Pun fully intended! A drive down to Dunge this morning at stupid o’clock gave Jim and I the chance to dip the “red male” Rosefinch reported yesterday but as the handful of readers of this blog will know, Dunge always delivers! A splendid Hobby sat up on a shed at the road side and allowed […]
Tag: Cuckoo
Oare and Elmley
An early morning trip down to Oare marsh in Kent rewarded me with a drake Garganey, Marsh Harriers, Cuckoo and Bearded Tits to name a few. Moving on to Elmley I found more Marsh Harriers and a Short-eared Owl along with plenty of Yellow Wagtails, Redshank and Lapwing as you’d […]
Video: Harvesting Cuckoo Shrike Eggs for Captive Breeding
The Mauritian Wildlife Foundation (MWF) is a non-governmental, non-profit conservation agency working in Mauritius to save threatened endemic local flora and fauna. The Mauritian Wildlife Appeal Fund was established in 1984 under the initiative of naturalist Gerald Durrell and the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust principally to raise funds for the conservation of endemic Mauritius wildlife. […]
Britain’s migrating birds are drastically declining, RSPB says
Bird populations that make the great journey between northern Europe and Africa – including the nightingale and turtle dove – are drastically declining, conservationists have warned. Nearly half of the 29 summer migrants, who appear in the UK in spring to breed before returning in the autumn, show long-term population declines. The nightingale, famed for […]
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 […]
Alarming disappearances among our familiar countryside birds
The latestState of the UK’s Birdsreport, published today, reveals many of our most familiar countryside birds are undergoing sweeping changes with some experiencing ‘plummeting population declines’, compared with the 1990s. It is now known that in some parts of the UK these birds have disappeared completely. A section of the report looks at the UK’s […]
‘Shocking’ decline of UK countryside birds revealed
Some of Britain’s most familiar countryside birds have plummeted in numbers since the 1990s, and some species have disappeared from parts of the UK, according to an authoritative annual report. Numbers of the farmland-dwelling grey partridge have halved since 1995, while the turtle dove has declined by 95%. The yellow wagtail, which inhabits farm and […]
A call for the cuckoo: how to help an endangered bird
I don’t know what it is about the cuckoo that makes my heart sing, but I could happily sit all day listening to its call. Something about it taps into a sort of inner contentedness – I wonder if we humans have evolved to associate the call of the cuckoo with the beginning of spring […]