The Standlake Birder

  The start of spring in March is an exciting and very active time for my two hobbies of birding and gardening. It sees the start of migration proper with the first wave of  early arrivals such as Wheatears and Sand Martins hitting our shores. Migration is very wind direction dependent and birds will always wait for the right winds to migrate on mass.  In the absence of favourable winds spring 2023 migration has so far been quite subdued with just small numbers of migrants in the country.    On Tuesday this week a very unusual report on RBA of a flock of six or so rare Alpine Swifts, a bird I have never seen,  in Dungarvan ,Co. Waterford caught my eye. With  favourable southerly winds on Wednesday it soon became clear that the migration flood gates had opened with over one  hundred incoming Wheatears found on the Dorset coast at Portland alone. With rain forecast for the afternoon I decided to spend the morning planting ou...

With spring hopefully just around the corner, I’ve put together a photographic portfolio of birds on spring blossom that I have taken over the years. I hope you enjoy them as much as I’ve enjoyed taken them!

The view from our house over the Malverns early on 6th March   With the weather forecast looking decidedly iffy I had decided against any birding this week. I plenty of jobs around the small holding to keep me busy. A week or so ago one of the old ash trees in the paddocks, somewhat unbelievably, caught on fire. It was an old tree quite hollow at its base. We think an ember from our neighbours bonfire blew into the hollow. The wind then caught the ember and set the inside of the tree on fire. The result was an incredible furnace which funnelled up through the centre of the tree. Our local farmer spotted it and was throwing water on it when he alerted me. The fire was so intense that I could not put it out with a hose and we had to call the fire brigade. They emptied 2000 litres of water on it which eventually put it out. It left the tree in a very precarious state so our neighbours organised a tree surgeon to come and take it down. The upside of this unfortunate event is that I hav...

  The diminutive avian gem commonly known as Pallas’s Leaf Warbler lies in the well populated category in my UK bird list of 1 out of ten badly seen birds. Although I’ve seen three in the UK I have probably not laid eyes on one for more that 20 seconds in total. With an estimated total hedge viewing time for this 20 seconds in the region of 12 hours this equates to a 0.05% success rate! The issue, as with other Leaf Warblers, is not that it is particularly secretive, rather its frantic feeding method of taking insects from deep in the hedgerow together with its relentless hyperactivity make unobscured views of any duration nigh on impossible. Being a glutton for punishment, I decided to have another go at photographing one of these little beauties on Thursday this week at the Attenborough NR near Nottingham.   Pallas's Leaf Warbler breeds from Siberia  through to  northeast China where it nests in Taiga forests. It is named after the German Zoologist Peter ...