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…
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
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…
Writing a blog in times of corona
I’d be very surprised if your mindset and mood haven’t changed a bit in the last week, maybe particularly in the last 24 hours. The world is a different place. So, what to write about in times of corona? Some of the things that I normally write about won’t happen (my diary is emptying rather…
Just for fun
I’ve been at the races at Cheltenham for the last three days. My first visit to this racecourse was 26 years ago on the Wednesday (at that time, the middle day of three) of the 1994 Cheltenham festival (of racing, I gather there are other Cheltenham festivals). On that day the first race was won…
Two bursts of song
I have been away from home, on a course at a meeting in the Cotswolds, but on Tuesday morning i was standing outside my home when I heard a strange song. Well, it started strangely, sounding almost like a Sedge Warbler’s stacatto song but it then resolved itself into a melodious Blackcap. I didn’t see…
Bird song (7) – Great Tits (2)
Forty years ago, in early April 1980 I helped my boss Dr John Krebs (now Prof The Lord Krebs of Wytham Woods, FRS) to finish off a field experiment looking at the function of bird song. Bird song is thought (I would say known, actually) to play important roles in both territorial defence (in birds…
Bird song (6) – Blackbird
I walked to the postbox down our street the other evening. The post is collected at 9am but so often when I think ‘I’ll pop along in the morning’ I later end up thinking ‘Missed the post again’. So in the evening gloom I strolled along the road past Victorian red-brick houses on the right….