The Standlake Birder -

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...

Resplendent Quetzal I had originally intended this to be my last blog on the Costa Rica trip but when I checked my photos I discovered that I had 6,000 to go through taken over the last three days of the adventure.   I hence decided to split it into more manageable two blogs. The reason for so many photos from our last lodge, Savegre, was the almost overwhelming abundance and variety of photogenic birds in the area.   Our big target bird for the 16 th   November was one of Costa Rica’s most iconic and highly sought after species, the very aptly named Resplendent Quetzal. So pre-breakfast we drove to a good local site  for them where there were many purpose-built perches photogenically covered in lichen. We got there early as Paco said it could be quite busy there and sure enough there were already other parties present creating the nearest atmosphere to a twitch that we had on the whole trip.   The Quezal twitch Within minutes of our arrival ...