I’ve never seen a Snowy Owl. I’d really like to see one. Even more would I like to see loads of them. And there have been loads and loads of them further south than usual in North America this winter. The latest Birdwatch has an article on Snowy Owls and a beautiful male on the…
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
Red Kites are normal now
Yesterday I took the train into London to meet the publishers of ‘A Message from Martha‘ for a chat. I added Great Spotted Woodpecker to my Wellingborough Station list but looked in vain for Red Kites. It was a dull day but they are usually mooching around the valley in which Wellingborough Station and the…
Bird Atlas – Winter
Winter really isn’t as interesting as the breeding season – but it’s quite interesting. Most resident passerine species have very similar distributions in the winter to those in the summer. That may sound obvious, but it needn’t necessarily be so, need it? Our Jackdaws and Chaffinches could all move to different areas of the country…
Bird Atlas – Ireland
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….
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…