Lockdown birding at home By April 7th, I had already ‘enjoyed’ two weeks of self-isolation and was starting my second week of ‘ordinary’ Lockdown. I am fortunate that my garden and the fields I can see from it have most of the bird species of the surrounding habitat. I have three standard bird feeders hanging…
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Tim Melling – Malayan Porcupine
Tim writes: The name implies that this is a tropical species but it also occurs throughout the Southern Himalayas, so also goes by the name of Himalayan Porcupine (Histrix brachyura). Its scientific name translates as short-tailed porcupine, even though its tail is quite long, but this distinguishes it from the Long-tailed Porcupine (Trichys fasciculata), which…
Just a reminder
Tomorrow is International Dawn Chorus Day. Read Chris Baines’s guest blog about how this all started. Sunrise is about 5:20am but it gets light before then and birds start singing before it gets light. But the forecast is fine so I’ll set the alarm for 4:30am and step outside for half an hour or so….
Saturday cartoon by Ralph Underhill
Can you help?
Here’s a big pile of boxes; What is in the boxes? Photographic plates – lots of them. Photographs of what, you might ask? Photographs of birds, by John T Fisher. These glass plates, about 200 of them, are looking for a home, a good home. I’m merely an intermediary here. The slides were given to…
Lockdown Nature-Writing challenge entries
I’ve started being a 9-5 person. I’m now often heading to bed at 9pm and waking at around 5am. This morning, after standing outside for a few minutes, to listen to the end of the dawn chorus, I turned on my computer to see that, as I expected, there was a flood of entries for…
What people are reading…
I’ve been asked by a few people about a good bird book – lockdown is making people look at what’s around them, and in many ways, the most obvious, alluring and beautiful things to watch are birds. And that’s why they are buying these titles on Amazon… The RSPB Pocket Guide is the 138th best-selling…
Guest blog – Peregrines and licences by Bob Elliot
Bob was the head of the investigations and species protection team for the RSPB for 14 years, fighting wildlife crime both in the UK and internationally. He is now the Director for OneKind, an animal welfare charity based in Edinburgh, that exposes cruelty and persecution to Scotland’s animals via investigations, research and campaigning. @onekindtweet OneKind…
Midnight deadline for entries to the Lockdown Nature-writing challenge
Entries continue to come in for this – I have only read two of them so far! I am expecting quite a lot of entries this afternoon because most people leave things to the last minute or so. You have until midnight and all entries are very welcome. For details see below. Across the world,…
Bird song (42) – Bittern
The booming song of the Bittern is not going to be heard in every garden in the land but probably this year in more than for a long time. The combination of less noise from road and air vehicles with a booming population (that’s a pun that few can resist) means that the extraordinary song…