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A Collared Flycatcher at Kilnsea

The Collared Flycatcher and I have a little history. A few years back I thought I had seen one in the Warren at Spurn. Being a female, distinguishing this bird from a Pied Flycatcher was by no means straightforward but it was caught and examined in the hand and believed to display the necessary distinguishing characteristics. On this basis I ticked it. A good few months later I was talking to Oxon and ex-Yorkshire birder Mick Cunningham as we both dipped a Rufus Bush Chat in Norfolk and he told me that DNA analysis had confirmed that the Spurn bird was in fact a Pied Flycatcher! Quite  a memorable dip as my UK bird list had gone down rather than up by one!   Fast forward to this Friday and I was having a morning coffee with Carolyn when a report of a bird trapped at Kilnsea in Yorkshire hit the bird alert services. As this bird was an absolutely stonking male there was no doubt about its identification. I begged forgiveness from my ever suffering wife and set off on the almost 4 hour d
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Spring in the wonderful Wyre Forest

    Pied Flycatcher I essentially did no UK birding in April for a mixture of good and bad reasons. Bad because I was ill at the start of the month, good because we were on holiday in Tuscany for the second part of the month. While there were a few rare birds around, I luckily had all but one of them on my UK bird list so I didn’t feel too hard done by!   Counterintuitively, April tends to be a very quiet month for very rare birds. My wife jokes that I have a spreadsheet for everything and its true that I do like a bit of analysis! So, to back up my statement that April is a surprisingly slow month for mega rarities, here is an analysis of new additions by month to my UK list over the past 6 years. April is the lowest and May the highest closely followed by June and October. Here’s hoping that May 2024 continues this trend!                    For my first UK birding trip for a month I decided to visit the beautifully tranquil Wyre forest just 20 miles from home. I arrived bright and ea
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Oasi WWF Padule Orti-Bottagone

   Black-winged Stilt   Our fabulous Tuscan host, Fabio, organised an excursion for us to the Oasi WWF Padule Orti-Bottagone only some 30 minutes from our villa.     The reserve is a     hot spot for Black-winged Stilts and Greater Flamingos. Our arrival we met local birder and reserve volunteer Stefano who was unlocking the gates - it was now obvious that we were going to get a private tour of the reserve! The location, I have to say, was not picturesque! The reserve was bisected by a motorway and a large factory belching out something horrible from a high chimney was on the boundary. I had read a review before we visited which said that the surround location was hardly pretty but the reserve itself was top notch for birds.   Stefano explained that on one side of the motorway was a freshwater marsh with a saline one on the other side. We made our way to the fresh marsh via walking under the motorway. We could immediately see Black-winged Stilts feeding and snoozing in their characteri
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A Tuscan Spring

Hoopoe Sometime in January we decided enough (rain and mud) was enough and to preserve our sanity we booked a spring holiday in our favourite part of Europe, Tuscany. The lack of blogs in the past month or so reflects the fun I’ve been having recently starting with an horrific dental abscess resulting in a late night visit to an emergency dentist. The dentist sorted out the abscess but in return seems to have given me some horrific bug which was the worst I’ve had for many a year and laid me low for two weeks. Three covid test were all negative so perhaps it was just a dose of flu followed by a chest infection – man flu is a truly terrible thing! Luckily, I had just about recovered in time for our Tuscan holiday.   A two hour flight to Pisa with BA followed by  a two hour drive delivered us to our villa on the outskirts of Castagneto Carducci at mid-afternoon on Monday 15 th  April. This is going to sound very snobbish but it was the first time for at least 20 years that I had flown in
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Sand Martins herald in spring with a touch of Spoonbill

  With nothing bird wise to temp me to drive any great distance I popped down to Slimbridge again o n Friday for a relaxed days birding. Making use of the members early access privilege I arrived before normal opening time and made my way to the Robbie Garnet hide where the sky seemed full of Sand Martins, an uplifting and welcome sight after such a dreadful wet winter.    Taking pictures of Hirundines is, to say the least, challenging, mainly due to the speed they move at. The more distant they are the more chance you have of getting focus to lock on but the smaller the image and hence the larger the crop and noise. This is compounded by the very high shutter speeds required, typically 1/4000 sec which almost always equates to high ISO and hence noise. To be honest this is 10% skill and 90% luck but if you shoot enough a few will be in focus as per this typical example.    From the hide I could also see an adult Spoonbill that has been present at Slimbridge since mid-February. There h
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Early spring in the Wyre Forest

  On Wednesday I met Jeremy just after dawn in the Wyre forest to look for Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers. To cut a long story short, a few hours searching where they have been in previous years only yielded two sounds of them drumming somewhere but no confirmed sightings. There was quite a nice selection of backup birds to keep us entertained, good flocks of Siskin, a few Redpoll and my first singing Chiffchaff of the spring.   Just to prove they do sometimes show themselves, here’s a picture taken in the forest two years ago.      Come mid-morning we relocated to Dowles Brook to look for Dippers where we had much more success. We spotted two very active birds almost immediately collecting nesting material with huge beaks full of moss. Assuming they were the same pair, they had chosen a new nest location compared to previous years, possibly because the water level was much higher. This led us to speculate how big a territory is and whether there could be more than one pair. Somewhat unhel
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