Category: Birding
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BOATING IN BANGLADESH
DECEMBER 2025 Bangladesh might not be most people’s first choice of holiday destination, but then most people have never heard of a Masked Finfoot. This bizarre bird, looking like a cross between a duck and a grebe, used to be widespread across south-east Asia and relatively easy to see. Now, as a result of…
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WHALES AND WINDBIRDS IN MADEIRA
May 2025 The Portuguese island of Madeira strikes you as a remarkable place before your plane has even landed. Forming the tip of an oceanic volcano, the main island is steep and mountainous. This leaves very little flat land to work with, so Cristiano Ronaldo International Airport is a marvel of engineering with the…
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BRITISH COAST WALK – DAY 115
7th April 2025 LYMINGTON PIER TO CHEWTON BUNNY The trains are running again this morning, so I head out before dawn and catch the first train from Southampton to Lymington Pier at the end of the line, passing through the woods and heaths of the New Forest and seeing some Fallow Deer from the…
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BRITISH COAST WALK – DAY 114
Sunday 6th April 2025 HILL TOP (BEAULIEU) TO LYMINGTON PIER Thirteen months after my last bout of coast walking I return to Southampton by train and catch a bus to where I left off in the heathland of the New Forest National Park. The weather is forecast to be warm and sunny, and I…
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WINTER IN THE BROKEN LAND
In the heart of eastern England, straddling the border between Norfolk and Suffolk, lies an area known as the Brecklands (or ‘Brecks’ for short). The name is derived from ‘Broken Lands’, as they were known in medieval times. A large expanse of open, sandy country cleared of trees during the Neolithic, by the Middle…
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WHAT LARKS! SOUTH AFRICAN MEGA-BIRDING
NOVEMBER 2024 For those of my generation, growing up in 70s and 80s Britain, South Africa will forever be associated with the dark days of apartheid. Never far from the TV news, this was the era of protests outside the embassy in Trafalgar Square, boycotts of Sun City and Cape apples, necklacing, and “Free…
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TAIWAN BIRDING DIARY 2024 – Part 2: Lowland Birding
26th April 2024 We left the mountains of Dasyueshan and Wushe with 29 of Taiwan’s 32 endemic birds under our belts. These are the birds that are found only in Taiwan and nowhere else in the world. With the slightly alarming earth tremors and the relentless rain hopefully behind us, we descended back into…
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TAIWAN BIRDING DIARY 2024 – Part 1: Mountain Birding
Following a few days in Taipei, my main reason for visiting Taiwan was to join a birding group and travel around the rest of the island searching for Taiwan’s unique wildlife. Taiwan is classified by Birdlife International as an Endemic Bird Area which, at the time of writing, hosts 32 endemic bird species (in…
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BRITISH COAST WALK – DAY 108
Monday 4th March 2024 HAYLING ISLAND TO HAYLING FERRY (PORTSMOUTH) In broad daylight it’s much easier to find my way back to where I left off last night. The footpath up the western side of the island is very pleasant, following the course of an old railway through a narrow strip of woods, with…
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A CONGREGATION OF WAXWINGS
I’m fairly sure a ‘congregation’ isn’t the correct collective noun for a group of Waxwings, but then I’ve never really seen the point of collective nouns for birds. Who comes up with them? Who actually uses them? Ok, some of them are poetic I guess: ‘a charm of Goldfinches’, ‘a murder of Crows’, ‘a…
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A LITTLE CRAKE IN MILTON KEYNES
11th November 2023 Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire is more often associated with concrete cows than with rare migrant birds. The iconic cattle have long since gone, but now there’s a Little Crake in town. Or rather at Linford Lakes Nature Reserve on the edge of town. Only about 100 of these secretive birds have…
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THE NIGHT HERONS ARE COMING!
The Black-crowned Night Heron has a huge worldwide distribution, right across North and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia…but it isn’t usually found in the UK. In the last decade or so, one of the big stories in British ecology has been the colonisation of these islands by, and increased breeding success of, long-legged…
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WALKING TO SLOVAKIA
VIENNA AND BRATISLAVA – part 2 of 2 Day Four – 20th May 2023 This morning it is hot and sunny as I catch a train to Marchegg, a small Austrian town near the Slovakian border. The journey takes less than an hour across flat arable land and from the window I see a…
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HAMSTER HUNTING IN VIENNA
VIENNA AND BRATISLAVA – part 1 of 2 The wild hamsters of Vienna have become tiny wildlife celebrities in recent years, especially since featuring in David Attenborough’s Seven Worlds, One Planet series in 2019. The European Hamster (or Black-bellied Hamster) is a different species from the domestic hamsters kept as pets – these are…
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ARCTIC ENCOUNTERS – part 3 of 3
ARCTIC OCEAN 9th – 12th March 2023 I have to catch the boat early this morning, so I miss out on the buffet breakfast. It’s a shame as this hotel, as well as the usual buffet items, serves a selection of fish, and I’m enjoying the novelty of having toast with salmon, herring and…
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ARCTIC ENCOUNTERS – part 2 of 3
NORWAY’S VARANGER FJORD 6th – 8th March 2023 I wake up to a morning that is bright and sunny, but still cold at -20°c (-4°F). I hear that I’ve chosen a good week to come here as the previous week was snowy and windy and the roads were blocked. There are four onward buses to…
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ARCTIC ENCOUNTERS – part 1 of 3
NORTHERN FINLAND 2nd – 5th March 2023 This isn’t my first trip to the Arctic. In 2019 I rode the Inlandsbanan, a slow summer train that runs through the centre of Sweden and stops as it crosses the Arctic Circle so that we could step down and take photos before continuing on to Gällivare at…
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SEARCHING FOR THE LAST WILLOW TITS
No one would say a Willow Tit was a glamorous bird. Few people will ever see one, and even fewer would be impressed by one if they did. Closely related to the Chickadees of North America, it is mostly pale brown with a black cap and chin. Its call is harsh and unattractive. When it…
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WINTER WILDLIFE AT WICKEN FEN
After a couple of wet weekends, I’m keen to get outdoors again and look for some wildlife. I decide to spend a day at Wicken Fen, one of Britain’s oldest nature reserves and one of only four areas of wetland left behind when the large fens of eastern England were drained for agriculture. I arrive…
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EAST SUFFOLK REVISITED
TWITCHING ALDEBURGH’S ALPINE ACCENTOR 29th October 2022 I’m back on the east coast of Suffolk again. Two weeks after the Red Deer rut weekend and a week after a London theatre trip, I had intended to stay at home this weekend and do some long-overdue housework. My oven needs cleaning and Henry the Hoover…
Vole Explosion 