High wire Y-browed

You learn something new every day birding. Sometimes it's plumage details, sometimes calls, sometimes language. The language of birding, like taxonomy and Clements, is of course constantly changing. Take a recent addition to the birding lexicon: 'chimping'.

Shame about the perch

The Urban Dictionary, a scholarly work of reference often quoted in these pages, defines chimping as 'What one does after taking a picture with a digital camera and looking at the result. Derived from the words they speak when chimping: 'Ooo-oo-oo!'' There is a second definition offered, but you'll have to look that up yourself, it's too rude for this blushing blog.

Shame about the shade

Anyway, an excellent new verb, to chimp, capturing perfectly (by the clean definition, I mean) what the row of us digital primates photographing the Cogden Beach Sabine's Gull on Monday were doing, firing off a burst at the Gull, then frantically checking our photos for a sharp one.

Shame about the leaf

If the Sabine's Gull provided plenty of scope for chimping, the second good bird of the day, a Yellow-browed Warbler at Abbotsbury, did less so. A fast moving, leaf coloured leaf warbler surrounded by leaves, with high contrast sunshine/ shade thrown in to complicate matters, was potentially a recipe for frustration. When it did sit out for me, it was on the less than classic perch of a telephone wire. Still, probably my best yet of this species so mustn't grumble.

'Chimping' at Abbotsbury. Identity of chimps obscured to protect their privacy. No animals were harmed in the making of this picture.