The Class of 2012 plus more worthy blogs

I finally caught up with some of the 'Waxwing Class of 2012' yesterday morning. Up to 34 birds were taking advantage of a 'champagne-pink' berried rowan in Ewell. I bowled up, found them sat at the top of a conifer, took up my position perched on a low wall and then had close encounters as they came down to the rowan tree to feed. A Carrion Crow spooked them off and I was flushed away by twitching curtains in a nearby house - I hate birding in residential streets.

Lee Dingain's blog has been added to my list of 'worthies'. He only lives about three miles from me but I don't know if we've ever crossed telescopes before - ridiculous really, seeing that we share so much common interest. Where as I'm becoming more sedentary, Lee seems to spend as much time in South America as in North Surrey, so vicarious thrills for us all! It also came to my attention that I hadn't put Benny 'Boy' Mothman's blog on my list even though I regularly visit it, so that has been put right. It's well worth a visit to see what's going on just north and east of London and is a real treat to browse through. What are you waiting for? Go and visit them...

Comments

Lee Dingain said…
Many thanks Steve for the plug and adding my blog to your list. I really appreciate it. I must say I enjoy your blog enormously and look forward to reading further posts about your Uber patch.
19 December 2012 at 19:24
Steve Gale said…
And many thanks to you too Lee. I hope 2013 is a good one for you.
21 December 2012 at 13:09
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goldfinches and Lavender

Image
We have three medium-sized Lavender bushes in our back garden. Throughout the summer the flowers (which last for several months) are a magnet for insects and give off a most restful aroma. As tempting as it is to cut the dead stems in the autumn, we always leave them, as we know that during the late winter we will get visitors to feed on the seed heads... This video was taken from the kitchen window this morning. We will normally see one or two birds over a few days, but have had up to 14 at once. We never tire of watching them. Lavender is a wonderful plant to have in the garden, with year round natural history benefits. So what are you waiting for? They are readily available at a garden centre close to you right now! There is an historic association with Lavender in this part of northern Surrey and south London. Lavender fields have been harvested for many years, with one particular field close to Woodmansterne being very popular with day trippers. A significant proportion o...
Read more

Welcome back!

Image
In November 2005 I purchased a pair of Swarovski 10x42 EL binoculars from The London Camera Exchange shop in Guildford, for the then princely sum of £899. These bins have served me well, with almost daily use in all types of weather, testing their durability to the maximum - salt water spray, deluges of rain, 38C temperatures, dust, dirt, slight knocks... and apart from the armour coating that had started to bubble and come away from the body, nothing to be alarmed about. Then, in the summer of 2022, I noticed that I had a problem when close focusing - the outer focusing wheel would lose grip and it would take me an age to regain a middle-ground distance of focus - plus, over the next few weeks this outer focusing wheel became loose. I resorted to the use of tape to keep it all in place, but realised that I had to do something about it in the long run. For a while I did consider buying a new pair - after all, they were then 17-years old - but they were still optically superb. It seemed...
Read more

A special day

In birding, timing can mean the difference between an average day in the field and that of a spectacular one. Good timing can be helped by reading the weather conditions correctly, or understanding local conditions but it is more often down to pure luck. In this case, I just got lucky... I had not visited Dungeness since March 2022, quite a gap for me. It was high time that I once more trod the shingle and my timing of a visit was down to several factors, mostly a personal liking for mid-late autumn but also because I needed to be at home until September 20th and could not make the journey south until then. I also chose to stay at the bird observatory for a few days rather than make it a day trip. All this conveniently found me stepping outside the observatory's back door in the breaking dawn of Sunday 22nd September, quickly making my way to the fishing boats, an area I prefer to stand to best appreciate any visible bird migration, an aspect of birding that I find exhilarating.  A...
Read more