Another trip to Wallasea Island at first light this morning. A Male Merlin zipped along the reeds and a female was seen sitting on a fence post too before two Ring-tail Hen Harriers and a Marsh Harrier came out to play. Several Kestrel and a few more flying passes from the Merlins kept me entertained […]
Tag: Skylark
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 […]
Spanish Sparrow breeding and much more – Haradh
Whilst birding the area of Haradh recently where we concentrated on looking in the pivot irrigation fields we also saw a few other good birds around the filed edges and surrounding areas. The first good birds we saw were just outside the main entrance to the huge HADEC farm complex where a nesting colony of […]
Highest site count of Greater Spotted Eagles – Sabkhat Al Fasl
Last weekends birding at Sabkhat Al Fasl produced a good number of winter visitors including the largest number of wintering Greater Spotted Eagles recorded at the site when 17 were seen in one morning. Birds normally arrive in September and stay until April or early May. Western Marsh Harrier is another wintering raptor seen regularly […]
Why we should learn birdsong alongside French and German?
I arrived home the other evening at dusk after a long journey, and stepped out of the car to hear a shouting match between blackbirds, one of the most beautiful sounds in nature. In the still calm of a clear March evening three males were fiercely staking their suburban territories, belting out sweet and flutey […]
Software can decode bird songs
The software brings the “cracking of the dawn chorus” one step closer. It used recordings of individual birds and of dawn choruses to identify the characteristics of each tweet. Dr Dan Stowell is lead author of the report, which was published in the Journal PeerJ. He told the BBC: “Given a set of recordings, each […]
Nightingale has best birdsong because of its complex brain, research finds
No wonder they celebrated it in a song. The common nightingale is top of the feathered crooners, according to research highlighted on International Dawn Chorus Day that suggests the bird’s impressive vocal range is down to the composition of its brain. The secretive bird, immortalised in the romantic 30s song A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley […]