The Standlake Birder

  A few days ago I made the short trip to Gloucestershire’s worst kept secret birding location to watch and photograph Short-eared Owls. I normally go to this location two or three times during the winter and have been blessed on occasion with some fantastic views.  I’m told the farmer maintains the fields here specifically with the Short-eared Owls in mind, meaning maintaining scrubby uncut grass, - so hats off to him or her!!    Sometimes they take to the air at midday and sometimes not until its almost dark – it’s pretty much potluck. At a guess I would say that it depends how hungry they are as their ability to find their favourite prey, voles, is much reduced in wet windy weather. This was my first visit this winter and it was great to see that at least three owls have returned. They came out  at 14:30 and continued to show well until sunset. In truth, it can be a bit of a circus at this site with many photographers present but on this occasion it...

  Water Rail The winter birding months tend to be mega rarity free and  I wouldn’t expect anything that would be an addition to my Uk bird list until at least April or more probably May. I find it hard to motivate myself to travel long distances for birds that I’ve seen well and photographed so the next 3 months will probably be mainly local.   I had a pleasant and relaxed day at Slimbridge on Monday. I hoped to see two scarce birds that had been present for a few days, namely Little Stint and Green-winged Teal. With no pressure to get there at a particular time I rolled up just before 10:00. From the car park I immediately  heard the eerie bugling of the recently returned Bewick Swans. I was, perhaps rather selfishly,  pleased to find very few visitors at the reserve, the combination of a school term weekday and winter having the desired effect. I say selfishly because, of course, the WWT are largely reliant on members and visitors for funding th...

    Little Owl, a UK introduction almost universally accepted as tickable on a UK list Many birders keep bird lists. These, for example, might record the number of birds seen in the UK, worldwide, or a particular country or area. Two issues arise when deciding what birds to include in such lists, what constitutes a species and how to identify a true wild bird as opposed to one which has escaped from an aviary. In this blog I will give my own personal thoughts on this somewhat controversial topic. My thinking on this issue will be guided by objectivity wherever possible driven by my scientific background.   The former is perhaps the easiest of these two issues to address. Modern affordable and rapid DNA sequencers provide the ability to study birds DNA rapidly and economically. It should be hence possible to define the level of DNA divergence between two birds  necessary for them to be recognised as separate species. Delving a bit further , there are a number of ...

  The Lapland Bunting is certainly not a bird I expect to see annually. In fact, the last one I saw was 4 years ago on the Malvern Hills. So when a very confiding  and photogenic male was found on the causeway at Staines Reservoir in Surrey I planned a trip to see it. Other commitments determined that the first day I could go was Friday just gone. Given that it had been there a few days already, I decided to wait for it to be reported before setting off as crawling around the M25 to dip a bird I have seen before was not very appealing! I kept an eye on both RBA and our excellent “Twitching the UK and Ireland” WhatsApp group and was pleased to see it reported on our group just before 08:00. Oddly, it didn’t get reported on RBA for another hour so it was a good job I was not solely reliant on that source of information.   The causeway on the reservoir is quite long so I parked at the end where it was mostly being reported from and walked up to the causeway. The last ti...

  The Red eyed Vireo is a comparatively common migratory bird in North America. Every Autumn a very small number are blown off course by storms and end up in Europe. The Colins bird bible rates it as a one star rarity equating to less than ten UK records per year. It is therefore a somewhat surprising omission from my UK bird list. In fact, I’ve not even ever dipped one! BOU lists 172 previous records the vast majority of which only stayed one day. So this is a definite case of snooze you lose.   There are  33 species in the true family of Vireos, a purely new world species, only 3 of which are on the UK list. The  Philadelphia Vireo and Yellow throated Vireo being the other two both of which have only been recorded once. They superficially resemble old world warblers but are not related to them.   On Sunday just gone one was reported at 08:15 at Durlston Country Park just outside of Swanage so I checked with my ever suffering wife and left home on the 3 ho...

       My birding this year seems to have mainly consisted of hours spent staring into dense vegetation looking for rare warblers. It has, however, delivered six new Warblers for my UK list, something I would not have imagined possible at the start of the year. Shrikes have the very opposite behaviour trait, often perching on the top of a bush in full view. So when a rare Isabelline shrike was discovered in Dorset it seemed like a good opportunity for some fairly laid back birding and photography. I have seen one before, a somewhat bedraggled youngster in foul weather in Devon a few years back.   Its location near Gillingham has fond memories for me being very close to where I grew up in the small village of Hindon. My dad was a bus conductor at the time and I have lovely memories of traveling on the bus with him as a small boy on the old Wilts and Dorset double decker bus from Hindon to Zeals a mile or so from Gillingham. Those were the good old days when buses...

   Pallas' Warbler Reading my blogs may give you the impression that autumn in Shetland is nonstop rare birds. Its not. There are always slower periods in a ten day stay. My blogs tend to concentrate on the big rarities but there are always slow days that, in all honesty, can be quite hard work. As in the rest of the UK, it’s all critically depended on having reasonably strong winds from the west or east. This year it was all about eastern winds and birds with hardly a sniff of anything exotic from north America. If truth be told, there’s not much else to do on Shetland at this time of year so slow days can be very hard going. Most days, however, there is at least something in terms of scarce drift migrants to go and see and photograph.   On Wednesday 9th October    a very rare American Nighthawk was reported on Yell. I thought about going but decided to wait for further information, mainly because I saw the Oxford bird so well a couple of years back. It’s a goo...