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