Now is the time to show that you are a European. For some strange reason, and the reason is fairly shrouded in mystery, the EU has decided to review the Birds Directive and the Habitats and Species Directive. The Dutch government was, it seems, one of the prime movers behind this and by chance will…
Tag: Stanwick Lakes
Donana 5 – wrapping up
It seems a long time ago that I was looking at herons, and raptors, and storks and larks in southern Andalucia – but the memories will stay with me. I must go back and read Portrait of a Wilderness – written about the area in the years before I was born. I remember reading Guy…
Donana 1 – a whole bunch of birds
Four days in the Coto Donana in spring sounds a pretty tough gig to you, I guess. But somebody had to do it and so an intrepid band of six of us arrived in Seville, in the rain, last Wednesday prepared to bird until we dropped. Although, in actual fact, we interspersed birding with some…
Home thoughts from Mark Avery abroad
HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD Oh, to be in England Now that April ‘s there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now! Robert Browning, of course. …
Uncoiling Spring
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I’ve been at Stanwick Lakes each morning for the last four and although Spring still has plenty of tension in it, it is beginning to unwind. Over the past four mornings Sedge Warblers have moved from absent (to my ears) to occasional, to all over the place and everywhere I would expect them to be….
Partly uncoiled
I had kept an eye on the weather forecast and rain was heading our way so I was at Stanwick Lakes for a bit of spring-spotting at 0700 this morning. It was cold again – it felt like the weather had stepped back to early March from mid-April. There was lots of song – Chiffchaffs…
Still coiled
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On Wednesday morning it was a lovely warm day and I thought I’d check how Spring was coming along before putting on a suit and heading to London to see my publisher, Bloomsbury, and then go to lunch with Lord Gnome. Stanwick Lakes was full of song: Chiffchaff song, Song Thrush song, Chaffinch song, Wren…
Not really a twitch
It wasn’t really a twitch because the birds weren’t that rare, the site was very close and I was going there anyway, but when I saw that there were a couple of Avocets at Stanwick Lakes yesterday afternoon then I got down there a bit quicker than I might otherwise have done. And there they…
Various
Things that caught my eye: a Chiffchaff caught my eye at Stanwick Lakes this morning. It also caught my ear – but with a call not a song (despite everything else being in song) so I am putting it down as a late winter visitor rather than an early spring arrival – though, who knows?!…
This month’s Birdwatch
I travelled into London yesterday which meant that I could read this month’s Birdwatch (the one with the Crane on the cover). My ‘political birder’ column is about vicarious liability. Usually,I look through the accounts of the rarities in Birdwatch and think to myself a mixture of ‘I’d never have realised what that was’, ‘I wish…