The Standlake Birder -

     Distant record shot of the Killdeer in the January gloom I was just settling down to a relaxing coffee after early morning smallholding chores on Wednesday morning when the surprising news that a Killdeer had been found in Hampshire hit the bird alert services. I wouldn’t normally expect a “drop everything and twitch” moment in January, that’s much more likely in the spring and autumn, but, with three new UK ticks in the past two years and now the promise of a fourth, January seems to becoming the new October for me. After begging forgiveness from my long suffering wife, I loaded up the car and set off on the two and a half hour drive to Ripley.   Birds turn up in the most unlikely of places and this American beauty was no exception. It had been found on a small reservoir adjacent to a pig farm in the tiny hamlet of Ripley. I’m guessing that the local birder who found it must have thought that all his Christmas’s had come at once!   I thought parking was li...

    Green Heron After one final visit to the bird feeders and breakfast we left Selva Verde and made our way by coach towards our next port of call, Laguna lodge on the northern Caribbean coast.   On route we drove through a large banana plantation, where we saw the banana equivalent of a railroad crossing as huge bunch after bunch of bananas were pulled across the road on a very Heath Robinson looking contraption. This is a memory that I’m sure will float back to me the next time I am enjoying a Costa Rican banana.   Driving further along the road we saw a group of people looking up into a tree where a Two Toed Sloth was miraculously right out in the open munching on leaves. The others we had seen were more like big furry tennis balls curled up and asleep.   Two-toed sloths spend most of their lives hanging upside down from trees. Strangely, they actually can’t walk, so they pull themselves hand-over-hand to move around in their characteristic extremely slow ma...

    Eastern Black Redstart   The attractive Eastern Black Redstart has been on my radar for some time as a bird I would like to see and photograph. This winter there have been two of them in the UK, one at Filey in Yorkshire earlier this winter and more recently a first winter, i.e. hatched this spring, male at Sheringham on the Norfolk coast.    So on Wednesday I set sail on a pre-storm Goretti visit to Sheringham. Black Redstarts tend to spend a lot of time on the ground foraging and the Sheringham bird, true to form, had spent a long time in amongst the formal gardens on the esplanade at Sheringham.   I arrived just before 10am on a truly bitterly cold morning and was immediately very glad that I had dug my thermals and warm hat out for the trip. Half a dozen people were milling around the general area the Redstart had been frequenting and it had been spotted once that morning on a roof. It took another hour or so for it to put in another brief roof appe...

       My birding year was totally dominated by celebrating somehow reaching three score years and ten with 19 days of full on birding in wonderful Costa Rica. To be honest, without Costa Rica it would have been a really duff year with UK birding being poor compared to the last few years. Even Shetland in October, which I forewent for Costa Rica in November, was comparatively slow compared to previous fantastic years.   The additions to my UK list were the lowest they have been since I started keeping records with just eight lifers taking me on to a UK bird list of 430 birds. Somewhat strangely, four of these eight new lifers occurred in the traditionally    slow months of January and December.   Here are my eight new 2025 UK ticks   ·        White-billed Diver ·        Booted Eagle ·        Song Sparrow ·        Montagu’s H...