Primary school children are filming themselves killing and torturing wild animals and sharing the grisly videos on WhatsApp in a ‘sick’ nation-wide ‘trend’. Around 500 youths across 11 groups, which include primary school children, have shared graphic photos and videos of wounded and dead animals killed using a hand-held catapult. Swans, deer, pigeons, foxes, squirrels, […]
Tag: moorhen
Easter in Derbyshire
Joyce and I stayed with friends for a week in Chesterfield, Derbyshire and although not at all a bird or photographic week I, as usual managed to get away once or twice or find something while out and about. ( or cunningly suggesting somewhere to go that I thought might be good for seeing some […]
Snow Buntings
No noticeable change in the bird life today although I did enjoy 3 Snow Buntings on one of the last snow decked fields in Maridalen but these could well have been around for a while. There was less wind today which I hoped would produce some raptor movement but I hoped in vain.
Conservation ecologists know no boundaries
Sorry for the recent slow rate of new posts. I am very busy with fieldwork and have little time to blog. Anyway, in recent days we worked both in Alentejo and in an adjacent section of Extremadura, near Olivenza. It is interesting to witness conservation issues in different colours and flavours. I can’t wait to […]
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 […]
Two Kinds of Coots
I was in London last week for a conference. My hotel was near Kensington Gardens, one of London’s Royal Parks. I walked all over the gardens, saw the famous statue of Peter Pan, and sat by a pond watching the royal waterfowl. There were mute swans, tufted ducks, Egyptian geese, moorhens, great crested grebes, great […]
Round up of Al Hayer in February
Last year I visited Al Hayer south of Riyadh almost weekly and it became what we birders call my local patch. This year I vowed to make trips more widely within Saudi Arabia and I have been doing so. However last weekend I returned to Al Hayer for the first time in over 6 weeks. […]
The new “blue lagoons”
In the late 1990s Tom Tarrant was birding the Riyadh area and he kept good records which I often compare against today’s findings. He has written about “the blue lagoons”. This was part of the Riyadh river where the habitat is more open than the area around the pivot fields where I normally bird. He […]