The Standlake Birder

  There are precious few birds that I’ve both seen and photographed well that I will drive 2 hours to see but I will make an exception for my favourite UK bird, the enigmatic Wryneck. No autumn birding in the UK is complete for me unless I have seen at least one of these beauties. So Monday morning found me in the Volvo driving 2 hours to see an exceptionally showy individual located at Exminster Marshes RSPB in Devon.   As it had already been present for a couple of days, I waited for it to be reported before setting off  and so it was near midday when I arrived at the small RSPB car park adjacent to the railway line. It was then a 30 minute or so walk down a pleasant leafy footpath to the welcoming looking Turf hotel. The hotel is next to Turf lock from where stunning views can be had over the river Exe estuary towards Exton. Those already present informed me that the bird had not been seen for several hours but that it had a habit of doing this before reappearing....

         Distant record shot of Marsh Sandpiper Prior to moving to our smallholding under the Malvern Hills some 5 years ago I spent many a happy hour in the Langley Lane bird hide at Pit 60 near Standlake. So when a rare Marsh Sandpiper was identified there on Friday morning from a photo taken the previous day I immediately started thinking about a visit.   We were looking after our two eldest grandchildren while their parents were at work over the weekend and I had already promised a Friday morning visit to Dirty Donuts, their favourite café, in Malvern. Now there was no way I was going to let the boys down, doubly so because the donuts baked and filled on site are absolutely to die for!   My Oxon birding pal, Nick , was working that morning but was planning to go with his wife Anne that afternoon so I arranged to meet them in the hide. They were already there when I arrived around 2:30 pm and Nick showed me the Sandpiper through his scope located di...

  BLOG UPDATE _22nd August 2025 Quote from Rare bird alert article   "An extraordinary ornithological milestone has been confirmed at Walberswick in Suffolk, where Zitting Cisticola Cisticola juncidis has bred for the first time in Britain. An adult was first reported at the site on 3 August, representing the first record for Suffolk. Just two weeks later, on 17 August, observers recorded two birds, with one male in full song - an early sign that breeding might be on the cards. Today, the discovery of a family party of five birds - two adults accompanied by three juveniles - has confirmed that this southern European and Asian warbler has nested successfully. The news marks the species’ first proven breeding on the British mainland and a major landmark in the ever-changing avifauna of these islands."   The photo above was taken by my mate Nick  in Lesvos earlier this spring   The Zitting Cisticola, alternatively called Fan-tailed Warbler, is a comparatively...

          This year so far birding has often seemed like trying to get blood out of a stone. Twitchable rarities have been few and far between and even scarce birds have been, well, scarce on the ground. This has made the usual summer birding doldrums seem even duller than usual.   So a juvenile rare Black Stork in Suffolk hence seemed worthy of a visit, and by this I mean a seven hour return journey drive. I’m either desperate or completely bonkers – my ever suffering wife certainly thinks the latter! I’ve only ever seen one in the UK, a brief flyover a few years back at Frampton RSPB so the chance to hopefully photograph this, by all accounts, obliging teenager was very tempting.   White Storks in the UK are troublesome  birds. They went extinct as a breeding species in Britain in 1416 when  the last recorded breeding pair nested on the roof of St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. A significant number of recently reintroduced, an...

     Grimley Night Herron curtsey of Adrain Sparrowhawk For the past week or so a second calendar year Night Heron has taken up residence on the old gravel pits at Grimley just north of Worcester. I’ve seen a few in the UK over the years and so it wasn’t a drop everything and go moment but none the less these are rather spectacular herons and so I have made two visits to Grimley over the past week.   I should really say Black-crowned Night Heron as there are a number of species of Night Heron including the somewhat similar but much rarer Yellow-Crowned Night Heron. The latter has not been recorded in the UK but there was a long standing and much admired one last year in Southern Ireland.   The adult Black-Crowned night Heron is short-necked, short-legged, and stout with a primarily brown or grey plumage with, yes you guessed it, a black crown. Their eyes are a piercing red.  Two or three long white plumes, erected in greeting and courtship displays, ex...

We are well into the time of year that some birders call the summer doldrums, meaning that birding tends to be rather slow in the summer post breeding season. So I had a very pleasant and laid back day at Slimbridge this week.   I made use of the 08:15 early entry for members and made my way down to the summer walkway in an attempt to see the returning White Spotted  Bluethroat.  I narrowly missed seeing the post breeding family of elusive Bearded Tits which had been seen by the volunteers at the Shepard’s Hut before I arrived. It is assumed that they bred in the reed beds next to the river Severn. After an hour or so the Bluethroat put in a brief somewhat distant appearance on one of its favourite twigs.  In all honestly, it was looking a little tatty in moult. Remarkably, this is the 5 th  year that it has returned to exactly the same spot and I’ve managed to see it every year. Bluethroats breed in central and eastern Europe  through t...

Northern Gannet Since my last blog I’ve finally managed to fill a gaping hole  in my UK list - Montagu’s Harrier. This Harrier is sadly lost to the UK as a breeding bird and now only occurs a few times a year as a vagrant. I’ve seen them well before abroad but have managed to dip several in the UK, most notably when I spent 8  forlorn hours on a cold windy Cornwall hill after I arrived 5 minutes after the bird departed, see here. When a first summer female was reported as present over a  couple of days at a site in Buckinghamshire I toyed with the idea of trying for it again. My mind was made up around midday a week or so ago when the bird was reported as “showing well”.  After a two hour drive it took some six hours to reappear but just as I was giving up hope it was spotted by others present some way off and I finally managed to get good scope views, but no photos, of one of my big bogey birds.   I’ve been thinking about visiting ...

         Over wintering Yellow-Browed Warbler, Frampton on Severn, January 2025 One of the avian phenomena that perplexes me most is the yearly UK autumn arrival of significant numbers of Siberian Phylloscopus warblers. Every year I travel to see Yellow-Browed Warblers that are overwintering in the UK and wonder what on earth they are doing here.  This is a really perplexing one as these delightful little leaf warblers breed in the eastern palearctic and migrate to tropical and south-east Asia for the winter. So overwintering birds in the UK have flown some 5,000 km in the wrong direction in perhaps the largest UK example of reverse migration. One  intriguing possibility is that mother nature is using reverse migration to establish independent breeding colonies hence mitigating the risk of the species being wiped out by some environmental  catastrophe in their home breeding range.   I’ve ponder this perplexing question many tim...

           There seems to be a bit of a developing theme here!    I checked our ‘birding the Uk and Ireland“ WhatsApp group as I was going to bed yesterday and discovered that a really stonking male adult Desert Wheatear had been found just an hour down the M5 from home! Again someone had posted a picture on social media of a bird that had apparently been present around the playing fields at Keynham for the last week.   I’ve seen Desert Wheatear in the UK before but never an adult male in summer plumage so when it was again reported early morning today a visit was a definite no brainer! I had a couple of jobs to do around our small holding first thing so it wasn’t until around 10:30 that I parked up and walk down to the reported position by Keynham playing fields.   I met Ady and his gang from Oxford and he told me that the Wheatear had just been flushed by a jogger. Bu**er! Had I got this one completely wrong? Should I have left home fi...

       Well that’s metrological spring done and dusted then! It was a funny one with lots of sun, hardly any rain and a predominance of northly wind. It seemed quite slow for mega rarities and, as per previous blogs, most of my birding time was spent locally.   June, however, got off with an avian bang with rare birds seemly being found almost every day. Unfortunately though, they were largely either difficult or impossible to twitch. In the impossible category sits arguably the bird of the year so far, an absolutely stonking male Pallas’s Reed Bunting on Fair Isle off the coast of mainland Shetland. Weather conditions made it impossible for any birders to get there on the day it was found and there was no sign of it the following day. In the hard to twitch category sits a beautiful Blue-cheeked Bee-eater seen off and on for a couple of days on Iona, an island off the coast of Mull itself a ferry ride from Oban.   As I was thinking about heading off to bed ...