Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2025 i Birdwatch

Many of our volunteers find it hard to believe that Lakenheath Fen is turning 30. They still have really clear and fond memories of those early days, planting hundreds of thousandsof reed seedlings. But consider the progress made since then and the experiences gained, from the joy of hearing the first Eurasian Bittern ‘boom’ across the reserve to doubletaking at the sight of a Common Crane lurking near the Joist Fen viewpoint. The years have indeed ticked past – each breeding season always bringing new excitement and anticipation – and our 30th birthday feels like the perfect point to pause and reflect on all that’s happened to date. Farming background When exploring the history of this site, it’s hard to ignore the profound effect other people have had on the…

Along-established notion among birders is that midsummer is the quietest period of the year for birding and a time to swap the bins and ‘scope for a moth trap or macro lens. In many respects this is true – summer migrants have long since arrived and we’re still some weeks off autumn passage getting going, with most birds in the midst of the breeding season. It’s also the quietest time at BirdGuides, with these weeks seeing the lowest volume of sightings reported daily. But the situation isn’t as straightforward as that and, for the keen patch birder, it’s dangerous to write off the longest days as being devoid of birding potential. Of course, if you’re in northern Scotland – especially the Northern Isles – then this is a month long…

This month’s expert panel: Mike Alibone, Keith Betton, David Callahan, Kit Day and Josh Jones Nikon Z50 II digital camera NIKON has focused on producing full-frame camera bodies in recent years, releasing several popular models in this section of the market. However, cropped sensors remain popular with bird photographers due to lower costs and offering more pixels on the bird. So, the announcement of the Z50 II – an upgrade on the five-year-old Z50 – is most welcome. The Z50 II is aimed squarely at hobbyist and enthusiast photographers, with a very reasonable price tag. It’s very compact and lightweight, being only 550 g including the battery. Despite this, it feels strong and well made. I’d have preferred a bit more depth to the grip, and some small buttons are very…

DIGITAL technology has changed bird photography in so many ways: memory cards with the capacity to store thousands of photos, noise-free images at high ISOs and crazily fast framesper-second shooting have all developed enormously since the turn of the century. But perhaps the biggest game-changer is in the ‘digital darkroom’. It’s no longer a case of collecting the developed film from the chemist (youngsters, ask your parents!), flicking through the results and that being the end of it. We now have powerful tools at our fingertips to improve the final image after the photograph has been taken. Post-processing can seem like a daunting task. With all those tools to choose from, it feels like the whole operation could take hours and eat into your spare time when you want to…

Halcyon April days READING recent letters from Birdwatch readers celebrating memorable twitches and encounters with rarities, I thought I would describe my own special morning on 8 April 1978. In those days connecting with a rarity was a more problematic experience. Site information and access details were often sketchy or even guarded, cars were less reliable and motorway journeys were gruelling. As a result, I had resisted the long slog south to connect with the Cheddar Gorge Wallcreeper for some time. However, improving weather, longer daylight hours and a free weekend tilted the balance. With my resolve finally broken, I recruited two birding ‘mates’ who I hardly knew to share the petrol costs and break the monotony of the drive. Service stations and Common Kestrels slipped by and, a number…

Birders clambering up ladders to stare into a walled garden at Hartlepool Headland, Co Durham, on a warm summer day forms one of the most iconic images of 21st-century twitching. This comical scene played out during the late afternoon of 6 June 2011 – the day of the discovery of a female White-throated Robin in the neighbourhood. Initially the bird was favouring a nearby bowling green, where it was much easier to view, but as the day progressed and the size of the twitch swelled, the robin moved onto the lawn of the infamous ‘Doctor’s Garden’, which is surrounded by 3-m-high walls and usually impossible to get a view of from the adjacent road. The extreme rarity of White-throated Robin – this was only the third British record and the…

In early September 2022, the known facts about Black-naped Pheasant Pigeon could fit on a single post-it note. Two individuals were collected on Fergusson Island, east of New Guinea, in 1882; the collector noted that the birds were on “an exceedingly rough range of mountains at an altitude of over 2,000 feet” and that it gave a ké-o call. Fourteen years later, in 1896, another individual was collected on the same island. There had been no documented records of the species since. End of note. For anyone interested in bird conservation, these threadbare details presented a conundrum. On the one hand, you could build a convincing case that the pheasant pigeon, despite the lack of recent records, was probably doing just fine. Few birders visit Fergusson and pheasant pigeons on…

Białowieża Primeval Forest, known in Polish as Puszcza Białowieska, is a special place. It’s a bit of a cliché to describe a certain wild area as such, but there is truly an enchanting atmosphere when you set foot in this vast woodland. At approximately 150,000 ha, straddling the border with Belarus in the far east of Poland, it is as close to wilderness as you can get in Europe. It is often cited as being the last primeval forest on the continent, but this isn’t strictly true – tracts of Eastern European mountains and Scandinavian boreal forest better qualify for such status. It is not untouched by humans, either; a theme woven into the fabric of this enormous woodland’s history. Białowieża is however the closest thing resembling a primeval forest…

BY June, the breeding season will be in full swing for many British birds and there will be plenty of activity to photograph as adults go about feeding their young. While many of our resident passerines will have been frantically collecting food for some time and are therefore looking a bit tatty by now, my target this month, Grey Wagtail, manages to remain looking smart and sleek well into the breeding season. This charming species seems to be doing fairly well these days. It has become a regular sight where I live in south Suffolk, though I’ve had more success photographing them in their traditional fast-flowing river habitats further north and west in the country. Grey Wagtail offers the full range of photographic opportunities: portraits (a bird perched on a…

JUNE has often been a quiet month for me on my patch but there have still been exciting moments. My first Marsh Warbler was singing at around midday at Titchfield Haven on 12 June 2017 – a moment I truly realised what other birders had meant by ‘you’ll know when you hear one’. It was such an amazing and elaborate song made up of seamless mimicry! That had been an interesting morning with two Tufted Duck and a few Sand Martins also new in. A Red-footed Falcon circling over the northern end of my patch in 2020 was another exciting June find. Also of note that year were record counts of Little Egrets at Posbrook Floods, with no fewer than 49 present. They appeared to disperse early morning with peak…

Ifeel a great sense of achievement in my contribution to the creation of Scilly Pelagics, from its concept to becoming an established fixture of the British birding calendar, with hundreds of folk joining us each year in search of breeding, passage and rare seabirds in Scillonian waters. Scilly Pelagics is famous for offering opportunities to observe and photograph seabirds at close range, and for its growing list of mouthwatering extreme rarities. So, how did it all happen? The lure of Wilson’s Scheduled pelagic trips to observe seabirds have long been established internationally, notably at hot-spots in Australasia and North America, but in Britain the seabirding tradition has been one of watching from headlands. From the 1950s, news of seabird rarities from a handful of dedicated headland watchers filtered through British…

Late spring through to early summer is quiet time for gull-watching in Britain. Before the first juvenile Yellow-legged Gulls arrive at the beginning of July, there is seemingly little to look at other than worn, moulting European Herring and Lesser Black-backed Gulls, perhaps with the occasional lingering Caspian Gull. Identifying gulls can be challenging at this time of year – clues such as ‘whiteheadedness’ are no longer reliable and many of the distinctive feather patterns on the coverts, tertials and scapulars have worn away. However, a potential prize awaits the keen gullwatcher willing to search through this bewildering array of tatty birds: freshly arrived first-summer Baltic Gulls, looking comparatively pristine with their replaced primaries. Baltic Gull (Larus fuscus fuscus) is the nominate form of Lesser Blackbacked Gull. There seems to…

The BTO’s latest Breeding Bird Survey report shows that, since 1995, the decline of Wood Warbler in the UK has been exceeded only by that of Willow Tit and European Turtle Dove and yet it receives almost no attention when compared to less rapidly declining species such as Eurasian Curlew, Common Swift and Common Nightingale. Could its preference for less populated parts of the country contribute to this neglect and ultimately lead to its loss with little attempt to save it? A small but dedicated group of enthusiasts in Hampshire is fighting to prevent that from happening. Habitat and nest sites Wood Warblers construct domed nests on the ground, generally in lightly vegetated woodlands. Most books refer to Atlantic oakwoods and beech hangers as the preferred habitat but, while western…

This month’s panel includes: Keith Betton, Kit Day, Chris Harbard, Matt Phelps and Amy Robjohns THE middle of the year already. How on Earth did that happen? The onset of true summer, June is a month when birding sometimes takes a bit of a backseat to other wild life watching pursuits, particularly butterflies, and it should also be a time to enjoy your garden at its very best, hopefully full of flowers and brimming with wildlife. The simplest way to attract more butterflies and other insects to your garden is to leave areas of long grass and wildflowers in your lawn. Perhaps you already did this as part of No Mow May, but don’t whatever you do be tempted to hack it all down now the calendar has changed. Rather,…

ONE of the most extraordinary moments of a bird’s life must be its emergence from the egg, especially for species with precocial young. In order to break free from the shell the chick embryo begins to develop a sharp tip to the beak, made of calcium, which is known as the egg tooth. This sharp protuberance allows a chick to pierce the egg membrane which accesses the air sac between the shell and the membrane, providing the chick with air to breathe. To help with breaking free, emerging chicks have a special muscle which stretches from the back of the neck and enables the bird to move its head upwards with enough force to crack the shell. By moving its head back and forth, the chick scrapes the inner surface…