool was just right.

World birds 925 and 926 soon followed as white-backed swallows skimmed the skies and a rufous songlark had me puzzling for ages over its scratchy-scratchy song and cryptic plumage. Then, gem of all gems, a distant blaze of gold shimmered through the heat haze – too far to make out any detail but the speck could only have been one bird. A mudflat specialist but also a honeyeater, the orange chat was my 15th for the trip and 927th species for my entire life.

A celebratory coffee followed at the Beltana Roadhouse, between Leigh Creek and Parachilna, where I stopped again. For another coffee, as it happens: the high mileage, and maybe the nights’ beers, were catching up on me and staying awake was becoming a challenge.

The Prairie Hotel gave me the day’s fifth lifer with a white-winged triller perched on nearby telegraph wires. This was another bird that I’d been half-identifying in its smart black and white plumage since Western Australia. Not dissimilar to a pied wagtail, the species is actually in the cuckooshrike family. They hunt from exposed branches, which makes them easy to catch out of the corner of one’s eye while driving. They don’t always hang around for one to stop, reverse and get one’s bins on ‘em though. The triller was a welcome finale to the Flinders. ⇐ ⇒

Breathlessly written by James Howard Kunstler, and with the very long subtitle of Surviving the [End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other] Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century. My edition had a shorter one by excising the bracketed words but they are key to the book with half of it being about oil (and its curtain-raiser, coal).

Both have correlated with our rocketing world population and have defined the carrying capacity of Planet Earth. Before the Industrial Revolution our numbers struggled up to 1 billion and managed to exploit most corners of the world. Now oil allows 7 billion. And when the oil runs out… Will nuclear, hydrogen, solar, wind or hydro cut it? They’re relatively so inefficient and user-unfriendly that it seems not.

We believe that technology will deliver. Kunstler doesn’t mention biofuel but that may postdate 2004. It doesn’t change his assertion that oil also fuels technology so it’d better find an alternative before it runs out. Well before; like now, and that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Next up is climate change (not global warming!) Here’s a nugget: twice in the last 20,000 years the planet has warmed by double-digit degrees (Fahrenheit, I assume) in about a decade. So you can throw away your smooth temperature projections. It can go crazy!

Oh, we’ve had scares about the future before. I grew up with the Cold War and nuclear winter but it was only ever one threat at a time. Now the question seems to be more the order in which the many will come. End of oil; end of gas; rising sea; depleted water; exhausted soil (which in any case requires gas to fertilise it for the yields we expect); disease (exacerbated by rising temperatures). And that’s not all…

The Running on Fumes chapter is an economic history and pretty much above my head. But I recognise a few terms, enough to think that Kunstler was somehow predicting the banking and real estate crisis that knocked the bottom out of my shares not long back. If so, I’m impressed and the more ready to believe his other projections.

The final chapter is a guess of how, principally, the US may cope post-oil. It sounds rather nice, for the 6 billion who won’t die of course. But they’ll largely be Johnny Foreigners so who cares about them? The other proviso is that society doesn’t degenerate into anarchy or war – rather a big ask given our reputation.

An eye-opener for me then and I thought I was au fait with most thinking about the future. This book does continue the sustainable retreat theme, which looks like the only rational, and hopeful, course of action. We won’t like it but we’ll like the alternative worse.

Yes, it’s official: the recession has come to Pokerbird WHQ and many titles in my Lulu bookshop are as much as 50% off. Plus, until 31 January 2012 take a further 25% off these prices for all my books there. Here are those details:

“Use coupon code LULUBOOKUK305 at checkout and receive 25% off your order. The maximum savings with this promotion is £50. You can only use the code once per account, and you can’t use this coupon in combination with other coupon codes. This great offer ends on 31 January 2012 at 11:59 PM PST. While very unlikely Lulu.com reserves the right to change or revoke this offer at anytime, and of course we cannot offer this coupon where it is against the law to do so. Finally, Lulu.com incurs the cost of this discount, so it does not impact the Author’s proceeds of the book (hooray!) This coupon will work for multiple titles but savings cannot go past the maximum of £50.”