Eastern Black Redstart The attractive Eastern Black Redstart has been on my radar for some time as a bird I would like to see and photograph. This winter there have been two of them in the UK, one at Filey in Yorkshire earlier this winter and more recently a first winter, i.e. hatched this spring, male at Sheringham on the Norfolk coast. So on Wednesday I set sail on a pre-storm Goretti visit to Sheringham. Black Redstarts tend to spend a lot of time on the ground foraging and the Sheringham bird, true to form, had spent a long time in amongst the formal gardens on the esplanade at Sheringham. I arrived just before 10am on a truly bitterly cold morning and was immediately very glad that I had dug my thermals and warm hat out for the trip. Half a dozen people were milling around the general area the Redstart had been frequenting and it had been spotted once that morning on a roof. It took another hour or so for it to put in another brief roof appe...
My birding year was totally dominated by celebrating somehow reaching three score years and ten with 19 days of full on birding in wonderful Costa Rica. To be honest, without Costa Rica it would have been a really duff year with UK birding being poor compared to the last few years. Even Shetland in October, which I forewent for Costa Rica in November, was comparatively slow compared to previous fantastic years. The additions to my UK list were the lowest they have been since I started keeping records with just eight lifers taking me on to a UK bird list of 430 birds. Somewhat strangely, four of these eight new lifers occurred in the traditionally slow months of January and December. Here are my eight new 2025 UK ticks · White-billed Diver · Booted Eagle · Song Sparrow · Montagu’s H...