Shooting organisations are clearly rattled by the campaign that has been building to remove lead from the environment (a subject oft-mentioned in this blog see here, here, here, here, here for example and the subject of a Guest Blog by the BASC Comms Director, Christopher Graffius). Complying with the law as it stands is going…
BLOG POSTS
Happy Birthday BTO
Apparently the BTO is 80 today – Happy Birthday! Personally I wouldn’t have said that Andy Clements was a day over 65 but you never can tell can you? There’s quite a lot of interesting stuff about the BTO’s past on their website – click here. However, unlike for most people in their 80s, it…
Thank yous
Flight Centre at Cambridge for sorting out my flights and car hire and especially Samantha for moving quickly just before I left to correct the mistake of my car hire being booked at a different airport from the one where I arrived and left! I was lucky, in the Wayne National Forest to meet several…
David, Gladys and other companions
I wasn’t on my own as I travelled across the USA. David came with me the whole way and Gladys was there almost throughout. The Sibley ‘Guide to birds‘ was in the passenger seat of my Hyundai Sonata right the way across the USA. Border Patrol officers glanced at it and were reassured that I…
Driving, eating, drinking and sleeping across the USA
Just a few thoughts for travellers to the USA, particularly from the UK, based on my experience. And my experience, of two long trips now, is based on driving long distances and not planning ahead too much so that you have the flexibility to go where the road takes you. Driving across the USA: it’s…
USA checklist of birds
For what it’s worth, here is my bird list for five and a half weeks in the USA – just over 300 species and over 80 lifers (in bold). On a careful run through Sibley I noticed I’d missed out a few species – western grebe (from California), black vulture (from Arizona) and roadrunner…
Top 10s
I covered 8270 miles in the USA and visited 20 states (TX, LA, AR, MO, KY, IN, OH, WV, WI, MI, PA, NY, IL, KS, CO, UT, NV, CA, AZ, NM) which means, completely incidentally, that I ‘need’ to visit only Oregon, Washington, North Dakota, Iowa (how did I ‘miss’ Iowa again?), Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama,…
I have blue eyes – blog 40
I have said too little, I feel, about the music which has accompanied me across 20 US states in just over five weeks. With a little help from Francis Sinatra; Thank you for coming to fly with me to see what spring is like in Michigan, Kansas and Utah. We saw Chicago in passing, which…
Disappointed of NM, delighted of TX – blog 39
Yesterday wasn’t a perfect day. Nothing absolutely awful happened but it just didn’t work out that well. But today ended on a very high note. Yesterday I drove through New Mexico and Texas to get to a National Park of which I had heard many years ago – Carlsbad Caverns. Here I hoped to see…
Humming – blog 38
I opened the curtains to look at the feeders in Richard Fray’s ‘yard’ before 6am on Thursday morning and all the birds flew away. But then they came back and from my bed I saw two lifers – canyon towhee and varied bunting. How great is that? And there were curve-billed thrashers and jackrabbits and…