Distant record shot of the Killdeer in the January gloom I was just settling down to a relaxing coffee after early morning smallholding chores on Wednesday morning when the surprising news that a Killdeer had been found in Hampshire hit the bird alert services. I wouldn’t normally expect a “drop everything and twitch” moment in January, that’s much more likely in the spring and autumn, but, with three new UK ticks in the past two years and now the promise of a fourth, January seems to becoming the new October for me. After begging forgiveness from my long suffering wife, I loaded up the car and set off on the two and a half hour drive to Ripley. Birds turn up in the most unlikely of places and this American beauty was no exception. It had been found on a small reservoir adjacent to a pig farm in the tiny hamlet of Ripley. I’m guessing that the local birder who found it must have thought that all his Christmas’s had come at once! I thought parking was li...
Green Heron After one final visit to the bird feeders and breakfast we left Selva Verde and made our way by coach towards our next port of call, Laguna lodge on the northern Caribbean coast. On route we drove through a large banana plantation, where we saw the banana equivalent of a railroad crossing as huge bunch after bunch of bananas were pulled across the road on a very Heath Robinson looking contraption. This is a memory that I’m sure will float back to me the next time I am enjoying a Costa Rican banana. Driving further along the road we saw a group of people looking up into a tree where a Two Toed Sloth was miraculously right out in the open munching on leaves. The others we had seen were more like big furry tennis balls curled up and asleep. Two-toed sloths spend most of their lives hanging upside down from trees. Strangely, they actually can’t walk, so they pull themselves hand-over-hand to move around in their characteristic extremely slow ma...