The Standlake Birder

While 2020 was a terrible year in so many awful ways, it was, somewhat perversely, a truly memorable birding year with many UK firsts, blockers unblocked and large autumn influxes of generally rare birds. Although a year list of 219 is very modest by my previous standards in did include an incredible 25 new UK lifers. So, without further ado, here is my birding year in review   Dip of the year   As usual this is the most keenly fought award with many worthy contenders but there is one dip that really is head and shoulders above the rest. The Rufous Bush Chat is a legendary blocker in British birding circles. In this regard blocker means a bird that has not been seen in the UK for many years and hence is regarded as a blocker on many birders UK list. The last record of any kind was in Jersey in 1998 and the last really twitchable bird was 57 years ago in Lincolnshire. So to say that considerable excitement was generated in twitching circles when one was found in Norfolk in Octo...

  Award Winning (😂😂😂😂) Pic Of Rustic Bunting I have made three birding trips out in the last week or so. They could all be characterised as being very birdy and enjoyable but a combination of winter gloom, user incompetence and distance made them somewhat non-photogenic, but, as I say, I enjoyed them very much and that’s the main thing!   I’ve made two post lockdown trips down to Thursley Common in Surrey in search of two rare Buntings.    Firstly, a Little Bunting which the Collin’s bible rates as a one star rarity equating to an annual vagrant in some numbers. It is a bird that I have only seen once before in the UK. The Little Bunting, as the name suggests, is appreciably smaller than our comparatively common resident Reed Bunting from which it is further differentiated by having a prominent pale eye ring, two buff white wing bars and more chestnutty coloured cheeks. It breeds across the taiga of the far north-east of Europe to the Russian Far East. ...

  During the current lockdown my birding activity has pretty much , well actually entirely,     been limited to my hide set up on my property near Pirton in Worcestershire. There have certainly been tempting birds to twitch, Greater Yellowlegs, stonking male Desert Wheatear and Craig Martin to name a few, of which I’ve seen precisely 0, 1 and 0 of respectively in the UK, but traveling the sort of distances involved just doesn’t sit well with me morally during lockdown. I’m sure I will enjoy twitching even more when I’m allowed to, abstinence makes the heart grow fonder after all! Looking at the great buffoon’s comments on Monday it looks as though the rules might let me twitch when lockdown ends next week. In  the meantime my hide is still set up next to the biggest of our ponds and, while the winter Thrushes seem to have m ainly moved to pastures anew, there has been plenty of other activity to keep me interested.   We have four species of Woodpeckers that it ...

  The whole area around our new home near Pirton in Worcestershire feels, with the exception of pit 60 before its painful demise, much more birdy than the countryside around Standlake. Our daily walks are accompanied by a wonderful chorus of Redwings and Fieldfares chattering away in the hedge rows and tree tops. I don’t have a methodology to accurately count them but I would guess they must amount to many thousands. We have velux windows in our kitchen and sun room and I often see them pouring overhead in what resembles a scene from Hitchcock’s famous film the birds. Once or maybe twice a day the thrushes will descend on mass to the largest of our three ponds for a drink. A  fallen tree at the back of the pond provides the birds with convenient and easy access to the water. It also acts as a very photogenic prop for my photography. I hence set up my new mobile hide last week in the hope and expectation of the Fieldfares arrival. Being at the back of the pond the fallen t...

  Nuthatch We are now very settled into our new home near Pirton in Worcestershire that we share with our 2 dogs, 3 horses and 2 chickens. We are pretty much unpacked and, lockdown 2.0 permitting, are in the midst of planning various home improvement projects in the house, stables, paddocks and garden. Birding wise our short time here has been notable for the large flocks of winter thrushes feeding on the numerous berries in the hedgerows. The large mixed flocks of Redwing and Fieldfare are very restless and noisy and often fly straight over the paddocks and house as they move from one autumnal feast to another. There are certainly many more winter thrushes here than I ever observed in Oxfordshire. I’m not sure if this is usual for this area or whether this is an exception year. We have had a Kingfisher perched on a fallen dead tree in our largest pond and a fly over Peregrine. The hedgerows around the fields adjacent to our house are home to a nice flock of Yellowhammers, a remind...

  Red-Flanked Bluetail   The Colins Bird guide lists the charismatic Red-flanked Blue Tail as a two star rarity which equates to one or UK sightings in a normal year. Historically it was a rare summer visitor in North-eastern Europe but this year has seen record numbers in Finland, giving us hope that we might get a few more vagrants than usual this autumn on route to their south-eastern Asian wintering grounds. With the much sort after, at least by birders, combination of easterly winds and short sharp showers last week we were certainly not disappointed with, incredibly, somewhere in the region of forty birds found on the English east coast. The Red-flanked Bluetail was high up on the list of UK birds I wanted to see and I needed no further encouragement whatsoever to get up at silly o’ clock last Wednesday and head for the east coast. The question was what destination to choose from the three obvious options, Yorkshire, Norfolk or Kent? In the end I opted for Kent as there ...