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Dunlin are familiar shorebirds on estuaries in winter and as passage migrants in Spring and Autumn but they nest with us too – up on the hills, in remote peatbogs the song of the Dunlin is heard. And it’s a pretty good song too. Delivered from the ground as pictured above but often in a…

This is a very localised breeding bird in the UK; its main stronghold is the Nene Washes near Peterborough where c90% of the UK population is found, mostly on land managed by the RSPB which also has nesting Cranes and Corncrakes (and Snipe, Lapwing and Oystercatcher – the previous three blogs on song in this…

The song of the Snipe is made by two vibrating feathers in its tail, captured brilliantly by Tim Melling in the image above. And Tim wrote of the discovery of this phenomenon in a blog a couple of years ago: During the early years of the twentieth century debate raged as to whether this sound…

A farmland bird which has declined greatly due to agricultural changes – notably the switch from spring-sown to autumn-sown cereals, drainage of wetlands and the move from hay to silage. In southern England at least, Lapwings have become, as breeding birds, much more concentrated on nature reserves. But there you will still hear the peee-wit…

Entries are beginning to trickle in for this Nature-writing Challenge. Thank you for those, and the promises of more, but you have plenty of time, 10 days, to add to the number. Across the world, people are experiencing a shared concern for themselves and their loved ones and many are enduring a period of social…

Curlews are pretty spectacular birds: large with amazing bills and a loud bubbling song. Once common in grasslands, wetlands and uplands across the UK they are now rare as breeders outside of the uplands. There is a pair of Curlew in the Nene Valley about six miles from my home, and I occasionally go to…

The Golden Plover has a wonderfully evocative song – only really heard in the UK on moorland areas up in the hills. The sound of it takes me right back to places like the Durham Moors and the Flow Country of northern Scotland. Golden Plovers will be singing in both those places today – I…