As always, there is some good stuff in this month’s Birdwatch. As well as the good news of the guano award for YFTB and the ‘Campaign of the Year’ award for the Ban Driven Grouse Shooting e-petition, there is plenty of other good reading material.
I enjoyed reading about the first Irish Harlequin Duck record (yet to be formally accepted), the first Masked Wagtail, the travails of missing and seeing Siberian Accentor and, most of all, the Dusky Thrush story from the Peak District.
There is also information about the Turkish conservation work that will be supported by the Champions of the Flyway event in 2017.
How to tell Bewick’s, Whoopers and Mute Swans apart? Do you always get them right first time? Nor me.
Rebecca Armstrong’s report on our trip to Slovakia took me back to some great birding days in the spring (see here, here and here)
And yes it was a lovely Christmas present to be voted the Birdwatch readers’ Conservation Hero of 2016. In a year when I’ve been called lots of names by the supporters of driven grouse shooting it was lovely to have been given this totally over-the-top praise by people about whom I care much more: birders and conservationists. Thank you. But it has meant that here, at home over Christmas, I have been told several times, ‘You’re not a hero, you’re just a very naughty boy!’. That’ll do too.
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Well, keep on being a naughty boy then!
Happy New Year!
It’s amazing that the Dusky Thrush has survived so long ,on an estate with a thriving raptor population such as Chatsworth.