Category: Twitching
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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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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…