The Standlake Birder -

  I took advantage of the lovely spring weather last week and visited my local happy place, the Wyre forest just 30 minutes from home. I arrived just after dawn and was greeted by a glorious dawn chorus in full swing. It was very obvious that the Chiffchaffs had arrived back from Africa on mass as they were very vocal. Some people find their Chiff-Chaff song monotonous but I love it (!), it almost feels to me that they are shouting “spring is here!”       I spent the first couple of hours looking for Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers. To cut a long story short, I heard drilling and was treated to one very brief view that did not trouble my camera. Not to worry, that’s better than nothing and I will almost certainly be back very soon!   Around mid-morning I relocated to Dowles Brook to look for Dippers and immediately spotted one looking very chilled out and inactive on a branch over the stream. Dippers are small, chunky, stout, short-tailed, short-winged, strong-legged...

      I like to try and find a sunny still day in March to go looking for two heathland specialists, Dartford Warbler and Woodlark. My go to place for this is Thursley Common in Surrey, a 325 hectares National Nature Reserve featuring extensive areas of open dry heathland, peat bogs, pine, and deciduous woodlands. It is famous as the summer residence until a few years back of Colin the incredibly confiding Cuckoo. The site is extremely well managed by Nature England and is perfect for heathland specialists.   I’ve always found it a very peaceful, and in the midweek when I go at least, a comparatively quiet spot for Dartford’s. This year, however, I decided to try another  site first in Berkshire which had the advantage of being 40 miles closer to home.   I spent a couple of hours at this new site for me on a sunny but cold morning this week. While there were lots of Stonechats and a few Woodlarks there I failed to either hear or see Dartford’s. To be h...

  My recent experiences with the hummingbirds of Costa Rica led me to ponder the why and how of the dazzling phenomena of Iridescence. As a recap, look at the two pictures of the Fiery-throated Hummingbird above.  From sideways on this Hummingbird appears emerald green but front on it is truly transformed into a veritable artists pallet of colours. To see the Fiery throat you have to be essentially face on, a few degrees either side and the fiery iridescence disappears. You would certainly be forgiven for thinking these were two entirely different birds.   I guess it’s fairly obvious that the colouration is not your run of the mill pigment colouration. In fact Hummingbirds are coloured by what’s known as structural colouration. This is a similar effect to how a prism splits light into its constituent colours. The Hummingbirds feathers have specialised pancake microscopic structures called melanosomes.  These contain little air bubbles that refract the light...

Fiery-throated Hummingbird   Now if you asked me when I was, say 18, if I would make it to three score years and ten on the 17 th  of November 2025 I would probably have laughed  in your face and said of course not. But here I was celebrating hitting the milestone in some style at the end of my wonderful Costa Rican adventure.   We had planned a leisurely departure from the Savegre complex before a day’s birding on the way back to the capital for our flight home on the next day. Our plans, however, were thrown into the air when we discovered that the only long winding road out of the complex was going to be shut for the day for road works! We hence had a hurried breakfast and departure before we were trapped for the day the wrong side of the road works. After passing the road works we all relaxed a little and looked forward to our final full days birding in paradise.    We stopped at the lovely Miriam’s Café where we enjoyed the hummingbird feeders whi...

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...