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…
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
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…
Saturday 2
You do know what day it is don’t you? Yesterday, in rural Bedfordshire, I was passing a field of unharvested beans, where the beans looked brown and crispy. I saw a raptor flying low over the crop and I wondered whether it might just be a marsh harrier so I pulled over and had a…
Going for gold – twitching to become part of the national curriculum
As a nation bids a fond farewell to the Olympic Games we turn our minds to legacy. Rather than pretend that suddenly it has become the birthright of all Britons to excel at coxless fours, dressage and wiff waff the coalition government (including the Liberal Democrats who have won golds for irrelevance for many months…
Your least favourite bird?
All birds are brilliant! It goes without saying, but I’ve said it. But it could just be that some birds are more brilliant than others. A while back, in a blog about cormorants, I said that cormorants were quite pretty really, which might be stretching things a bit, but they wouldn’t come bottom of my…
Say hello to the cuckoo
It’s May, it’s raining and for the first time for many a year, perhaps ever, I haven’t seen a cuckoo in April. My Birdtrackrecords going back to 2005 show me that I have always seen a cuckoo by now. I went out in a fine spell on Monday thinking that I should hear a cuckoo…
St George, Shakespeare and little owls
Today is St George’s Day and apparently Shakespeare’s birthday and the day he died too (how tidy!). It is also the day when little owls, an introduced species, were first proved to breed in the UK – and that was in the county of Northants and just down the road from where I am writing. …
Another world record coming up?
Some time this week a team from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology will attempt to beat the world record that they set last year of seeing the most North American bird species in a day. Last year they set a record of 264 species in Texas and that’s where they are based now. It’s not…
In praise of Birdtrack
I am a great fan of Birdtrack. I can see lots of value in the data that are accumulating there in terms of looking at future changes in bird distributions and numbers. But also it allows me to check changes at my local patch at Stanwick Lakes where I go scores of times each year….