BIRD WATCHING AT SIDDICK PONDS, 270414

It was a rather grey old day in Cumbria last Sunday, but wed found out that there was supposed to be a nature reserve at Siddick Ponds near Workington, and so we set off with our binoculars and cameras to seek out more bird life to watch.

We did not get off to a great start to be perfectly honest with you. The car had developed a rather strange scraping noise after any vigorous gear changes, which I was putting down to either gearbox or clutch problems, whilst secretly hoping it was just an oil issue, and this was a troubling development when we were so far from home, but the wiser part of me was telling me that the extra round trip of forty-odd miles didn't seem likely to help the situation any.

Then we had a little trouble in finding the place, although that was our fault for not reading the "Bird-Watching in the Lake District" book properly and, after zooming back and forth along a particular stretch of road a couple of times, we pulled up and realised that the factory complexes that we'd assumed we needed to get past, were the very places that we were expected to park up in, sign up as visitors to, and collect the keys to the Hide from.

After parking, the Beloved went off to get those very keys, and I mooched around in the car park and idly took a snapshot of where we were on my telephone. Then I got bolder and, as I took out the SLR in preparation for our Bird-Watching, I decided to quickly remind myself of how it worked (it had been a while) and strolled across the car park to take a picture of some fascinating stacks of lumber, not least because I thought that it might make an interesting desktop pattern.

This was the point that a woman from Security emerged from her hutch and told me off about taking pictures, explained that no photographic equipment was allowed on site, and asked me to delete the shots from my camera, which I, of course, being a good little citizen, did, despite the fact that it caused me to wonder about a few things.

After all, did this mean that all camera phones were automatically confiscated from all employees at the start of each shift? And was this another example - of which I have heard many - in which a visibly "big" camera is seen as a threat of some kind, despite actually (because of its vintage) not being quite as "good" (in terms of picture quality at least) as the brand new telephone which had not drawn anything like the same amount of attention? Several people have now mentioned to me that they've been asked to stop taking pictures when using an SLR when everyone around them is busily snapping away with compacts and telephones as if walking around with a great big camera automatically makes you some kind of criminal, despite the fact that, I imagine, the real criminal mastermind would be using means which didn't draw anything like as much attention to themselves.

Ah well… After this incident, I rather grumpily went with the Beloved into what seemed from the short list of sightings written in the book provided, to be a relatively infrequently used Hide. We opened up a couple of viewing windows, and I used my wicked, evil camera to shoot rather a lot of pictures of the relatively few birds that we saw over the next couple of hours.

Our visit was rewarded by seeing a selection of Cormorants perching on poles and doing various display poses as they sat there drying their wings, a surprisingly active Heron, and a couple of Oyster Catchers who shared a brief "romantic moment" just a few yards away during which we actually felt that we were rather intruding upon them.

Still, that's spring for you, I suppose.

So, all-in-all, despite the grumpy old start, we'd found there was a rather nice Hide to sit in, and we got to watch a few birds for a while, and there really are few better ways to spend a Sunday morning in my book.