You are reading a single comment by @adroit and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@adroit
I rode the Berkshire Bird race with a couple of mates.
This is an annual event normally done by teams in a car, who clock up about 300 miles criss crossing the county to find as many birds as possible, then come back and complain about climate change affecting bird numbers.
We started doing it by bike about 5 years ago, and have managed to improve every year, this year we started at 4 am and covered about 62 miles, and set a new record of 100 birds.
We rode for 16 hours and had to carry binoculars and telescopes, as well as food and drink. It was frosty at dawn, by mid morning we were hot, so our panniers were bulging with discarded clobber. One of our team stripped a pedal thread, so for two hours he limped along by clipping the pedal to his shoe and sticking it in the hole where the thread should be, before we got a spare bike delivered. Much of the ride is off road, round gravel pits and across farmland and heath, so it is hard work. We found some pretty scarce birds, Lesser Whitethroat, Firecrest, Arctic Tern, Tree Pipit, Dartford Warbler for example.
We were last, of course, but not by much, the next team drove for 24 hours, and found 101 species, and the best team also took 24 hours and found 112. Judged on birds per mile we were nearly 4 times as successful as the drivers!