The Standlake Birder -

  Snow Bunting Our big news is that we are moving to a new house!  As I type this I am surrounded by the utter chaos of the move. The packers are in and everything is disappearing fast in readiness for our actual move tomorrow. They actually started packing last week and the first thing they packed was all our food and cooking utensils 😂😂😂😂   The house has been on the market for, well forever …..   Post lock down number one, and curtesy of the stamp duty holiday, there was a lot of interest and it finally sold. Our plan was to move somewhere cheaper where we could afford to buy a place with land while downsizing the house a little. We are moving to a very remote barn conversion in Worcestershire with 4 acres of land for our horses plus lots of habitat potential for birds, large pond, scrub area etc.   Last Thursday I spent the day birding in Norfolk. My target birds were Red-breasted Flycatcher, Snow and Lapland Bunting.  The drive to Norfolk was a...

Brown Shrike I had planned a days birding last Friday and, with an easterly wind blowing in from the continent, it seemed as though the east coast was the right place to be. A few reports of comparatively scarce migrants such as  Red-breasted Flycatcher and Yellow-browed Warbler were coming in suggesting that birds were definitely on the move. The easterly wind also held the promise of something much rarer being blown in from the continent.   I was faced with a choice between the Yorkshire or Norfolk coasts and did not make up my mind until I was sitting in my car ready to depart at 05:30. It was pretty much a toss of the coin situation but in the end I opted for Yorkshire, a few more miles but a much easier, mainly motorway, drive.    Well you can probably guess what happened but read on! The “Yorkshire is the new PIT 60” refers to how many times I have already been to Yorkshire this year as opposed to previous years where I was almost resident at pit 60. Unlik...

.  Video courtesy of Mick C On Saturday my black-belt birding neighbour, Mick, sent me a text saying that one of his Yorkshire mates had found a rare vagrant Franklin’s gull from North America on the Dales. On Sunday morning I checked RBA and it was still there so, over breakfast, I muttered my common refrain to my lovely wife Carolyn, “the bird is still there”. Her immediate response, bless her, was “do you want to go and see it then?” I did not have Franklin's gull on my UK bird list so I needed no further encouragement whatsoever. We arranged that I would be back in time for Carolyn’s legendary Sunday roast dinner at 19:30 and I sent a text to Mick telling him my twitch was on and did he have any location tips? I was outside packing the car ten minutes later when Mick appeared in his Sunday best PJs and asked me if I fancied some company.  Mick in his Sunday best PJs A short while later, and with Mick now fully dressed I hasten to add, we set off on o...

Yesterday I decided to spend the day photographing Autumn migrants. The beauty of watching and photographing passage migrants in Autumn is that they have a tendency to stay in one location for much longer than in the spring when they are in a great rush to get to their breeding grounds. My first port of call was Sutton Coldfield NNR where a stunning adult male Red-backed Shrike had taken up residence. I left home somewhat late for me around 06:30 and made my way along the M40 and 42 arriving on site some 90 minutes later. I parked, as instructed by RBA, near the model aircraft flying site and followed OS locate to the stated map reference. Having never been to this site before I was surprised by its size and location, 2400 green acres just 6 miles north of the centre of Birmingham. It boasts quite a varied mixed habitat with a large lake, green parkland spaces and heath like terrain with gorse and scrub interspaced with clumps of trees. Being such a green retreat surrounded by...

  Melodious Warbler The Melodious Warbler is the South Western cousin of the Icterine Warbler that I was fortunate enough to see and photograph at Spurn  recently. It closely resembles the Icterine Warbler which it replaces in France and Spain. Like its cousin, it is an insectivorous  summer migrant to Europe migrating to Africa in the autumn for the winter. I’ve had a bit of a warbler fest this year so far adding six warblers to my UK list. The only non-mega remaining hole was indeed the foresaid Melodious Warbler, a scarce rather than mega vagrant averaging 20 -30 records a year. So when one was reported at Dawlish Warren Nature reserve in Devon the game was well and truly on! Sadly, the poor Dawlish warbler has had an unfortunate encounter with something animal or vegetable in nature leaving it one-eyed. These warblers are normally only in one location for a day or two before moving on, but this individual has stayed longer, its reluctance to move prob...

Ruff I spent Sunday morning at Slimbridge dipping a Citrine Wagtail that my good birding friend Nick  had found the previous day. Although early access for members  is still restricted, Slimbridge very kindly put in place a guided entry system for members wishing to see the bird from the car park at 08:00. I arrived at 07:30 and managed to get myself booked onto the first tour of ten but, unfortunately, there was no sign of the bird from the Hogarth hide where it had been seen the previous day. I had a walk around the reserve and then went back to the Hogarth hide for a second look where I met my birding friend Ewan. We spent the next hour or so chatting and taking pictures of very confiding Ruffs and Green Sandpipers right in front of the hide. At one point we heard that the Wagtail had been spotted at the Kingfisher hide so we rushed around there only to find a small distant flock of what appeared to be Yellow Wagtails in amongst the cattle, a case of mistaken iden...

Note to self – remind me to bemoan the summer doldrums for birding as this results in extraordinary events! Collared Flycatcher So, in my last blog I bemoaned the summer doldrums  for being a very dead time for birding. Well, the god of birding clearly is one of the two people who read my blog and she decided to do something about it! Starting on Monday, easterly winds drove early continental migrators onto the north east coast in general and Spurn in particular in a birding event that would have been very special in the migration hotspot of October let alone one of quietest  times of the year in early August. The big mega, a Collared Flycatcher, is a very rare bird indeed, and, together with a very strong supporting cast of Icterine and Greenish Warblers, multiple Red-backed Shrikes and other hard to get birds in Oxfordshire such as Pied Flycatchers, there was no doubt at all where I was going on Tuesday! I set off from home just after 5am with the...