If you spend as much time outside on British Columbia’s rural Galiano Island as professional gardener Ana Todorović does, it’s a sad inevitability that you will encounter dead birds. But when Todorović returned home from work on May 16, she noticed something distinctive about the goldfinch-size, streaky-brown bird corpse on her lawn: It had a […]
Tag: Siskin
Champions of the Flyway – final days
After all COTF teams handed in their lists and we got everything sorted for the awards ceremony, I had time for few hours of sleep. But I could not sleep in on my last morning in Eilat, especially with so many sites I had no time to visit this week. Dawn found me in Holland […]
Pennington Marsh – 5th and 9th March
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 […]
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 […]
A good year for Crossbills
It would appear to be a good Crossbill year with sightings now regular in certain parts of Suffolk with this in mind I visited a drinking pool they have been visiting and with patience I was rewarded by several visits from up to nine Crossbill. A Jay and several Siskin also visited the pool and […]
Letters from Listeners: Odd Things Birds Eat
In the past few weeks, I’ve received a couple of letters from listeners about their backyard birds eating unusual items. Craig Magnuson of Forks, Washington, wrote that he’s seen Evening Grosbeaks, during several different summers, eating cold campfire charcoal shortly after dawn at the Lake Kachess campground in the Wenatchee National Forest. He noted that […]
Catching a few ticks in Tuddenham
Saturday saw me going solo down at Elmley while the Jims enjoyed Vange Marshes Stilts. I had good but brief views of a day flying Barn Owl, a Peregrine hunting the marshes with several Buzzards and Marsh Harriers. Hares were putting on a show and the mating rituals of Lapwing and Redshank were in full […]
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 […]