This month’s Birdwatch

Mark 7 Comments

I travelled into London yesterday which meant that I could read this month’s Birdwatch (the one with the Crane on the cover).

My ‘political birder’ column is about vicarious liability.

Usually,I look through the accounts of the rarities in Birdwatch and think to myself a mixture of ‘I’d never have realised what that was’, ‘I wish I had seen that one’, and ‘I wonder when one of those will turn up at Stanwick Lakes’, but this time I looked at the photo of a gull and thought ‘that looks familiar’ and so it was. It was the Laughing Gull that I had seen on Sunday, but I also recognised the cafe behind it!

My friends Alan Davies and Ruth Miller currently hold the record for the number of birds seen in a calendar year – an amazing 4341 species (read about it in the new edition of their book The Biggest Twitch (foreword by me)) but this year, I read, a young American, Noah Strycker, is aiming to pass the 5000-species mark. He started the year in the Antarctic, and there is another Antarctic article in Birdwatch – about birds seen in Shackleton’s footsteps.

Elsewhere, as well as all these penguins, there is more about gulls. For a few weeks my daughter had seen Bonaparte’s Gull and I hadn’t, but then I went to the US and saw one on Memorial Day with friends in New York State. There is an excellent article on how you might pick out a Bonaparte’s amongst the Black-headed Gulls on your local patch, or maybe just in the park. I’ll be looking harder from now on.

And there is more –  Cranes, book reviews, reintroductions, optics reviews. vegetarianism and much more. There is even a guide to what birds you might see in the Upper Derwent Valley – but it doesn’t mention the fact that it might be raining very hard.

Birdwatch is always a good read, but sometimes I just don’t get around to reading it as much as I have this month. Subscribe here.

 

[registration_form]

7 Replies to “This month’s Birdwatch”

  1. I read ‘The Biggest Twitch’ on a birding holiday. Their accounts were so vivid, I didn’t know what country I was in when I woke up each morning.

  2. “My friends Alan Davies and Ruth Miller currently hold the record for the number of birds seen in a calendar year – an amazing 4341 species (read about it in the new edition of their book The Biggest Twitch”…………….maybe they could clarify the carbon profile of this particular worthless”epic”.

  3. “My friends Alan Davies and Ruth Miller currently hold the record for the number of birds seen in a calendar year – an amazing 4341 species (read about it in the new edition of their book The Biggest Twitch (foreword by me)) but this year, I read, a young American, Noah Strycker, is aiming to pass the 5000-species mark.”

    Climate change. It’s just something that happens to other people, isn’t it?

  4. A bit puzzled by your promotion of the pointless pursuit of listing and racking up huge carbon footprints in the process when climate change is probably one of the biggest threats to wildlife?

    1. Gert – a bit puzzled that you say that when I was promoting a magazine. It’s an interesting read. Unless you are criticising me for reading it on the train.

Comments are closed.