NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

Midnight has passed and the curtain has come down on the third North Downs and beyond Wheatear festival. This year there were three awards: Overall champion Whoever posts the most images of Northern Wheatears by the end of April 2015. A photograph of five birds together counts as 5 images Earliest posting Whoever posts the earliest image of a 2015 UK Northern Wheatear wins this one. Best photograph The best image of a UK Northern Wheatear in 2015 (up until the end of April), to be judged by as yet unannounced members of the  BBC's Countryfile  team (likely to change) will be the winner. So, to recap:  Northern Wheatear only. UK only. 2015 only. This year the competition was serious, with tactical posting, late runs and some quite frankly underhand manoeuvres taking place. An early runner was Tony Brown (aka The Cowboy Birder) from Essex, who got in early and had posted eight images even before March had ended. But the stress of birding in the shadow of ...

My old stomping ground - Beddington Sewage Farm (or Beddington Farmlands as it is now referred to) - has undergone a bit of a social media makeover. You can visit the new web site by clicking here.   If you are on Facebook they have created an account and you can visit it by clicking here.   Are you into Twitter? Well, so is Beddington, under the account name 'Beddington Farmlands'. Last but not least you can keep abreast of all the birding, mothing and political highlights (and lowlights) by visiting Peter Alfrey's excellent blog 'Non-stop Birding' ( and you can get there by clicking here). I have banged on about Beddington frequently on this blog, but for those who haven't visited this blog before (or those of short-term memory), this is the place where I cut my ornithological teeth. It has been birded for almost a century and has an almost unbroken ornithological record stretching back to the 1930s - how many places can boast that? The roll-call of Bed...