I visited Pennington Marsh on 5th and 9th March and on both days saw much the same. Its a pretty static time of year with winter birds steadily but barely noticeably declining and very few migrants appearing. The Lapwing are now in regular display and are busy making nesting scrapes on the marsh while Black-tailed […]
Tag: Sparrowhawk
Sleeping Pygmy Owl
It really is quiet at the moment on the bird front. Summer migrants have all left but there are very few exciting winter birds around. The Pygmy Owls in Maridalen don’t seem to be around anymore with a bird I saw early on Saturday morning the last sighting. There have been some reports of large […]
Pennington Marsh – 5th October
It was a beautiful October day and after dropping Tobias at school I was going to spent the day at Pennington Marsh until it was time to pick him up at 15:30. After a coffee at the corner of Lower Pennington Lane I walked along the fun length of the Ancient Highway. It took me […]
Oslo in a nutshell
I took in quite a few of Oslo’s best localities today in chilly temperatures but without the rain that was forecast and with few new birds. Maridalen had 3 Lapwings in the morning but 6 by the afternoon which were stood on the ice – hopefully these (and more to come) will breed in the […]
Glossy Ibis at Ely
First stop this morning was Kiln Lane Ely where we parked up and walked down the lane a few hundred yards to view the flooded fields. The first walk along the footpath failed to locate the Ibis that’s chosen to over winter in Cambridgeshire. As I walked back the Jims called to say the target […]
Wings over Israel: conservation challenges and second chances
Israel is one of the most important bird migration bottlenecks in the world. Twice a year, when the call of warmer climes springs nature into action, an estimated 500 million birds make their spectacular odyssey: amongst them, the entire global populations of Lesser Spotted Eagles (~100,000) and Levant Sparrowhawks (~60,000), the entire European population of […]
Wheatear at Minsmere
An early start saw us walking Minsmere in search of Swampy without joy as it had seemingly “done a bunk” been eaten or simply decided it likes the deeper section of reeds. Anyway we didn’t give much time to scanning the pool and instead decided to enjoy a mornings birding around the reserve. We picked […]
Twite in the sun
The weather today was gorgeous and I was down to a t-shirt before noon. But days with blue skies are generally speaking poor for birds and today was no exception. I stuck to Maridalen where I hoped some raptor migration might save the day but the only I raptors I had (Sparrowhawk, Goshawk and Buzzard) […]