The Standlake Birder

Humbug! With nothing to motivate me to get in the biscuit tin (aka the garage curtsey car) for a long drive, local birding has again been the name of the game since my last blog.   Some non-birding villagers told me that there used to be Nightingales in some of the small local woods in Pirton. Given that Worcestershire’s main breeding population is not too many miles away this certainly seemed plausible. So I’ve been making evening visits to some of the local small and very overgrown woodland. Although the habitat looks ideal and I’ve stayed to near dark, there was no sign of any Nightingales.  What there were, however, were  lots of biting midges! The info came from villagers who have lived in the village for a long time so it is quite likely that there used to be Nightingales there but sadly no more.   Today I spent a few very chilled out hours at Grimley and Upton Warren.   It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve been to Grimley when the first few Re...

      Black-winged Stilt Carrying on with last weeks theme, pseudo-local birding was the name of the game again this week. Doubly so as my normal bird-mobile is in the garage and the curtesy car is best described as a biscuit tin on wheels which I wouldn’t really fancy driving any distance. It does, however, have the advantage that it seems to use no fuel whatsoever.   Slimbridge was my chosen destination yesterday, a far cry from the peace and tranquillity of last weeks Wyre forest but, when the crowds of children start to annoy me, I remind myself that if we don’t educate this generation about  nature and our delicate planet much better than ours there really is no hope. Our relentless pursuit for higher and higher yields of chemically produced food and the resulting decimation of our insect population worries me immensely. We are probably already too late to reverse the decline in our ecosystem. I wonder how my grandchildren will look back on my generati...

     After my two recent mega twitches to see the rare Scoters in Scotland and the Grey-headed Lapwing in Northumberland some very laid back local birding was definitely what the doctor ordered this week. I am very fortunate to have the Wyre forest just 20 miles from home, a magical place where you can lose yourself completely in nature and forget the troubled outside world. It’s a place that you really can’t visit too often as a bird lover in the spring with the possibility of Dippers, Tree Pipits, Redstarts, Pied Flycatchers and Wood Warblers to delight you.   Wood Warblers normally arrive a little later than most other spring migrants and I was too early to see them on my last visit in April. So armed with coffee and biscuits I arrived at the Dry Mill Lane car park in the forest early on Thursday morning. The morning was bright and clear and my spirts were immediately lifted hearing Blackcaps and Blackbirds singing their spring serenade. Surely Blackbird song is u...

  Hooded Merganser A Stejneger’s Scoter, found at a place called Lower Largo in Scotland on the 28 th  April, constituted yet another addition to the recent good run of UK firsts. Being a round trip of some 720 miles from home this would be a mega twitch for what would probably be distant and difficult views out at sea. As I was two thirds of the way there it would have made all the sense in the world to have gone when I twitched the Northumberland Grey-headed Lapwing, see here . It was, however, not to be as other commitments meant I had to return home that night. Within the same large flock of Velvet and Common Scoters were also 2 White-winged Scoters. With only 2 records to date, this is another bird missing from my UK list, I’ve dipped one before at Musselburgh also in Scotland, and further incentive to get off my backside and in the car. What put me off was 12 hours of motorway driving and the negative thought of a possible dip of the century as I knew this was going to b...

     We were out walking our dogs yesterday morning when I said to my every suffering wife that May was a top month for rarities. We had just got home and I was making coffee when I picked up on our twitching WhatsApp group that a Grey-headed Lapwing had been found near the Scottish border in Northumberland! This would be the first UK record of this Asian Lapwing and only the 4 th  in the whole of the western  palearctic.    So after a very quick coffee I was in the car and off on the 285 mile trip to Newton-by-the-Sea. It was a mainly boring motorway drive punctuated by a few nervous stops to make sure the bird was still there – a passing raptor could be enough to spook it and make it depart!   The excellent “twitching the UK group” was providing good updates on the traffic conditions, parking and the bird on route and I arrived at 16:00 and found a space to park amongst the many cars. Walking towards the birds location is always notable for...