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…
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
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)….
Birdwatch March issue
The March Birdwatch looks very fresh and clean and comes in its new potato starch wrapper – but what about the articles? Dominic Mitchell mentions the recent acceptance of a bird close to the heart of many Northants birders – the Falcated Duck of 1986-87 and 1987-88. This was the first British record. Although the…
Birdwatch wrapper good enough to eat?
The wrapper on my March Birdwatch magazine looked different… and it is. I’m glad to see that Birdwatch alongside many other magazines, but far from all of them, has switched away from plastic wrappers and, in this case, to potato starch. Good for them! And although I am sure that the managing editor, Dominic Mitchell…
Slightly odd ‘story’
In the Guardian there is a slightly odd story about how disadvantaged people are by not having access to National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. From Exmoor to Northumberland, the country’s poorest people are being denied access to England’s most beautiful countryside and missing out on the mental and physical health benefits that…
USAF to deny airspace to UK birds in The Fens
I’d never heard of Quartz so I am indebted to a reader for sending me this link which describes the search for an outfit to scare birds away from RAF (ho! ho!) Mildenhall and Lakenheath. It reminded me of when the RSPB bought Lakenheath Fen (then a bunch of carrot fields) and wanted to turn…
I’ve done my BGBW and it was fun!
Long-tailed Tit. Photo: Tim Melling I looked out between 9am and 10am to record the birds I saw in my garden. It’s a good ritual which brings hundreds of thousands of people together in a common activity and thinking about nature for a while each year. My records were as follows; species seen in chronological…