Four years ago I was participating in the Champions of the Flyway Bird Race in Israel with the three gentlemen above. It was fun and we raised a lot of money for bird conservation in Greece. But Israel is not the country in the world with the best moral credentials (nor is the UK!) and…
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
Bird song (13) – Greenfinch
I agree with regular commenter here, murray marr, that Greenfinches seem more numerous and obvious songsters this year than usual. But, there isn’t a lot to the song of the Greenfinch really; But I’m glad to hear them and see them more often – I find I’ve missed them. Greenfinches rather live under the shadow…
Bird song (12) – Great Tits (5)
In 1984, from pretty close to this time of year, and for a two-week period, I helped a fellow post-doc at the Zoology Department in Oxford carry out a field experiment in the University Parks on song recognition in Great Tits. We studied 13 male Great Tits holding territories for at least the second year…
Bird song (11 ) – Robin
It’s easy to see why the Robin is our favourite bird. They are common, occur in towns and gardens as well as the countryside, are confiding to the point of appearing friendly, easy to identify, have a nice orange patch on their breast and have beautiful dark eyes. Haven’t you ever looked deep into a…
Bird song (10) – Great Tits (4)
Male Great Tits react more strongly to the playback of Great Tit song if it is broadcast to them from the centre of their territories than from the edge. That’s not surprising, but it is interesting. And it opens up the possibility that one can measure something about song recognition by individual Great Tits through…
Silence, but not silence
I’ve been able to sit in the garden quite a lot in the last few days, sometimes working, but always with binoculars at hand. At other times, I would hear planes overhead, cars on the road, school children on their ways to and from school, and at break-times in the not-too-distant school playgrounds. There would…
My column in April Birdwatch
The editorial team at Birdwatch are very kind to me, my copy deadline for each issue has gradually crept closer to publication day to enable my political birder column to be vaguely topical. And so it was first thing on 10 March that I sent Rebecca Armstrong my words for the April issue and it…
Bird song (9) – Great Tits (3)
Song has a clear territorial function in many birds, and certainly in Great Tits. A male Great Tit’s territory is the area which he defends from other, neighbouring Great Tits, it is the area within which his mate will lay her eggs and it is the area most used for much of the nesting season….
Natural solace (2)
On my way back from hearing my first Chiffchaff I came home the pretty way, along the quiet by-road, with the potholes, through the fields, and I saw in front of me, to my left, a Red Kite suddenly arch in mid air and dive down towards a field of sheep. Now I wasn’t expecting…
Bird song (8) – Chiffchaff
When I was a lad, birding just south of Bristol, my aim was to hear a Chiffchaff in March rather than let that event slip into April. In fact, my aim was to hear a Chiffchaff before my birthday on 29 March. I usually did it, but not always – that’s why it was a…