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 [...]
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Bird of the Year 2009
27 January 2010 – 12:48 pm
Bird of the Year 2009: best performances in a supporting role
23 January 2010 – 3:37 pm
Best Plant
Provence in May was just a great place for flowers. I claimed on Twitter to have seen nine or ten species of orchid, although it’s entirely possibly I over-claimed, since there tend to be lots of very similar species, some of them are quite variable, and I didn’t have a book with me. Still, [...]
Bird of the Year 2008: best performances in a supporting role
16 January 2009 – 1:59 pm
I know it’s getting slightly late for yearly round-up posts, but hey-ho.
Best Plant
The wildflowers on the cliff-tops in Wales were quite something: gorse, foxgloves, bluebells, red campion, sea campion, thrift, kidney vetch, burnet rose, dodder, spring squill, centaury, ox-eye daisies, cowslips. It really was spectacular. So it’s really just a matter of picking a species. [...]
Bird of the Year 2008
28 December 2008 – 12:53 pm
Nearly all Welsh this year, I think. I’ve seen bugger-all in the garden, and haven’t done that much birding, so it’s mainly down to my spring trip to Pembrokeshire.
Before I get onto that, though, my other notable birdy trip this year was to the WWT reserve at Welney, where they feed the overwintering swans. They [...]
Bird of the Year 2007: best performances in a supporting role
5 January 2008 – 4:22 pm
Best Plant
There’s lots of choice here; I’ll just give a hat-tip to the big trees of Kew Gardens and Greenwich Park which I got over excited about in the autumn.
But most of the possibilities were in Crete. Crete has more species of plant than the UK, and a bundle of them are endemics. In spring, [...]
Bird of the Year 2007
31 December 2007 – 3:59 pm
It’s that time again. Last year when I did this, I’d been birding in Spain in the spring and then the Galapagos and Ecuador in the autumn. This year has been less dramatic—no albatrosses or toucans—but I did see some great stuff in Crete in April.
First, though, some local stuff. There have been Little Grebes [...]
bird of the year 2006: best performances in a supporting role
6 January 2007 – 12:53 am
Best Plant
All those rainforest plants were nice, and I enjoyed taking wildflower photos while I was in Spain. But, not least because it’s nice to pick a winner that I can actually identify, I’m going for the Galapagos Prickly Pear, Opuntia echios. On islands where there are giant tortoises and land iguanas, they’ve evolved woody [...]
(my) bird of the year, 2006
3 January 2007 – 4:01 pm
While I’m rounding up 2006.
2006 was a pretty good birding year for me, mainly because of my trip to Andalusia at Easter and Galapagos/Ecuador in the autumn. But I did get one lifer in Britain this year, which for a rather occasional, fair weather birder like me was very exciting. That was Horned Grebe (what [...]