The Standlake Birder

I’ve said to Carolyn a couple of times this week that I felt a Mega was in the offing. There’s been a large fall of birds overshooting on migration to continental Europe this week with more than 30 Red-backed Shrikes counted on Fair Isle alone. So I was hoping for some mega rare overshoot from the East. In fact the opposite happened – birding is nothing but totally unpredictable!   On Saturday I was out doing a lunchtime walk around my local patch when a report of a mega rare Indigo Bunting was posted on the bird alert services. With just 3 accepted records to date this bird really is as rare as rocking horse poo. A male in summer plumage is also a stonkingly attractive bird. The location, Whitburn in county Durham, was some 250 miles or a 4 hour drive from home. I calculated that by the time I walked home and packed the car it would be around 18:00 when I arrived. Should I go now or wait until tomorrow on the hope that it stays? I quickly decided that it was too risky to wait and ...

  On Monday I spent the day at one of my favourite reserves, RSPB Frampton on the Wash in Lincolnshire. In contrast to Worcestershire, where it pretty much rained all day, it was a lovely sunny spring day.   Frampton holds fond memories for me. Over the years I’ve added Black Stork, Buff Breasted Sandpiper and White rumped Sandpiper to my UK list at this large well managed wetland site and I hoped to reacquaint myself with a number of scare and rare birds which were on site during this visit.   My first target was a Red-breasted Goose that had been associating with its normal carrier species, the Brent Goose, on the grassland opposite the scrapes. I soon located it a little distantly, a theme for the day, in amongst the Brents and got good views through my scope.   The Red-breasted Goose breeds mainly in Artic Siberia and winters on the shores of the Black Sea. It is a rare vagrant to the British Isles where it is sometimes found with flocks of Brent or Barnacle Gees...

  We have a new residential development on our quiet country lane. I haven’t seen any planning applications posted so I’m not sure if its above board. On top of that our new neighbours are very loud and noisy singing from dawn to dusk.    Yep, the Common Whitethroats have moved in with 3 adjacent territories along our small lane. I’m not sure what the normal area requirements are for a territory but they are certainly close enough together that the males can hear each other sing.  This is contributing to how vocal and active they are as each claims to be a much better mate than their neighbour. Photographing these hyperactive little warblers is fun and almost too easy as they like to hammer out their fast and scratchy song from an exposed perch atop the bushes. I find the song has a scolding characteristic to it, perfect for telling the neighbours to shut up! Occasionally one would get so wound up by its neighbours singing that it would fly up in a hover like manner ...

The Collared Flycatcher and I have a little history. A few years back I thought I had seen one in the Warren at Spurn. Being a female, distinguishing this bird from a Pied Flycatcher was by no means straightforward but it was caught and examined in the hand and believed to display the necessary distinguishing characteristics. On this basis I ticked it. A good few months later I was talking to Oxon and ex-Yorkshire birder Mick Cunningham as we both dipped a Rufus Bush Chat in Norfolk and he told me that DNA analysis had confirmed that the Spurn bird was in fact a Pied Flycatcher! Quite  a memorable dip as my UK bird list had gone down rather than up by one!   Fast forward to this Friday and I was having a morning coffee with Carolyn when a report of a bird trapped at Kilnsea in Yorkshire hit the bird alert services. As this bird was an absolutely stonking male there was no doubt about its identification. I begged forgiveness from my ever suffering wife and set off on the a...

    Pied Flycatcher I essentially did no UK birding in April for a mixture of good and bad reasons. Bad because I was ill at the start of the month, good because we were on holiday in Tuscany for the second part of the month. While there were a few rare birds around, I luckily had all but one of them on my UK bird list so I didn’t feel too hard done by!   Counterintuitively, April tends to be a very quiet month for very rare birds. My wife jokes that I have a spreadsheet for everything and its true that I do like a bit of analysis! So, to back up my statement that April is a surprisingly slow month for mega rarities, here is an analysis of new additions by month to my UK list over the past 6 years. April is the lowest and May the highest closely followed by June and October. Here’s hoping that May 2024 continues this trend!                    For my first UK birding trip for a month I decided to visit the beautifully tranq...