The Standlake Birder

  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...