The latest Birdwatch landed on my doormat today and will be available in the shops soon.
It’s what we could think of as the Hen Harrier Day issue! There’s a useful leaflet with details of Hen Harrier Day events but much more. Rob Sheldon writes about HHDays past and present and the Guest Blog by Ed Hutchings which you first read here is reproduced for an even wider audience. Dominic Mitchell, Birdwatch‘s founder and editor, points out that Bird Fair and HHDay are both the successes that they are because of the support of birders – birders like you?
Elsewhere in this issue are some hints on how to identify all the species of phalarope in the world – just the three of them (Red-necked, Grey (or Red in North America!) and Wilson’s) – and this article is sumptuously illustrated with photos of these stunning birds. Having seen Wilson’s Phalarope in many places in the western USA in May and June this took me back to the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge in Colorado where on 25 May I saw 9 Wilson’s (along with an American Bittern, 13 Cinnamon Teal, 50 White-faced Ibis and some gorgeous-looking (and rough-sounding) Yellow-headed Blackbirds). My memory for birds that I have seen (and missed) is quite good (as is my memory of winning and losing bets, funnily enough) but I can be confident of what I saw because I used eBird to maintain my bird records in the USA (300 species of bird exactly if you’ll allow me the dead BarnOwl in California).
My Birdwatch column in this issue, written in Arcata, northern California, on a day when I saw my first Vaux’s Swift, discusses the merits of both Birdtrack and eBird – both ways of keeping your birding records in order, both ways of sharing them with a wider community so that they can do good, and both infinitely better than them mouldering away in notebooks that no-one else can see (or even if they could, they couldn’t make any sense of them). But your choice of which birding software to use, and where in the world to use them, may say as much about you as it does about them.
Elsewhere Rob Hume writes the first of two articles on a short history of bird conservation – I’m interested to read what the second says.
With such riches, and more, in every issue you ought to consider a subscription – and this offer is ridiculously generous…
…if you are at the Bird Fair you’d be mad not to partake.
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