Although we all will slip into talking about this fine book as the BTO Atlas it is the Atlas of the BTO, Scottish Ornithologists’ Club and Birdwatch Ireland. And it is the People’s Atlas too! Ireland, north and south of the border, is an interesting place – as revealed many times over in this Atlas….
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
The amazing needless tale of a swift
You couldn’t make it up. A rare bird, not seen in the UK for 22 years is spotted by a string of experienced birders in the north of Scotland and the twitching community get on the move. And then the bird, a member of a group that one would put near the top of one’s…
Birds in the Bath
I was in London last week and had my first ever look inside Westminster Abbey. The price of entry almost put me off – £18! And as we all queued to pay, everything paused for a prayer to come over the public address system – it’s good that the Church makes Mammon wait for God…
So that was April
As we entered April I hadn’t seen a spring migrant so I have spent the month catching up. I have now seen most of the returning spring migrants that i would expect to see locally with the exceptions of garden warbler, lesser whitethroat and hobby. My first swift on Saturday, at my local patch of…
Birdtrack gets even better
Have you had a look at Birdtrack recently? Do! You’ll be impressed.
Birding bits and pieces
I’ve done a lot of driving around the country recently – I’ve been collecting motorways. Recently I have ‘got’ M1, M4, M5, M11 and far too much of the M25 as well as glimpses of the M2, M3 and M40 – is there a prize? When you spend a lot of time in a car…
BTO Winter Thrush Survey
Last week I did my Big Society thing for the BTO winter thrush survey. There was a spell of what we will have to call fine weather in the morning and I was out looking for blackbirds, song thrushes, mistle thrushes, redwings and fieldfares, and indeed waxwings and starlings, and indeed anything else that might…
Something for a rainy day
The weather forecast isn’t great for the next few days so you might find that you are stuck indoors when you would like to be out looking at waxwings or fieldfares (I must do some winter thrush recording) or geese or holly or ivy. Here are some new maps from the BTO to get your…
Waxwings are here again
I caught up with some waxwings near my home on Thursday. Huntingdon races were abandoned because of the freezing ground and my central heating had chosen to pack up a couple of days earlier. In addition the car’s battery couldn’t cope with the cold and the AA had had to come out and get me…
Birdwatch
My latest column in Birdwatch (the one with the Sabine’s gull on the cover) discusses whether we should like pheasants or not – I’d like them more if they weren’t full of lead. I wrote in BBC Wildlife a few months ago about pheasants too – now there are lots of letters on the subject…