The Standlake Birder

    It was my 68 th  birthday on Friday and boy did we celebrate in style! Dinner at our favourite Italian restaurant with good friends was washed down with copious amounts of Italian Red wine followed by a few Limoncello shots. We then retired to our friends house and energetically tucked into their delicious home-made toffee vodka. By all accounts a thoroughly good time was had by all but boy did I suffer on Saturday! I remember a time in the dim distant past when I didn’t get hangovers. When I was still living at home pre-university I would often go out for a few beers with my dad to his working men’s club. I remember him complaining of how hungover he was the next day but I seriously thought he was making it up as I had no experience whatsoever of this terrible curse of the drinking classes! Sadly those days seem long gone!   So with Saturday a complete write-off I resolved to get off my backside on Sunday and twitch a rare Pallid Swift which has been in a small ...

        On Tuesday of this week news started to filter out of a Little Crake at Linford Lakes Nature Reserve on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. Potentially this would be another UK tick for me in what has already been an exceptional year. I however had other more important priorities in the middle of the week, i.e. spending time  with my gorgeous little 11 month old Grandson in Manchester!   Friday was hence the first day I could go and so, buoyed by good pictures posted on social media of what is normally a shy and reclusive bird, I set off on the 2 hour drive to Milton Keynes. Linford Lakes Nature reserve is owned and managed by the parks trust. I learnt later that this was set up when the town was first created and 10% of all land has to be given to them by property developers – what an excellent scheme! Access to the site is normally by permit only but the volunteers had kindly arranged managed access on a couple of days in return for a £5 donation...

  First winter Red-headed Bunting There really was only one place to go birding this weekend, Flamborough on the east coast of Yorkshire above Hull. On offer was a Red-headed Bunting, potentially the second UK record, another mega in the form of a Two-barred Greenish Warbler, a Pallas’s Warbler, and a Dusky Warbler.    Saturday looked the better of the two weekend days so I left home at 05:30 for the 4 hour drive to Yorkshire. After a couple of breaks I pulled up at Flamborough head just before 10:00,  parked up at the Lighthouse carpark and paid £4.50 for all day parking. Not too surprisingly, many other birders had had the same idea, it fact it felt like a Shetland 2023 reunion with so many familiar faces from our autumn holiday present.   Faced with such a glut of rare birds to see I was in a  dilemma as to what to go for first. My priority for the day was the Bunting as, if accepted by the powers to be, this would be a UK tick for me. However,...