The Standlake Birder

     Grimley Night Herron curtsey of Adrain Sparrowhawk For the past week or so a second calendar year Night Heron has taken up residence on the old gravel pits at Grimley just north of Worcester. I’ve seen a few in the UK over the years and so it wasn’t a drop everything and go moment but none the less these are rather spectacular herons and so I have made two visits to Grimley over the past week.   I should really say Black-crowned Night Heron as there are a number of species of Night Heron including the somewhat similar but much rarer Yellow-Crowned Night Heron. The latter has not been recorded in the UK but there was a long standing and much admired one last year in Southern Ireland.   The adult Black-Crowned night Heron is short-necked, short-legged, and stout with a primarily brown or grey plumage with, yes you guessed it, a black crown. Their eyes are a piercing red.  Two or three long white plumes, erected in greeting and courtship displays, ex...

We are well into the time of year that some birders call the summer doldrums, meaning that birding tends to be rather slow in the summer post breeding season. So I had a very pleasant and laid back day at Slimbridge this week.   I made use of the 08:15 early entry for members and made my way down to the summer walkway in an attempt to see the returning White Spotted  Bluethroat.  I narrowly missed seeing the post breeding family of elusive Bearded Tits which had been seen by the volunteers at the Shepard’s Hut before I arrived. It is assumed that they bred in the reed beds next to the river Severn. After an hour or so the Bluethroat put in a brief somewhat distant appearance on one of its favourite twigs.  In all honestly, it was looking a little tatty in moult. Remarkably, this is the 5 th  year that it has returned to exactly the same spot and I’ve managed to see it every year. Bluethroats breed in central and eastern Europe  through t...

Northern Gannet Since my last blog I’ve finally managed to fill a gaping hole  in my UK list - Montagu’s Harrier. This Harrier is sadly lost to the UK as a breeding bird and now only occurs a few times a year as a vagrant. I’ve seen them well before abroad but have managed to dip several in the UK, most notably when I spent 8  forlorn hours on a cold windy Cornwall hill after I arrived 5 minutes after the bird departed, see here. When a first summer female was reported as present over a  couple of days at a site in Buckinghamshire I toyed with the idea of trying for it again. My mind was made up around midday a week or so ago when the bird was reported as “showing well”.  After a two hour drive it took some six hours to reappear but just as I was giving up hope it was spotted by others present some way off and I finally managed to get good scope views, but no photos, of one of my big bogey birds.   I’ve been thinking about visiting ...

         Over wintering Yellow-Browed Warbler, Frampton on Severn, January 2025 One of the avian phenomena that perplexes me most is the yearly UK autumn arrival of significant numbers of Siberian Phylloscopus warblers. Every year I travel to see Yellow-Browed Warblers that are overwintering in the UK and wonder what on earth they are doing here.  This is a really perplexing one as these delightful little leaf warblers breed in the eastern palearctic and migrate to tropical and south-east Asia for the winter. So overwintering birds in the UK have flown some 5,000 km in the wrong direction in perhaps the largest UK example of reverse migration. One  intriguing possibility is that mother nature is using reverse migration to establish independent breeding colonies hence mitigating the risk of the species being wiped out by some environmental  catastrophe in their home breeding range.   I’ve ponder this perplexing question many tim...

           There seems to be a bit of a developing theme here!    I checked our ‘birding the Uk and Ireland“ WhatsApp group as I was going to bed yesterday and discovered that a really stonking male adult Desert Wheatear had been found just an hour down the M5 from home! Again someone had posted a picture on social media of a bird that had apparently been present around the playing fields at Keynham for the last week.   I’ve seen Desert Wheatear in the UK before but never an adult male in summer plumage so when it was again reported early morning today a visit was a definite no brainer! I had a couple of jobs to do around our small holding first thing so it wasn’t until around 10:30 that I parked up and walk down to the reported position by Keynham playing fields.   I met Ady and his gang from Oxford and he told me that the Wheatear had just been flushed by a jogger. Bu**er! Had I got this one completely wrong? Should I have left home fi...

       Well that’s metrological spring done and dusted then! It was a funny one with lots of sun, hardly any rain and a predominance of northly wind. It seemed quite slow for mega rarities and, as per previous blogs, most of my birding time was spent locally.   June, however, got off with an avian bang with rare birds seemly being found almost every day. Unfortunately though, they were largely either difficult or impossible to twitch. In the impossible category sits arguably the bird of the year so far, an absolutely stonking male Pallas’s Reed Bunting on Fair Isle off the coast of mainland Shetland. Weather conditions made it impossible for any birders to get there on the day it was found and there was no sign of it the following day. In the hard to twitch category sits a beautiful Blue-cheeked Bee-eater seen off and on for a couple of days on Iona, an island off the coast of Mull itself a ferry ride from Oban.   As I was thinking about heading off to bed ...