On a beautiful spring like morning, I dropped Tobias off for his last day at school before the Easter holidays and spent a couple of hours at Pennington Marsh. At the corner of Lower Pennington Lane I had a coffee and watched the Lapwing displaying and listened to the Sky Lark but other than small […]
Tag: Dunnock
Let’s go to Dungeness
I had arranged to meet the Jims this morning but had no plans set on where we’d go so at 5.30am we discussed a plan and with nothing really jumping out as a target I uttered the magic words “let’s go to Dunge” and then we were off. 7am and we were looking over the […]
Mongolia – 12th May (Day 5) – Dalanzadgad and Gurvan Saikhan National Park
After some early morning birding around the guest house at Dalanzadgad which produced much the same as yesterday including Isabelline Shrike,Pallas’s Bunting, Red-throated Thrush and Long-toed Stint we packed our bags and headed into the Gurvan Saikhan National Park around 45 minutes away. Citrine Wagtail- Gurvan Saikhan National Park Isabelline Shrike – […]
The Private Life Of The Dunnock
There’s an old saying that you never stop learning and that’s never more true than when you start looking at the natural world. Earlier this year I saw a Dunnock busily collecting insects for its chicks. In the UK it’s a bird often seen in the garden and is known for its secretive behavior of […]
Disappearing Nightingales
Taking photos of Common Nightingales can be tricky but flight shots are pretty rare and I was really pleased to capture a sequence of photos set on 1/2500th of a second of such a bird in ‘hovermode’, something that to me at least is a pretty rare sight. During the breeding season and with young […]
Good stuff
Yesterday was cloudy and warm(ish) but clear skies overnight with a resulting heavy frost were going to cause a big change in bird activity this morning. The fields and marsh areas in Maridalen were covered in ice and there was hardly a thrush to see. With the clear skies any viz mig was so high […]
Chris Packham cuckoo reveals migration secrets
A cuckoo wearing a solar-powered satellite-tracked tag is the first to provide UK scientists with migration data for three years running. Having flown more than 45,000 miles Chris, named after wildlife presenter Chris Packham, revealed overwintering in Angola for the first time. The four-year-old returned to the Norfolk/Suffolk border on Friday, said the British Trust […]
Review: Bird Sense: What it’s Like to be a Bird, by Tim Birkhead
Who’d be a bird anyway? Chickens have bi-focal vision: one eye for the close-up work of pecking seed; one for the fox on the horizon or the hawk in the sky. Peregrine falcons don’t swoop directly on prey – as the crow flies, to coin a phrase – but in a wide arc, using the […]