The Standlake Birder -

Record shot of Long-toed Stint Ok not my best attempt at title humour I agree but its getting late and I'm tired!   The regular reader will know by now how this story goes. All is quiet  and peaceful in the Hutchins household early on Saturday morning. Breakfast has been taken. The first, and always the best, cup of tea of the day has been drunk and I’m just about to have a shower when a message arrives from my birding mate Nick, “are you on your way”. This clearly means that I had missed some major birding news somehow. The few early morning reports on RBA shine no light on the issue and so I message Nick back. The previous evening a Temminck’s Stint located at St. Aidens RSPB in Yorkshire had been reidentified from photographs as a mega rare Long-toed Stint. Now this bird, with just 3 records on the BOU list prior to 2019 was truly as rare as rocking horse s**t!. The last bird stayed 2 days in county cork in the Republic of Ireland in 1996. The last UK record was some 3...

Rose-coloured Starling Our Shetland adventure started when Jeremy arrived at my house at 7 am on Friday 24 th  September. My Landover was involved in an altercation with a large lorry occupying more than the full width of the single track road by our house the previous week so we were using a curtesy car from the garage to get us to and from Aberdeen airport. More on this later!   We planned to break our journey with some on route birding and our first decision was whether to take the more direct westerly route straight up the M6  or the longer easterly route with the option of birding one of the Yorkshire hotspots. A Wilson’s Phalarope was the attraction on the westerly route but we decided to try for one of the Pectoral Sandpipers in Yorkshire.   The journey to Yorkshire was quite slow with the motorways already busy with Friday traffic. We hence arrived a little later than planned at a new site for both of us, Tophill Low nature reserve run by Yorkshire Water...

Surely there must be a cure for this madness!   For an explanation read on dear intrepid reader read on!   Mid-afternoon last Thursday a report surfaced of an exceeding rare Green Warbler being trapped and ringed at Bempton Cliffs RSPB reserve. The BBRC database reports just 6 UK sightings of this green beauty. Its rarity is compounded even further by 5 of these records being on remote offshore islands while the remaining one was an almost untwitchable one day wonder in Cornwall. Hence the possibility of a twitchable bird on the UK mainland put the UK birding fraternity into somewhat of a frenzy!   The Green Warbler is the more eastern relative of the imaginatively named Greenish Warbler, itself a very scare migrant visitor to these shores. It spends the warmer months breeding in a rather restricted range in Northern Turkey, Caucasus and Northern Iran before returning to Southern India and Sri Lanka to over winter.   Later on Thursday reports started to emerge of nea...

White-tailed Lapwing I’ve said it before and I will definitely say it again, repeating yourself is an age thing you know, I said repeating yourself is an age thing you know, the great thing about my hobby is that you have no idea what the next day will bring. Yesterday was a case in point.   I had a straightforward, but none the less very pleasant, day planned. Up at 06:30, breakfast then do the horses and go for a countryside walk with Folly and my bins. A cup of coffee with my lovely wife and then a telephone consultancy call with some private equity investors in Australia at 10 am. Then an afternoon doing jobs outside interspersed with some training sessions with Loki.   Well I got as far as the coffee when a message from my great birding buddy Nick alerted me to the presence of a mega rare White-tailed Lapwing in Yorkshire. My every suffering wife asked if I would have enough time to go after my phone call, well is the pope catholic I asked myself!   As it turned out ...

Black Stork My radio silence in the past 4 weeks reflects the fact that I’ve done precisely zero birding since my last twitch to see the Western Sandpiper. Some weeks back I lost my beloved Red Setter, Dillion, who finally succumbed to the cancer we have been battling for the last two years. At only just 8 years old to say we were devastated would be an understatement!   So 4 weeks ago an 11 weeks old Weimaraner called Loki was welcomed into our household. Why Loki? Well, for those not into Marvel characters, Loki is the Norse god of mischief! As someone said to me on learning his name, be careful what you wish for! Weimaraner are know as the ghost dog due to their grey fur and steely blue eyes.   I’ve spent lots of time in the past 4 weeks looking after and starting to train him. Luckily, this has coincided with a summer lull in “lifers” to twitch but last week a first summer Black Stork was found on the Lincolnshire coast. So on Friday, as soon as the Stork was reported, I l...

  Whoops wrong type of Western !!! A rare Pacific Golden Plover, a most attractive  bird and one missing from my UK life list, has been  frequenting Frampton Marsh RSPB reserve on the Lincolnshire wash for the past week or so. At the weekend we had a summer party in one of our paddocks and with family staying over Monday was realistically the first day I could go. To be absolutely honest, I was also feeling a little fragile for most of Sunday! We had 40 or so people from the village at our garden party and one of my favourite real ales, Enville, on tap which flowed rather too copiously!     Lets get the party started! When an even rarer Western Sandpiper was also found at the weekend near to Frampton on the wash at Snettisham RSPB reserve the motivation to twitch reached near boiling point!   The Western Sandpiper is indeed a truly rare bird with just 10 accepted records on the BBRC list to the end of 2019. The Collin’s bird bible rates it as a 3 ...

  With nothing that I really wanted to travel very long distance to twitch since my visit to the Elegant Tern in Anglesey last week , I decided to visit  Langford Lakes in Wiltshire today where a photogenic first summer female Red-footed Falcon has been for the past few days. I have seen the foresaid Falcon in England a number of times before but only distantly through my scope and so I don’t have any even half decent photos.   The Red-footed Falcon is the eastern cousin of our summer visitor, the Eurasian Hobby. It often favours similar wet habitats where it can find copious dragonflies and small birds to eat. It is normally found in eastern Europe and Asia as a summer migrant and it winters in Africa. Its conservation status is near threatened due to habitat loss in its breeding grounds. The Colins birding bible rates it as a one start rarity equating to “an annual vagrant in some numbers”. Moving even further east to Northern China, there is another cousin of the ...