Posts tagged with ‘birds’

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Hot migrant bird news!

In the garden this afternoon, a female stonechat, captured here via the magic of holding my iPhone up to a pair of binoculars:

It doesn’t look like much, especially compared to the summer males, which are positively glamorous, but it’s a pretty good sighting for south London and a patch tick for me.
Interestingly a couple of [...]

Links

LIZ JONES: Honour killings? What we’ve done to young Emma is just as shameful | Mail Online
OK, that settles it, the Daily Mail's entire business model is now based on trolling and linkbait. via Mitch Benn on Twitter.
(del.icio.us tags: newspapers media )

BBC – Earth News – Auklets and penguins: birds use feathers ‘to touch’
Birds may [...]

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2010

That time of year again, the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch, one of the world’s biggest exercises in citizen science. The usual drill: one hour of birding in the garden, with the counts being the maximum seen at one time.

blue tit × 3
great tit × 2
coal tit
long-tailed tit
chaffinch × 3
goldfinch
woodpigeon × 2
pigeon × 4
magpie × 3
blackbird × 3
song [...]

Bird of the Year 2009

Starting with the trainspotter-y listing details: I added three birds to my patch list and three to my British list, one of which was a lifer. Really, that’s not a very good score; I got two lifers and a patch tick in the first week of 2010. But the year had a few highlights nonetheless.
The [...]

A bit of Essexy birding

I had a good day at Rainham Marshes in Essex today. I got a new bird, Bean Goose; also saw peregrine, loads of ducks (wigeon, pintail, gadwall, shoveler, shelduck etc), stonechat, meadow pipit, huge numbers of lapwing, ruff, possible water rail, and the most obliging bird of the day, this extremely tame Slavonian Grebe:

Ah, the [...]

Christmas food debrief, bitterns etc

I should note in advance: the bitterns are not part of the food debrief. I daresay they turned up on Henry VIII’s dining table, but not mine.
Food notes: the fruity stuffing was good, the pistachio one mainly tasted of parsley and garlic, which was pleasant enough but not very christmassy. The prunes in bacon were [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 24: Robin

No surprise in the final bird on the advent calendar. Or at least, no surprise for my British readers; robins probably appear on more Christmas cards here than Jesus.

In fact, the robin is so deeply linked to Christmas that it’s slightly surprising to remember other countries don’t have the same association. Some of them have [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 23: Partridge

I’ve been baking a ham, wrapping presents, and listening to cheesy Christmas music today, so let’s plough on with the Christmas clichés.
I’ll skip the seven swans a-swimming, the six geese a-laying, four colly-birds, three french hens and two turtle doves; but here’s a partridge:

It’s not in a pear tree because, apart from anything else, it [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 22: Spotted Nightjar

I’m going out on the razz this evening and I have things to do; presents to wrap, cats to give pills to, ummm… that might be it. But anyway, here’s a quick one, a lovely picture of a Spotted Nightjar and chick which I found on Flickr:

Cryptic camouflage designed to help birds hide can be [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 21: Raven

My computer shows signs of being on its last legs, so here’s an avian omen of death. In Anglo-Saxon poetry, in the build-up to a battle, three animals — the eagle, the raven and the wolf — turn up in an ominous foreshadowing of the bloodshed to come.

I’m pretty sure this literary trope didn’t arise [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 20: Hawfinch

I sometimes dream about birds. Particularly, I dream about rare birds turning up suddenly in my garden.
And my subconscious aims high; I dream about mixed flocks of parrots and hornbills which, in dream-logic, have been caught up in some extraordinary freak weather system and blown from all corners of the world to turn up together [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 19: Magpie Shrike

Just a quickie, since I’m catching up with myself; the Magpie Shrike:

» The 3 watchers, © Marc Dezemery, is used under the CC by-nc-nd licence.

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 18: Short-eared Owl

I had to have an owl for one of these entries, because let’s face it, everyone loves owls. So here is the Short-eared Owl, Asio flammeus.

The Short-Eared Owl Is one of the most widely distributed species of bird in the world; it’s found on all continents apart from Australia and Antarctica. There are even endemic [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 17: Green-tailed Sunbird

Still on the dinosaur thing, because it is genuinely fascinating, I think. Yesterday I picked a bird that looked like a bit like a dinosaur to illustrate the point, but of course they’re all evolved from dinosaurs, even ones like the Long-tailed Tit, or this Green-tailed Sunbird:

And it’s not a distant relationship, in evolutionary terms; birds [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 16: Red-legged Seriema

In the comments for the last entry, Tricia said:
Just…look at its DINOSAUR EYE, Harry!

The reason why some birds look, from the right angle, rather dino‑saurian is that they are dinosaurs.

Many people think that the dinosaurs went extinct. This is NOT TRUE.
They just grew feathers.
» The headshot of the Red-legged Seriema is © Sarah and Iain but [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 15: Stone Curlew

This is the [Eurasian] Stone Curlew, Burhinus oedicnemus:

A goggle-eyed beauty of a bird.
» Alcaravão is © Joaquim Coelho and used under the CC by-nc-nd licence.

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 14: Wilson’s Storm-petrel

The tubenoses — the petrels, shearwaters and albatrosses — are a wonderful group of birds saddled with a slightly unfortunate name. It’s true that they do have tubular nasal passages on top of their beaks, presumably to help them sniff out food at sea, but it’s not exactly a name full of the romance and [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 13: Long-tailed Tit

Familiarity breeds contempt, and it’s hard to get excited about even the most attractive of birds when you see them for the 20,000th time. But there are a few birds which are dirt common but which never fail to give me a little thrill of pleasure every time I see them. Like long-tailed tits:

They are [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 12: Chestnut-crowned Antpitta

This is one of my favourite birds ever, the Chestnut-crowned Antpitta, Grallaria ruficapilla:

Or in a more orthodox portrait:

They have a simple three-note call, and on a birding trip to Venezuela we encountered one individual that consistently got the notes in the wrong order. Which got funnier every time it did it.
» Chestnut-crowned Antpitta, perhaps my favorite [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 11: Red-necked Phalarope

When I read Halldor Laxness’s Independent People, it kind of made me want to visit Iceland. On the one hand, it’s a bleakly pessimistic tale of a man struggling to drag himself out of grinding poverty, only to be crushed underfoot by changing circumstances. On the other hand: phalaropes!

Phalaropes — that’s the Red-necked Phalarope — [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 10: Sword-billed Hummingbird

When I started this advent calendar I intended to just post picture of a bird each day and leave it at that, but I keep thinking of things I want to add. Today, though, I really am just going to post a picture:

That is a Sword-billed Hummingbird, Ensifera ensifera. Not, sadly, one of the hummingbirds [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 9: Sedge Warbler

You wouldn’t last long as a birder if you weren’t able to find beauty in little brown birds, but they don’t always photograph well, so I was pleased to find this lovely shot of a sedge warbler on Flickr:

The Sedge Warbler, Acrocephalus schoenobaenus, is an archetypal LBJ — Little Brown Job — but is actually [...]

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 8: Swallow-tailed Gull

This is the Swallow-tailed Gull, Creagrus furcatus. It’s endemic to the Galapagos, and as you can see, with that big red eye-ring it’s one of the world’s more striking seagull species.

I use the word ’seagull’ deliberately because, for some reason, it really winds up a lot of birdwatchers; they insist that the only acceptable term [...]