Standing up for Nature
Tim writes: Pied Flycatcher is quite a scarce bird in my local area so I was quite pleased to find one near Holmfirth. I mentioned it to a friend, who went to look and found three. As the weather was good I decided to go back and try for a photograph and this was my…
Tim writes: back in May, during lockdown, something had tipped over both of my heavy birdbaths during the night, so I bought a cheap infrared trail camera to see if I could discover the culprit. On the very first night I found I had both Fox and Badger visiting the garden, and they have continued…
Tim writes: Yellowhammer was one of the first bird songs that I learnt as a child. It is usually rendered “a little bit of bread and no cheese” but only the cheese bit chimes with me. It was Enid Blyton who popularised this rendition of the song in several of her books and poems (eg…
Tim writes: I know that this isn’t a contender for bird photograph of the year but it does show something interesting. It shows that ducks moult all their flight feathers simultaneously, so they are completely flightless for a time. Most birds moult their flight feathers gradually, one pair at a time so that they are…
Tim writes: the name warbler was coined by Thomas Pennant in 1773 so what do you think Grasshopper Warbler (Locustella naevia) was called prior to that? Well nearly a hundred years earlier in 1678, John Ray (in the first bird book in the English language) called it “The Titlark that sings like a Grasshopper, Locustella”….
I like giving talks and have given a lot of them over the last few years. But with COVID-19, the opportunities have disappeared. In some ways, this is a bit of a relief as, a bit like air travel, travelling to remote village halls in the dark on rainy days in November may sound ultra-glamorous,…
Tim writes: Green Woodpeckers are shy birds that I rarely see well. They are thin on the ground where I live in the Pennines and extremely skittish. I hear them call more often than I see them, and when I do see them it is often a flight view, or of one hiding on the…
A seemingly peaceful scene of musk ox in the mountains of Dovre National Park, Norway, though an animal that commands respect and a safe distance. They were introduced from Greenland to Norway within the last 100 years and I’ve seen these huge shaggy beasts on several occasion. However, this is not about musk ox, but…
Tim writes: have you ever thought what a daft name Spotted Flycatcher is? Even its scientific name Muscicapa striata means striped flycatcher. Well at least this one lives up to its name and has a few pale spots at the back of its head, which they don’t have for long. This is a recently fledged…
Tim writes: some years ago I served on the British Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee (BOURC) which assesses and maintains the official list of British birds. Category A of the British List is for any truly wild bird that arrived in Britain naturally. An immature Lammergeier ranged widely in Devon during May 2016 but this has…