Where did June go? I know I was in Scotland for over a week (and you know I was there too as I wrote about the Flow Country here and here) but suddenly June is gone. I have added a species to my garden list for the year but not to the overall garden list…
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
A review paper in British Birds
Here are a few quotes from the paper; Since I am known for campaigning for a ban on driven grouse shooting, I should be clear that I am not in favour of banning Pheasant shooting. Pheasants are naturalised in all European countries except Iceland. The European population, as measured in spring by national bird monitoring…
June Birdwatch
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June’s Birdwatch is full of good stuff. This article about the World Land Trust‘s 30th anniversary is well worth a read, for example. There’s an identification guide to pratincoles which took me back to August 1973, I think it was 1973, when two friends and I found a Black-winged Pratincole in Norfolk. It must be…
Garden birds in May 2019
This year I am keeping a list of birds seen in or from my garden. I didn’t add any species for the year in May – which is a bit surprising. Although, I was in eastern Europe for a couple of weeks so this was really a half-month! However, it is a sad sign of…
Red Kite
Just down the road from where I live there is a Red Kite sitting on eggs. If you stop the car by the side of the narrow road and look across a very narrow field there’s the bird on its nest – almost at eye level because of the lie of the land. I’ve stopped…
Garden Birds in April 2019
This year I am keeping a list of birds seen in or from my garden. Here is the list for the year so far with the four extra species seen in April added to the bottom of the list. Robin House Sparrow Jackdaw Blackbird Woodpigeon Starling Black-headed Gull Great Tit Red Kite Carrion Crow Chaffinch…
Songbird Science
Songbirds and science The following blog is based partly on the witness statement from Wild Justice (passages in red) which was part of the claim issued to the court on 21 March (and emailed to Natural England although they will not have had a formal sealed document for some time after that due to court…
130 years of Little Owls
Little Owl. Photo: By Trebol-a (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Little Owls were successfully introduced into the UK at Lilford Hall, just down the road from me here in east Northants, by the 4th Baron Lilford in 1889; on St George’s Day, his gamekeeper found a little owl on a nest.
Big flock of Goshawks in Northants
On my walk around Stanwick Lakes this morning, in a cold northeasterly wind, I saw a pair of Sparrowhawks do a bit of half-hearted display, and a Red Kite cruised past, and Kestrel and Peregrine are always possibilities, but if I had see five Goshawks I would have been very surprised. Gos is on my…
Birds on stamps
The Royal Mail is issuing a set of stamps of birds of prey. Ten species are featured – all four falcons that nest in the UK, both the accipiters that nest in the UK, both the eagles that nest in the UK and the Buzzard and the Red Kite (which both nest in the UK)….