Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2024 i Birdwatch

Popular and reliable sites in a few parts of Britain enable birders to enjoy watching Hawfinches. With a reputation for being shy, secretive and scarce, why search for them anywhere else? Look at BTO BirdFacts online and you will find why that is likely to be a challenge, but also why it’s worth doing, particularly away from the few areas that still have relatively large populations, such as the New Forest, the Forest of Dean, the Wye Valley and North Wales. In this article I’ll give tips on how to find Hawfinches, especially away from the well-known sites. The species has been Red Listed in the UK since 2009 and between the last two BTO Atlas surveys the breeding range declined by 76%, leaving disparate main populations across the country.…

Tucked away in the remote highlands of northern Pakistan is Bashqar Gol Biosphere Reserve. Within the Chitral district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Laspur Valley, this lesser-known protected area is a mosaic of rugged mountains crossed by deep gorges and surrounded by tundra, subalpine meadows and forests. The landscape is sculpted by sheer cliffs that rise above the valley floors and glacial streams that carve their way through the mountains, feeding into rivers and glacial lakes. Sitting at elevations ranging from 1,800 m to more than 5,000 m, Bashqar Gol’s terrain shifts dramatically. The more temperate lower slopes of the reserve are covered by juniper and deodar trees, creating a dark, dense forest canopy. These trees, many of which have stood for hundreds of years, provide critical shelter for wildlife such as…

MIGRATION may be all over again until the spring, but I find the depths of winter can be a very productive season for bird photography. Weather-related movements of birds can happen during the shortest days, and, more locally speaking, changes in the weather will cause some birds to behave differently. One such species is Water Rail. This secretive waterbird usually prefers to squeal away from the safety of a dense reedbed, but a cold snap can make individuals much easier to see as they emerge to seek food. You might be lucky enough to find one attending a feeding station or scuttling across an icy channel. Most Water Rails remain very shy and the slightest sound could send one hurtling for cover; if you have a mirrorless camera, deploying the…

FOR those with a long memory, Uganda under the reign of President Idi Amin in the 1970s was somewhere that we did not imagine visiting. However, the reality today is that Uganda is a thriving country with a warm welcome for tourists – and it offers great birding. Although always in second place to neighbouring Kenya in terms of visitor numbers, Uganda offers many more opportunities to visit deep forests and see primates such as Mountain Gorilla and Chimpanzee. For those who focus on endemic birds, this year has seen Karamoja Apalis split so that the endemic Ugandan form retains that name while those in Tanzania and Kenya are now called Maasai Apalis. You can see it in the Pian Upe Wildlife Reserve along with the endemic Fox’s Weaver, which…

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Few British birds are as spectacular as White-tailed Eagle. This huge raptor, with its 2.4-m ‘barn door’ wingspan, is one of our most recognisable residents and one that is now faring well thanks to decades of hard work by conservationists across the country. As with other birds of prey, history has not been kind to White-tailed Eagle. Once widespread across Britain, the species was persecuted to the point of extirpation in the early 20th century, with the last remaining pair recorded on the Isle of Skye in 1916 and the last known British bird shot two years later in Shetland. Six decades on from that sorry end, new hope for the species came when a project started bringing young White-tailed Eagles from Norway across to the island of Rùm in…

PERHAPS Shetland’s best bird of autumn 2024 was found on the afternoon of 3 October – Britain’s fifth Eastern Crowned Warbler. The bird, discovered in a Sandness garden, proved rather mobile and sent the large crowd of assembled birders on something of a merry dance, before eventually showing fairly well towards the end of the day. With no sign the following morning, the warbler marks a significant first Shetland and Scottish record. The previous British birds were in Co Durham in 2009, Hertfordshire in 2011, Cleveland in 2014 and East Yorkshire in 2016.…

At the beginning of October, excitement broods in the small coastal town of Le Conquet as several dozen birders gather to board the Penn Ar Bed ferry. The destination for the majority of them is an island of great ornithological possibilities–Ouessant. Named ‘Enez eusa’ in the Breton language, meaning ‘the farthest island from the continent’, it is one of France’s most famous birding localities. The first observers arrive at the end of September, but by mid-October hundreds of birders from all over France and further afield across Western Europe converge for an annual pilgrimage to this small yet enchanting island. On board the ferry, impatience and tension are palpable as the first Northern Gannets, skuas and shearwaters are observed. The vessel crosses the Fromveur, a strait known for its powerful…

REVIEW Fujifilm GFX100S II camera IN the digital age, ‘medium format’ describes a camera with a sensor larger than the 35-mm ‘full frame’ (see Birdwatch 389: 64-66). Large sensors tend to be expensive and they also result in the effective focal length being less than the lens specification suggests. It’s the opposite of the crop factor seen in APS-C bodies such as the Canon R7. A 500-mm lens on APS-C cameras gives an effective focal length of 800 mm, whereas with a medium-format camera, it would be less than 500 mm. Unsurprisingly, super-telephoto lenses for this system have therefore been practically non-existent. For these reasons, medium format hasn’t yet caught on for bird photography. But could that be about to change? The Fujifilm GF 500-mm f/5.6 R LM OIS WR…

I know I am probably in the minority, but I have a bit of a soft spot for December – and not just because of Christmas. Yes, it’s dark and (sometimes) cold, but I enjoy the feeling of the year winding down towards its close. The shorter days offer the perfect time to pause, rest and reflect on all that has passed throughout the year and think ahead to the future. In the garden it’s also a time of calm, quiet and restfulness. Perhaps, if you are lucky enough to get any frosts this month, you may be able to enjoy the sight of hoary seedheads and other features of structural interest glistening in the sunshine – assuming that you have heeded my advice to avoid rushing into cutting everything…

MANY birds have a sensitive area near the tip of the bill which is rich in nerve endings and detects movements in mud and water. Special sensory organs are found at the end of the bill, and each contains a nerve ending with a special organ which can be stimulated. Herbst corpuscles are stimulated by pressure changes and occur in pits at the bill tip, and also in the tongue, while Grandry corpuscles detect changing velocity and are in the skin at the end of the bill. These special structures enable the movement of worms in mud, or fish in water, to be detected. This sense probably evolved in the dinosaur ancestors of birds. Both dabbling and diving ducks have these Grandry corpuscles in the nail of their bills, and…

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Winter is a season that some birders may not relish all that much. Personally, I’m an autumn enthusiast – I wait all year for it to arrive but then, when it’s here, I develop a sense of dread about the nights quickly drawing in and heading home from work in the dark without the opportunity for a spot of birding on the way. The cold increases as autumn slips away, taking with it the fizzing excitement of finding a rare passage migrant or two. I’m a lizard-like creature, often cold and craving the sunshine as the winter blues start to settle in. But then, when I stop and think about it, some of my very best days out birding have been in the depths of winter. Cozy layers, lots of…

Living in south Norfolk, I am in the enviable position of having great birding locations all around me. If I drive 45 minutes in any direction, I can find a superb range of species. My feeders are infested with House Sparrows and we have three resident species of owl. European Turtle Dove and Yellowhammer still nest in the hedges around my house, Grey Partridge can be heard in the neighbouring fields and flocks of European Golden Plover and Northern Lapwing grace the winter skies. Looking through historic records for my own parish, I noted that Dickleburgh Moor had occasionally produced some interesting records, notably two Sabine’s Gulls that appeared after the Great Storm of 1987 and the sporadic appearance of winter waterfowl. For most of my adult life I had…

PERHAPS the number one benefit of digital photography is that we can take thousands of photos in a day at no cost (thinking back to the days of film and developing images). We can blast away at 30 frames per second when there’s a bird in the viewfinder in the hope of nailing the perfect shot. The only downside is that the thousands of photos we take can present a daunting task at the end of a day in the field. The first step I take is to trim the numbers down to something more manageable. While storage is relatively inexpensive nowadays, there’s little point in keeping loads of duplicates or shots that don’t make the grade. Powering extra hard disks and cloud storage both have a carbon footprint, too. You…

BY December most migration has tailed off, although some local movements occur due to weather or birds moving in search of food. As I type there appears to be the beginnings of a big Hawfinch arrival, so it looks like this species is likely to be turning up away from traditional sites in the weeks ahead. It’s worth searching for them locally and trying to locate any roost sites to help monitor them (see pages 40-44). Whatever you do in December, with daylight hours in short supply, it is important to make the most of any nice days we get. Weather: snow and ice If you’re in Scotland, snow in the mountains should bring birds to lower ground including Ptarmigan, grouse and Snow Bunting. More widespread snow is likely to…

Ecuador update IN my letter last month (Birdwatch 389: 75), I advised of the state of emergency covering certain provinces of Ecuador. In October we travelled to the country for three weeks, basing ourselves at only three lodges in the states of Zamora Chinchipe, Loja and Pichincha respectively. We saw 470 species, including 61 species of hummingbird and 10 species of antpitta. The most popular months for travelling in the Ecuadorian Andes are December to March, so we were outside of the peak birding season. This meant that we generally had both the lodges and birds to ourselves. It was a pure delight to sit quietly with stunning birds such as ‘Panchito’ and ‘Bebe’, the pair of Jocotoco Antpittas. However, the lodges seemed too quiet and my concern is that…