The Great Grey Shrike and the Red-backed Shrike are two Shrikes I would expect to see every year in the UK. The Great Grey Shrike is a non-breeding scarce winter vagrant to the UK with a small number overwintering here most years. There’s been a quite showy one in the farmland hedges just outside of the small village of Fillingham in Lincolnshire for a while. So with a sunny day at last forecast for this Tuesday I was on site joining a small number of other birders just after 10 am. The sun was shining as forecast but there was a bitterly cold wind blowing and initially the Shrike was keeping to the leeward side of the hedge. This particular chap has taken to hovering over a weedy field hawking voles. I have never seen this behaviour before and so this was something I very much wanted to see. After an hour or so of mainly preening and sheltering from the artic wind the shrike flew over the hedge into the foresaid field and started performing its acrobatics very much to the deligh...
A combination of post Costa Rica adventure hangover and the feeling that I’m going to get wet rot every time I leave the house in this truly vile weather has made UK birding feel like a real slog so far this year. A sodden trip to the New Forest on Wednesday did nothing to lift my spirits. I did see my main target species, Firecrest, but they were wisely keeping as dry as they possibly could within their favoured Holly habitat making views less satisfactory than on previous visits. The rest of the day was pretty much a sodden write off with most birds hiding from the cold downpours. There has been a rare American Bufflehead hanging around the Welsh coast for a few weeks which I had toyed with going to see. My experience of twitching rare ducks somewhere on a vast blank sea canvas is, to say the least, a depressing one so I had decided this one was not for me. When presumably the same bird relocated to a small lake on Anglesey the prospect of twitching it becam...