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,…
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
Entry G by Emma Claxton Russell
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…
Just a reminder
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….
Midnight deadline for entries to the Lockdown Nature-writing challenge
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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,…
Bird song (42) – Bittern
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…
Midnight tomorrow – entries for this blog’s Nature-writing Challenge
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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…
What can BirdTrack tell us about birds, birders and lockdown?
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…
Bird song (41) – Mistle Thrush
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…
Lockdown Nature-writing Challenge – closes midnight Thursday
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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…
Bird song (40) – Turtle Dove
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…