The Standlake Birder

  I’ve seen a couple of Baikal Teals in the UK, most recently 2 years ago at RSPB Greylake on the Somerset levels. It sits in that well populated category on my UK list that I’ve mentioned many times in blogs before, i.e. seen but badly!   Now a little surprisingly given its two year absence, what is presumably the returning  adult drake was re-found at Greylake yesterday.  So, with at least some sun forecast to break the seemingly endlessly monotonous  dull December days today, off I went on the 90 minute journey down the M5 to see if I could get some better views.    While checking previous Baikal Teal records I discovered that the Greylake bird from two years ago was the only UK bird I have seen that has been accepted as wild by the great powers to be providing further incentive to visit. A short walk from an almost full car park took me to the same hide overlooking a large expanse of water that I last visited two years ago. The small...

With tongue in cheek, I normally call my annual birding reviews “Top of the Flops” but this seems a really disingenuous title for a truly exceptional year during which I added a staggering 27 birds to my UK life list.   The birding event of the year, perhaps even of the decade, was the star spangled influx of ultra-rare American passerines in September driven by an unprecedented combination of events. Lee, a truly  monstrous storm sprawling across some 15,000 square miles of the Atlantic with winds up to 165mph coincided with the mass migration of passerines along the west coast of north America. The resulting sheer number of rare passerines blown to our shores was quite overwhelming ,for example 46 rare vagrant Red-eyed Vireos were found within the space of a few days. The epicentre of the fall of rare birds, and hence the September destination for many UK based birders,  was the Pembrokeshire islands and mainland coast, see my bird of the year below. Every sil...

  Waxwing Every winter a small number of Waxwings can be found in the UK, mainly in the north and northeast. Just occasionally, a mass eruption occurs with many thousands of birds that would usually overwinter in Scandinavia relocating to the UK. We call this very welcome phenomena a “Waxwing Winter”.  Such an eruption has occurred this year with remarkable flocks exceeding a thousand birds relocating to Scotland in the late autumn and early winter to feed on the abundant  berry crop. Rowan berries are a particular favourite. I always thought that these mass eruptions only occur when the berry crop has failed in Scandinavia but a number of people have told me that the berry crop there has been very good this year. So I’m not sure what has driven this year’s mass eruption.   As the berry crop further north becomes exhausted the birds move south in search of food and so I’ve been waiting for a photo opportunity from some local birds. With not much else around...

   Canvasback ( its the one with the long black beak) curtsey of Nick Truby   Ornamental ducks are perhaps the most difficult and controversial birds that are on the current  British bird list. They are widely kept in collections and as such differentiating a genuine wild vagrant from an escapee is extremely challenging and sometimes impossible. I’ve discussed the issue of proving a birds provenance before, see here , but in summary a ring or isotopic analysis of a sample are required to prove beyond all doubt that the bird is a genuine vagrant. In the absence of this objective evidence of origin much more subjective factors are used to prove that the bird is “probably” a genuine wild bird. You could, however,  strongly argue that in the absence of the definitive evidence above, none of these ornamental ducks should be on the UK list of accepted wild birds   The Canvasback is the North American cousin of our common Pochard and is kept in some UK o...