Standing up for Nature
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,…
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…
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 am a fan of Birdtrack (more correctly BirdTrack but I can’t be bothered with that ‘T’) – I’ve said so many times on this blog. In fact I was involved in helping set it up when at the RSPB, and Birdtrack is still a collaborative enterprise with the BTO in the lead. Introduction to…
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…
Entries are coming in – but you still have plenty of time to compose and send in yours – by Thursday midnight. Across the world, people are experiencing a shared concern for themselves and their loved ones and many are enduring a period of social distancing and being cut off from wildlife. But, also, many…
The Song of Solomon talks of the voice of the turtle being heard in the land – that was the Turtle Dove, not some warbling reptile. But it is a song rather rarely heard in the land these days. The Turtle Dove was once a very common bird in southeast England and its purring was…
Jangling keys – that’s how a Corn Buntng sounds. Here are examples of jangling keys from across Europe. Here’s one from Oropesa, Spain: …and another Spanish bird from Tarifa; …and one from Yorkshire, UK; There is a single pair of Corn Buntings in Northamptonshire, I gather. I used to see them in several places, but…
The song of the House Sparrow seems to be pretty much like its call – cheep! But you can see a male House Sparrow, sitting by a nest box or opening on the edge of a roof, going ‘cheep!’ time after time after time. If it were any other bird then we’d call it a…
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…