I went to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum yesterday, which is always worth a look.
Apart from the fact that there are loads of great photos, there’s the fun of deciding whether the judges have made the right decisions. I’m always a bit disappointed when they choose a portrait [...]
Posts tagged with ‘birds’
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Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition
1 December 2007 – 11:23 am
Parakeets
4 November 2007 – 6:19 pm
Not a very good picture, not least because they’re all camouflaged, but look at all the ring-necked parakeets in the garden:
I think there are ten in the picture, though some of them are rather hidden. Attractive birds, even if they are noisy little buggers.
Apologies for infrequent posting
8 October 2007 – 12:31 pm
I’m working up to writing a long post about the book I just finished, but in the meantime, here’s a quietly hypnotic video of someone hand-feeding hummingbirds:
Sparrow!
6 August 2007 – 9:50 pm
I was reading in the garden today and heard a distinctive chirp: there was a female house sparrow on the bird feeder. Once, this would have been normal, but British house sparrow numbers have plummeted in the past few years; the sparrow population of London declined 75% between 1999 and 2004. It was the first [...]
scrabble scrabble scrabble
27 July 2007 – 2:30 pm
There’s something alive in the chimney. Which is mildly creepy. I just hope to god it manages not to die up there. On the subject of which:
Q. What goes ’shriek shriek bonk’?
A. A parakeet flying into a window pane.
Which I heard happen yesterday, but as there wasn’t a stunned parakeet lying outside the house afterwards [...]
Digiscoping parakeets
25 July 2007 – 1:43 pm
The parakeets only reached this part of London about three years ago, but now we have flocks of them every day; there are often seven or eight on the feeders and more in the surrounding trees. They’re attractive and full of character, but as ever with foreign species you worry about their impact on the [...]
Digiscoping woodpeckers
24 July 2007 – 4:09 pm
I was having a go at photographing the juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker that comes to the birdfeeder, but it’s kind of tricky. My success rate when digiscoping is never that high at the best of times; and as you can see, it’s not temperamentally inclined to stay still:
Still, the motion blur can be a fun [...]
Too wit to woo
10 July 2007 – 11:23 am
I heard an owl last night, for the first time in years. I think there are quite a few tawny owls in London—they’re a basically woodland species and fairly well suited to a suburban mix of woodland, park and gardens. A few years ago I used to hear them quite regularly here, but as I [...]
Blogger Bio-blitz #3: Lasithi plateau
8 May 2007 – 3:31 pm
The last of the three locations in Crete that I bio-blitzed was the Lasithi plateau, where I was from the 27th-28th of April. The plateau is just the prettiest place in the world, as well as providing some good birding for me. Apparently, it’s formed by the build-up of silt from the surrounding rivers creating [...]
Blogger Bio-blitz #2: Paleohora
3 May 2007 – 3:46 pm
Paleohora is a little town on the south coast of the western end of Crete. It’s an expanding resort town with plenty of tavernas and cafes, but still small and quiet compared to the established resorts. Especially quiet in April, which is really before the tourist season starts in earnest. The town sits on a [...]
Blogger Bio-blitz #1: Ayia Lake
1 May 2007 – 4:04 pm
On April 21st, I went birding to a reservoir near the village of Αγια, written as either Agia or Ayia in Roman characters. Ayia is about 9 km SW of Chania, the capital of the westernmost province of Crete, and the reservoir is a good spot for migrating waterbirds. The reservoir is surrounded by reedbeds [...]
Blogger Bio-blitz: Crete overview
1 May 2007 – 3:04 pm
Well, I’ve got back from Crete, and now’s my opportunity to write up some of my birding as full Blogger Bio Blitz posts. Now with pictures!
Some general scene setting, first. Crete is a beautiful island, mainly consisting of spectacular mountains surrounded by blue Mediterranean water. But it’s not a forgiving place; in the interior of [...]
Lasithi
29 April 2007 – 3:11 pm
Well, I spent a couple of days in Tzermiado on the Lasithi plateau, which is like a little chunk of Holland - flat fields and fruit trees - randomly inserted in among the Cretan mountains. Some good birds (wryneck, quail, cirl bunting, black eared wheatear, griffon vulture, peregrine, blue rock thrush), and up on the [...]
Red-letter day
23 April 2007 – 2:14 pm
For me, one of the nice things about birding in Europe is that, in a sense, every new bird represents a lifetime ambition fulfilled. If you live in the UK, soon after you start taking an interest in birds, you get a book of birds of Britain and Europe, and spend time looking at all [...]
The lake of crakes
21 April 2007 – 4:17 pm
I went out to a reservoir near Hania today. The guide to birdwatching in Crete listed, among the possible birds for the site, Little Crake, Spotted Crake and Baillon’s Crake. I’ve never seen any of those before, but I didn’t get my hopes up because all the crakes are notoriously difficult to see; they skulk.
So [...]
birding at Aghia Triada
20 April 2007 – 4:04 pm
‘Aghia Triada’ is ‘Holy Trinity’, and it’s a monastery on Akrotiri. I went there not just to look at the monastery, but mainly to do birding.
It was a good birding day, I’m pleased to say. Lots of birds, but the most notable were the black-headed race of Yellow Wagtail, Golden Oriole and two which are [...]
Hania, still.
19 April 2007 – 10:17 am
Well, I’ve been to the Hania Archeological Museum, the Cretan Folklore Museum and the Byzantine Museum this morning, so I’m all cultured up good. The Archeology is not doubt a pale shadow of what iwould have seen if the Heraklion museum had been open, but they had some nice stuff. The Folklore Museum was probably [...]
Knossos
17 April 2007 – 1:24 pm
It turns out the Heraklion Archaeological Museum is closed for renovations until July. Which is disappointing, because it holds a world-class collection of Minoan artefacts and I was looking forward to going there.
Oh well. Instead I got on a bus to Knossos, one of the sites where a lot of the stuff in the museum [...]
Parakeet feather on Moleskine
13 April 2007 – 12:14 pm
Parakeet feather on Moleskine
I bought a new notebook yesterday for my upcoming trip to Crete. This is the previous one, with a feather I found near the birdfeeders, presumably from a parakeet. I do like Moleskine notebooks. I’ve used masses of different notebooks of various kinds over the years both for birdwatching and poetry, but [...]
Wildlife round-up
11 April 2007 – 1:45 pm
I was pruning back a rosemary bush to get rid of what I vaguely thought were frost damaged leaves left over from winter, so I’d have some less manky rosemary to cook with, and found these:
Which I immediately recognised from a photo in the London Wildlife Trust newsletter, though I couldn’t remember what they were [...]