Feeding birds is hard-wired into our national psyche. The apocryphal Victorian “tuppence a bag” for seed for the Trafalgar Square pigeons has morphed into a national pastime, with an estimated 17m households spending £250m a year on more than 150,000 tonnes of bird feed – enough to feed the entire breeding population of the 10 […]
Tag: Chaffinch
Italian Officials Investigated for Eating Illegal Birds at Secret Dinner
A group of Italian officials was caught by police during a secret dinner that included songbirds like goldfinches and chaffinches, The Telegraph reported. The group is now under investigation for the lunch, as some of the birds were from a rare species. The meal also violated COVID-19 guidelines set by the country. 20 officials from […]
Guiding in the Dale
Yesterday I was guiding Andy from Florida. We spent the whole day in Maridalen and despite a very fresh northerly wind the Dale did not disappoint and we had a very fun and production session. I was back in the Dale this morning (where else would I be) to follow up on the Ortolan Buntings. […]
Thrush Nightingale
May, guiding and demanding kids makes blogging difficult! Yesterday I guided Gene and Susan from Minnesota and we had a great day under a hot sun. Marsh Harrier, Water Rail, Shoveler, Ruff, Wryneck, Osprey, Icterine, Reed and Sedge Warbler plus all three flycatchers was a pretty good showing. Today, as forecast, we had rain in […]
Winter Birds
We really don’t have too much snow down here on the Devon/Cornwall border, so a covering of the white stuff was a bit of a novelty on two separate weeks in March. I could have panicked and ran around with my long lens and end up photographing nothing at all or just stay in the […]
Pennington Marsh – 7th April
This first half of April has been fantastic, like mid-summer come early, after an early morning breeding bird survey where the highlights were a couple of Song Thrush and a Willow Warbler I spent a couple of hours at Pennington Marsh. Spring really is here and there wereBlackcap singing from the scrub, fair numbers of […]
Mega’s, Vagrants and Rarities in Kuwait
It has been quite some time since my last post. Following a low depression in Arabia in late November that brought more than above average rainfall at this time of the year to the Region, some great birds were recorded in Kuwait. The one species was a vagrant and a 1st for Kuwait that has […]
Birds on the east coast
This is the second blog to look at Mansur Al Fahad’s trip two weeks ago to the east coast. He saw a very large number and variety of waders, some of which gave almost as many identification headaches as the gulls. However this blog looks at some of the non-waders he saw. All the pictures […]