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…
Category: VERY BIRDY: birdwatching and birding nattering
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….
Sometimes it all works out
Yesterday was a cold morning but the air was still and so it didn’t feel bitter on my regular walk around Stanwick Lakes. Great tits, dunnocks, chaffinches and robins were singing in the cold morning air. The lakes in the ex-gravel pits were partly frozen but most had small open areas of water in which…
Little owls – would you miss them?
My American friend who visited recently would have quite liked to have been shown a little owl, and I would have quite liked to have shown him one, but they are dropping out of my life. And if you can’t see a little owl in Northamptonshire then where can you see them, I ask? The…
Red kites
I see red kites quite often over my garden in east Northants now – practically every day if the weather is OK and I spend enough time looking. I saw one as I was on my way to the Post Office on Tuesday, and on both Tuesday and Wednesday, on trips to London, I saw…