The Standlake Birder

    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...