I've now been birding for 25+ years on a predominantly local patch bias. This area is the south Essex region around Southend-on-Sea which includes a number of different locations and habitats. It must be said that despite being on the coast it is severely over shadowed by other far better birding counties that bookend it, namely Suffolk and Kent. Even north Essex has better birding by a long way. That said perseverance over the years has brought the birders of Southend a number of decent birds (Cream-coloured Courser, Olive-backed Pipit, Red-throated Pipit, Red-rumped Swallows, Steppe Grey Shrike, Lesser Grey Shrike etc) whilst my own best local finds include Gull-billed Tern, Black Kite, Red-footed Falcon, five Ring-billed Gulls (including Rossi) and numerous scarce county birds, Shrikes, Wrynecks, Crane, Dotterels etc.
Over the years I have become an avid gull watcher and I discovered the now regular mid summer influx of Mediterranean Gulls along the seafront just east of Southend Pier with county record counts from there for the past four years, highest count so far is 186 birds on 26th July 2009. I spent early days gull watching at Paglesham Lagoon and Hole Haven Creek searching for Caspian Gull but it was in early 2009 that I was able to get onto a local rubbish tip at weekends where the numbers of birds being found and seen very well dramatically increased. I have now lost track of how many Caspian Gulls I have seen locally but I have seen more in the county than any other birder.
In the mid 1980's I stretched my horizons from my local area with a visit to those stunning islands, the Isles of Scilly. Ever since then I have been back virtually every year in October as well as at other times and Scilly is without doubt my most favorite place on the planet with spring trips now rapidly becoming as regular a feature as those in October.
In the mid 1990's I began my overseas birding exploits with a spring visit to Eilat and that really opened my eyes to what I had been missing. I now get away every year, sometimes two or three times, with far flung destinations such as Peru, New Zealand, California, China, Costa Rica, Kenya, Namibia, Uganda, Ecuador, Australia and Nepal all bringing some wonderful experiences.
During the early part of 2002 I got hooked on a new fad, digiscoping, which opened up a whole new arena. This swiftly took over from the more expensive film photography I had been doing up until that point. However in 2005 I progressed to a Canon digital SLR set up, a 20D and 100-400mm lens, as I wanted to improve my photos. My shots suddenly took leaps and bounds in terms of quality, I was now really hooked. In 2006 I bought a Canon 500mm lens and was now spending more time looking down a camera lens than a scope.
In 2008 I upgraded the camera body to the Canon EOS 1D MKIII and found that it was easier to get great flight shots than with the 20D though it took a little practice with all the settings and the end images, when you get them right are superb however I have experience ongoing issues with the body, as have many other photographers with my bug bears being i) the constant focus searching despite all the 'right' settings, ii) a still grainy end image (despite the camera supposedly being the best in its class at the time of release. A number of functional/mechanical problems have also occurred, the lens mounting ring needing to be replaced when my 500mm lens wouldn't lock on and nearly fell off in Oz, the SET button has become stuck and there's a permanent mark on the sensor that just will not shift and so on. All of this faults after the warranty ran out which meant lots of additional money to shell out. Addendum (21/06/10): The shutter is now locked and I can't take any pictures now at all, my advice Get a Nikon.
As for twitching I go very infrequently these days, in no small part to less lifers turning up for me though I think though the prospect of sometimes having to spend 8+ hours in a car on an overnight drive to get to the bird and then travel back again is just to much these day. This coupled having some bad long distant dips, the lure of gull watching, photographing local birds and having seen most of those UK lifers overseas I rarely go further than a couple of hours from home for a new bird. Still there are some birds I will go for which the photo pages prove. My rarities pages will seem a little sparce due to my lack of traveling for everything and anything with most of my years rarities coming from Scilly.
So basically I'm a local patch working birding photographer that is mad on gulls that wants to live on Scilly whilst traveling the world taking pictures of everything.
Digital SLR set up
Canon 1D MKIII Digital SLR body
Canon 20D Digital SLR body
Canon 500mm IS USM L F4 lens
Canon 100-400, IS USM L F5.6 zoom lens
Canon 1.4x MKII extender
Sigma 28-300mm 1:3 Macro F5-63
Digiscoping set up
Nikon P5000 Coolpix
Swarovski 80HDS with 30x eye-piece
Swarovski Digiscoping adapter