Standing up for Nature
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…
This is a very localised breeding bird in the UK; its main stronghold is the Nene Washes near Peterborough where c90% of the UK population is found, mostly on land managed by the RSPB which also has nesting Cranes and Corncrakes (and Snipe, Lapwing and Oystercatcher – the previous three blogs on song in this…
The song of the Snipe is made by two vibrating feathers in its tail, captured brilliantly by Tim Melling in the image above. And Tim wrote of the discovery of this phenomenon in a blog a couple of years ago: During the early years of the twentieth century debate raged as to whether this sound…
A farmland bird which has declined greatly due to agricultural changes – notably the switch from spring-sown to autumn-sown cereals, drainage of wetlands and the move from hay to silage. In southern England at least, Lapwings have become, as breeding birds, much more concentrated on nature reserves. But there you will still hear the peee-wit…
Entries are beginning to trickle in for this Nature-writing Challenge. Thank you for those, and the promises of more, but you have plenty of time, 10 days, to add to the number. Across the world, people are experiencing a shared concern for themselves and their loved ones and many are enduring a period of social…
I’ve been in my garden a lot in the last four weeks. I can make phone calls, read things and think – I can’t easily write – but I can also watch birds. And so I have 22 complete bird lists out of 28 days (they are complete in the sense that I made a…