I’ve been fretting over how to cast my votes in the Birdwatch Birders’ Choice awards. The only one that I have completely decided upon is my choice for the Guano Award for environmental harm – DEFRA deserves to ‘win’ this and let’s hope the results are published before or during an election campaign. Whereas the…
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
It’s your choice
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The Birdwatch Birders’ Choice nominations are published – click here. Some difficult choices to be made, as always. But it’s good fun. I’ll be agonising over my voting intentions this week.
Garden birds September 2019
I did see a last Swift from the garden in September – on 3 September. September added three species to the year list but no garden-lifers. The three species are Great Spotted Woodpecker (two, together, flew high over the garden as though they were looking around rather than going anywhere in particular), a hooting Tawny…
October Birdwatch
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October Birdwatch arrived through my narrow late-Victorian letterbox afew days ago and so you’ll find it in newsagents too. Well, when I say you’ll find it there you might not. Not only because the limited numbers are bound to sell out soon but also because there are so many magazines that I find it difficult…
Garden birds August 2019
August is a month of disappearing Swifts although I sometimes see them over the garden into September. The latest record so far this year has been 27 August. I wonder whether there will be any more over the next few days. If not, it’ll be about 8 months until I can look up from the…
A bright Pallid future?
In 2017 the first pair of Pallid Harriers to nest in western Europe was reported from the Netherlands (see here). After no further nesting in the Netherlands in 2018 it might have seemed that this was a remarkable and amazing one-off event but the evidence is that Pallids are spreading west, not so slowly but…
Garden birds July 2019
July was a month of warmth, heat and rain – like most months of the year really. Everything was growing like mad in the garden though. More a month for butterflies than birds with Meadow Browns, Gatekeepers and Ringlets joining the earlier species this month. On 31 July I recorded the garden’s first Painted Lady…
August Birdwatch
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August’s Birdwatch magazine arrived with me yesterday and I’ve already read lots of it – even though it is a bumper issue with 96 pages. There’s an interesting article on what I’m still going to call Marsh Harriers in normal speech (Western Marsh Harriers, more correctly these days) which reminds me that I probably saw…
Cattle Egrets breed in Northants
This blog is based on Mike Alibone’s blog on the same subject – a must read every week (or more) for Northants birders and with enough interesting information to be of wider than local interest. I’ve become a little blase about Cattle Egrets in the last 12 months as there have been regular sightings of…
Mystery birds (2)
I was sent this photo of a mystery bird photographed in a garden in Higham Ferrers (east Northants). It was seen, appropriately enough, on 4 July. I’ve seen this bird in the wild but never as well as this. I was sent a recording of its call too, and that pretty much nailed it.