The ramblings of an all-round naturalist based in north Surrey
Look who came back to say "Hello"
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If you want to see some proper images, rather than this digiscoped dross, please visit Ploddingbirder, who is most probably, as we speak, uploading some on to his blog.
On Tuesday evening, at 20.05hrs, I was taking out the rubbish, when I heard a call from south-west of the house. I froze, knowing what it was at once, but scarcely believing it. I had listened to this call on Xeno-Canto many times, getting ready for such a moment but not really considering it something that I would hear over the back garden. After 15 seconds the call came again from the blackness, now directly over head. Yes, there was no mistaking it! Another 20 seconds it called a third time - now further away to the north-east... "Kwowww" A lazy drawl, part bark, part yelp. A Bittern. Nocturnal flight-call. I went back inside and played the call on Xeno Canto just to make sure that I had remembered everything correctly. I had. Bloody hell, a Bittern over suburban Banstead! And only a week after an Arctic Skua had blessed me just a mile or so away. Sometimes the birding Gods do smile on you. To some birders these two species are just small fry, mere starters to the main cou
I first met Bob Hibbett in 1981. Maybe 10-years older than me, he cut quite a striking figure, being tall and upright, wearing long flowing hair and sporting a clutch of love-beads around his neck. He spoke with a slow, deep voice and in conversation made me realise that he was not like other birders - he used to hang around the pubs and clubs with professional Chelsea footballers, and had lost a digit or two from one hand due to a failed schoolboy firework experiment - it is fair to say that I found him a touch exotic. He became a mainstay of my birding world throughout much of the 1980s. Along with his young son Scotty, Steve Broyd and Stuart Holdsworth, we formed a merry band of birders who travelled across the country in his Citroen in search of the rare and the wonderful. Birds such as Little Whimbrel (Kenfig), American Bittern (Magor), Greater Yellowlegs and Caspian Tern (Minsmere), Squacco Heron (Radipole) and Varied Thrush (Nanquidno) readily spring to mind, but there were many
It isn't news. It should really come as no surprise to any of us. Our wild bird population is in free-fall, cartwheeling downwards to some horrible, unimaginable base figure. For years we have been talking about the demise of such species as Turtle Doves and Spotted Flycatchers, but these migrant losses have been explained away as not really being of the UK making - it is the expansion of the Sahel desert you see, or the southern-Mediterranean hunters blasting them out of the sky. Our Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers are suffering at the hands (wings?) of nest site competition from Ring-necked Parakeets, not our fault but that of a foreign interloper. Our Willow Tits are being removed from southern England because of the drying out of habitat, a world-wide symptom of climate changing, so not our fault really. And now, any collapse of any bird population in the UK will be down to the bird-flu pandemic, handily attributed to unhygienic poultry-farming in some far-off country. The reasons
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