The Standlake Birder

  This year I set myself two birding goals. Firstly, to add 20 new birds to my UK list. Secondly, to get some better photographs of some of the more common birds I had failed to photograph well in the past. Given the background of another grim pandemic year, which pretty much wiped out the first couple of months in lockdown, I was very pleased with the outcome. I’ve added a whacking 26 new birds to my UK life list and have manged at last to get half decent photos of Wood Warbler and Pied Flycatcher. Although my focus was not on a year list, I still managed a half decent total of 222, largely due to my week in Shetland in the autumn.   So without further a do here are my personal year highlights. Bird of the year    This was oh so nearly dip of the year but, at the 4 th  attempt, I finally managed to life tick the elusive Belted Kingfisher in Lancashire. This was made all the more rewarding after two previous harrowing encounters with the infamous slope of death....

         Belted Kingfisher I have had three failed attempts, or dips as birders call them, to see the Lancashire Belted Kingfisher over the last few weeks, including two harrowing encounters with the slope of death, see here .     So when the bird was relocated a few miles away from its original location in an altogether less challenging spot I was soon off on my 4 th  attempt to see this truly stunning mega rare vagrant from North America. We had friends from the village coming to dinner on Wednesday night so I really didn’t fancy a strength sapping silly o’clock departure.  I hence left home at 07:00 on Wednesday morning and heading north again up the car park previously known as the M6.   The Kingfisher had relocated close to Samlesbury at a place called Roach Bridge on the river Darwen. I arrived at 09:30, found a parking spot very close to the bridge, and set off along a muddy footpath towards the reported location. Disconcerti...

    Barred Warbler Some 18 months ago I traded in my trusted 1DX mrk 1 and upgraded to the new mrk 3. I was very happy with my old 1DX but the shutter count was starting to get high and I decided to go for the mrk 3 while the mrk 1 still had reasonable residual value. For still photography the improvements in the mrk 3 were largely incremental apart from the new live mode which appeared to make the camera a kind of hybrid between mirrorless and traditional DSLR.            I’ve been largely disappointed with the mrk 3. The increment improvements for stills are so modest as to not make any perceivable difference. The live mode is simply unusable handholding a telephoto lens and the camera would often lock up completely requiring it to be turned on and off at the most inconvenient moments. To make matters even worse the new eye detection software only seemed to be available in the unusable live mode. Cannon recommend a software update to sort out th...

Pintail The end of autumn and start of winter brings a seasonal change to my birding. The mad autumn rush to drop everything and twitch a rare bird being largely replaced by the all together more leisurely and chilled pursuit of days out winter birding in my favourite spots. I am very fortune indeed to have three good winter birding sites within an hour’s drive from home.         Slimbridge, at least in my humble opinion, comes into its own in winter. Large flocks of overwintering wildfowl gather providing a dazzling spectacle guaranteed  to lighten up the shortest and dullest days of winter.   My two other favourite haunts are the winter woodlands at the Forest of Dean and Wyre Forest.  Both can be good for wintering birds with the Forest of Dean being particularly good for Hawfinches while, later in winter, the Wyle Forest is good for Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers.   On Wednesday I hence decided to dig out my thermals from the bottom of m...

Little Auk On Saturday I set off on a mission to fill a gaping hole in my UK bird list by means of a Little Auk which had recently taken up residence at Weymouth Harbour. I would not call it a rare bird as such, many hundreds pass down the east coast during late autumn on migration, but views are normally distant and you can spend the whole day sea watching without seeing one only to find a report of a hundred flying by the spot you were starting at a few days later. These sea watching views are normally distant and brief and somewhat physically challenging! What is rare is to have one stay in a pleasant location allowing decent views. This exact opportunity presented itself when last week a bird took a liking to Weymouth harbour and its multitude of moored boats.   The little Auk as its name suggests is our smallest and most northern Auk, no bigger than a Starling. It is black and white with a very small stubby bill. In flight its small wings are flapped rapidly in a distinctive w...