The latest Birdwatch is now out – my column promotes Gavin Gamble’s e-petition. Elsewhere in the magazine is an interesting review of the Hawfinch invasion – have you seen any? No, nor have I – but I keep looking up and hoping. Bill Oddie writes about birding Scilly this autumn – and getting wet and…
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
Make your choices
The Birdwatch Birders’ Choice Awards are now open for your votes – and there are some very difficult choices too. Who will be Conservation Hero? Will it be Helen Glover and Steve Backshall who raised £300,000 for the World Land Trust (of which I am a trustee)? Or my friend Ruth Peacey who has supported…
Junk from the Guardian
Consider which you would consider as five of the best UK birdwatching sites. It would be tricky to name your top five but I wonder whether the five sites picked out by Rachel Dixon in the Guardian would get in your top 100? 200? I guess every five are ‘five of the best’ in a…
Birdwatch and British Wildlife
I didn’t plan it, but if I’d thought about it then maybe I would have done. In my columns in the current issues of British Wildlife and Birdwatch I discuss two issues where opinions differ. In British Wildlife I discuss the rather poor working relationship between animal welfare organisations and nature conservation organisations and contrast…
Those fledged Pallid Harriers from The Netherlands
This was the story – click here. And here is the video… Lovely – just lovely!
Pallid Harriers nest successfully in The Netherlands
The first nesting of Pallid Harriers in western Europe has occurred in the Netherlands this year, and the birds have fledged four young (all females). The birds were discovered by Willem-Pier Vellinga, a volunteer of the Dutch Montagu’s Harrier Foundation. This successful nesting of a rare species is only now being publicised at the…
News from my patch, Stanwick Lakes
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There is a colony of Black-headed Gulls on the lake next to the A45 which forms part of my local patch of Stanwick Lakes. And this year, some of the gulls with black heads really did have black heads because they were Mediterranean Gulls, a pair of which nested among the brown-headed Black-headed Gulls. …
House Martins
It seems that many of you are missing your House Martins this year too. The other evening there was just an occasional single bird flying above me as I sat in the garden in the evening – I’d expect them to be present almost all the time and in numbers of up to double figures….
House Martins – it looks like a poor year
One of the problems of not having been in the UK for about a month this spring is that I have not seen spring build as I normally do. And I am still catching up. The few pairs of House Martins in my street aren’t there this year. And there aren’t any just around the…
Birdwatchers are smoking mad
Birdwatchers are up in arms at the description of the new colour for cigarette packets as ‘the world’s ugliest colour’. Pantone 448 c is the colour which dominates the wardrobes of many UK birders – although not that of Lee G R Evans. Staff of clothing firms Country Innovation, Rohan and Paramo are reaching…