The Standlake Birder

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 ...

      I’ve been using my new Cannon lens for approaching two months now and thought it would be useful to share my experience with birders who read my blog. Very unfairly, I will compare it to my other go to lens combination, my cannon 500mm with x2 converter and RF adaptor.   Ease of use   It would not be an exaggeration to say that my new zoom lens has revolutionised the way I birdwatch. This is a simple and obvious result of the relative weight and size. While the 500mm prime comes in at a hefty 3.2kg the zoom lens is more than 50% lighter at just 1.5Kg. It is also a third shorter.    The large cumbersome 500 prime always limited how far it was comfortable to walk. Compared to this I hardly notice I’m carrying the zoom lens. This means I’m happy, for instance, wandering around the Wyre Forest for 7 hours. Something I would not contemplate with the 500mm prime where I would tend to stay in one or two spots.        Image Softness ...

        On Wednesday I visited Chew Valley Lake hoping to see an American Spotted Sandpiper. Chew Valley Lake is a reservoir near Chew Stoke in Somerset and is the fifth-largest artificial lake in the United Kingdom, with an area of 1,200 acres. The lake was created in 1950 and now supplies most of the water to Bristol and the surrounding area. It is unusually shallow creating an excellent habitat for birds, with some 260 species recorded to date, and is designated a Site of Specific Scientific Interest  (SSSI).   The Sandpiper was located at Herriott’s pool adjacent to the main reservoir where it had been present for two days alternating between feeding on the shoreline viewable from a layby and resting up on a much more distant wooded island. Only part of the shoreline is viewable from the layby with the rest obscured behind a thick hedge.   The Spotted Sandpiper is the American cousin of our Common Sandpiper and in non-breeding plumage they are quit...

        Wood Warbler With the exception of one failed twitch, see here, I’m still sticking with my pseudo local spring birding and thoroughly enjoying it. For an infinitesimal small period of time I did consider a mega twitch to Shetland to see a ultra-rare American sparrow but soon dismissed this foolish thought. Good job as it turns out because it was a short lived one day wonder.   So this Tuesday, with perhaps the last of this lovely weather for a while, I hatched a plan to spend most of the day in the forest again followed by an evening trip to try and see Nightjars on the Cannock Chase. I’ve mentioned before that my plan this spring is to try and get more familiar with the habitat and wildlife  at Wyre by making multiple visits. I’ve been trying, at least for part of the time, to avoid my well-worn paths and instead explore new areas of the forest.    This week I also had another particular target bird in mine, the Spotted Flycatcher, a...

          Common Whitethroat In terms of new birds for my UK list this year so far has been a very slow one.  My last addition, assuming its finally accepted, was the Cornish Booted Eagle way back in January. Still there’s been plenty of nice local stuff to keep me happy.   Hearing the first Common Whitethroat in song announces the much anticipated return on mass of our spring migrants in late April and early May. Its song is perhaps not the sweetest being fast and scratchy with an almost scolding tone but, very kindly, it tends to be sung from a prominent and exposed perch.    Rather subjectively, there seem to be more Common Whitethroats in the hedges around our small village than in the last couple of years.  Where the hedgerows are uncut the Mayflower on the Blackthorn has been truly stunning this year with the bushes absolutely laden with glowing bunches of dainty white flowers. I say uncut because they tend to flower on l...