The Standlake Birder

           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 ...