Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering

I think of Nightjars as being birds of southern England but they are actually quite widely found in the UK including parts of Wales, northern England and southern Scotland. But I first heard them on the Somerset Levels in my youth and my strongest memories of them are on heathlands in Dorset, Hampshire, Norfolk and…

Much more often heard, often at night, than seen, the Corncrake was once found in every county in Britain and Ireland – that’s about 150 years ago. But it made the mistakes of nesting in grasslands and needing to produce lots of young every year to survive. Corncrakes are short-lived – only 25-30% of adults…

Skylarks have wonderful songs but so do Woodlarks. Both have tuneful songs but they are very different so you won’t get them mixed up with each other, nor, really, with anything else. Woodlarks often, but not always, sing on the wing but instead of the Skylark’s normal hovering flight Woodlarks are always on the move,…

Wildlife from my Window I bought it from the pound shop. I really didn’t think it would work, but for a quid, I was willing to try. I stuck the small, clear-plastic bird feeder on the window on New Year’s Day and waited. The seed clumped together, it had to be emptied, washed and refilled…

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….

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,…

There are more than 20 entries already in for this blog’s Nature-writing Challenge. There’s plenty of time for you to compose your entry today, and come back to it tomorrow to polish it and send it in. Across the world, people are experiencing a shared concern for themselves and their loved ones and many are…

I haven’t recorded Mistle Trush from my garden since April 2014 and it is now a bird, another declining species, that I see rather rarely. Most of my sightings, and hearings, are in upland areas on my travels. And so when I hear a Mistle Trush sing, I have to listen to be sure that…