The Standlake Birder

  One of the most exciting things about birding as a hobby is its complete and utter unpredictability together with the excitement and adrenaline rush that goes hand in hand with it.    Today was a case in point.   My day started off pretty normally with a shower followed by a leisurely breakfast and feeding the chickens and horses. Carolyn and I then set off for a dog walk around the idyllic countryside that surrounds our new home in Pirton. When we got home I made some freshly ground coffee and cut two slices each of Carolyn’s delicious home-made malt loaf. We sat in the area at the back of the house we call our courtyard drinking our coffee and admiring our new late summer hot border which is just starting to flower.   By now it was 11 am and, on checking my phone, I saw that my good birding buddy Nick had messaged me as follows :-   “Do you need Roller”   This could only mean one thing – an Eurasian Roller had been found somewhere in the UK!  ...

  Blyth's Reed Warbler My lovely daughter Rachel and her partner recently moved to a new house in Manchester and the plan for Father’s Day was for me to travel up on the Saturday evening and spend the Sunday with them. Unfortunately, the recent increase in Covid cases in Manchester changed the advice on meeting up so we changed our plans to meet somewhere halfway between us on Sunday. Rach and I have some track recorded of twitching together as we made a trip to see the Lammergeier  in the peak district last summer. Hence I somewhat cheekily suggested that we meet at RSPB Middleton Lakes where there was a very showy rare Blyth’s Reed Warbler. Rach was most impressed that I managed to turn a visit to see their new house into a days birding! Blyth’s Reed Warbler rates as a 2 star rarity in the Colins bird bible meaning one or a few records a year but this feels a little out of date now as annual records have been slowly increasing in recent years. While still a rarity in western...

After my long day out last Thursday, see here , I planned a relaxing weekend gardening and perhaps doing some local birding. Everything changed, however, on Friday afternoon when a very showy River Warbler was reported at Ham Wall RSPB reserve in Somerset. I waited for the bird to be reported on Saturday morning and as soon as it was set off on the 100-mile trip down to the reserve.   There have been 48 UK records of the River Warbler since 1950 but 29 of these have been on Shetland and Orkney. Many of the other records have been of 1 or 2 day short stays meaning that the last twitchable bird on the UK mainland was 11 years ago. It rates as a 3 star mega rarity in the Colins bird bible, i.e one or a few records per decade. The River Warbler belongs to the  Locustella  genu s  of warblers and there is a big clue as to their song in that name in that they sound more like insects that birds. The only comparatively common member of the genus in the UK is the Grasshopper ...

Great Reed Warbler The Great Reed Warbler falls into my well populated category of 2 out of ten birding encounters, i.e birds I have seen but very badly. Photographs of a reportedly showy individual at Besthorpe nature reserve in Nottinghamshire hence caught my eye and last Thursday I made the mainly motorway journey of some 120 miles to go and see it. The Great Reed Warbler rates as a 2-star rarity in the Colins bird bible which equates to one or a few annual records. It resembles our common Reed Warbler but is much larger with a noticeably larger head, heavy bill with a dark tip, and a broad, pale eyebrow.   They breed throughout mainland Europe and migrate to sub-Saharan Africa to over winter. The loud gruff croaking song carries a long way and is quite distinctive from the common Reed Warblers out of key scratchy rant.   I parked in the small reserve car park and made my way towards the reported reed bed. From some considerable distance the Great Reed Warblers song was soo...

  I had a potter around Grimley last Friday and was amazed by the number of Reed Warblers now present. I though Reed Warblers were territorial, indeed I have recently seen two males fighting over real estate – click here . Yet the sheer concentration of Reed Warblers in some of the patches of reeds left me wondering how territorial they really are. I tried to count how many adults were in one patch of some 10 x 10 meters. Any number is only a rough estimate as they rather obviously do not all show at the same time but I guesstimate 6 adult birds in this small patch of reed, probably more. Two singing males were right next to each other seemingly quite comfortable with close proximity. I noticed that where the concentration of Reed Warblers was at its highest the males were quite showy often signing from the tops of the reeds. In contrast the birds at Otmoor RSPB close to where I used to live seem to mainly sing from deep within the reeds.  I guess that the high concentrat...