Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2021 i Bird Watching

The start of the new year set me thinking about how birdwatching is all about constant change – it’s what makes it endlessly fascinating, and it’s what I talk about on page 26. Where have all the Pochards gone? Why do Stonechats come and go? Your best chance of finding the answers to questions like that, and to coming up with new questions, of course, is to take part in our #My200BirdYear challenge. Our special 16-page centre section has everything you need to get you started, and as always, it’s all about getting out there and watching birds, in the way that suits you. It’s a challenge, yes, but it’s fun and informative, and we want to hear how you’ve gone about tackling it. Wherever you are, and whatever birding…

twitter.com/BirdWatchingMag facebook.com/BirdWatchingMag RARITY RATINGS 1 WAXWING Even if it isn’t a classic ‘Waxwing winter’, there will always be some of these gorgeous northern visitors somewhere during the month. Most likely, they will be in the north or the east (being birds which have come over from Scandinavia and Russia etc). Everyone knows that supermarket car-parks are hotspots, with abundant berry-rich trees and hedges! Wherever they are, these fluffy shape-shifters are pure magic and a treat for the eyes and the ears (with a beautiful ‘tinkling bell’ trill of a call). 2 BLACK-TAILED GODWIT There are two subspecies of Black-tailed Godwit which occur in the UK – the nominate European race, which nests in tiny numbers, and the Icelandic subspecies, which forms the largest wintering flocks. There may be nearly 50,000…

Find the location closest to your destination and add or subtract the hours and minutes from the high tide time at London Bridge, below. SOUTH WEST Weston-Super-Mare (+5:05) Barnstaple (+4:30) Newquay (+3:32) Falmouth (+3:30) Plymouth (+4:05) Torquay (+4:40) Bournemouth (-5:09)* Portland (+4:57) St Peter Port (+4:53) Swanage (-5:19)* Portsmouth (-2:29) Southampton (-2:53) SOUTH EAST Ryde (-2:29) Brighton (-2:51) Eastbourne (-2:48) Dungeness (-3:05) Dover (-2:53) Margate (-1:52) Herne Bay (-1:24) Southend-on-sea (-1:22) Clacton-on-sea (-2:00) EAST ANGLIA Felixstowe Pier (-2:23) Aldeburgh (-2:53) Lowestoft (-4:23) Cromer (+4:56) Hunstanton (+4:44) WALES Colwyn Bay (-2:47) Holyhead (-3:28) Barmouth (-5:45) Aberystwyth (-6:11) Fishguard (+5:44) Swansea (+4:42) Milford Haven (+4:37) Cardiff (+5:15) NORTH WEST Whitehaven (-2:30) Douglas (-2:44) Morecambe (-2:33) Blackpool (-2:50) NORTH EAST Skegness (+4:29) Grimsby (+4:13) Bridlington (+2:58) Whitby (+2:20) Hartlepool (+1:59) Blyth (+1:46) Berwick…

“It’s moving left, in the canopy!” Jim Lawrence makes sure that I can see the Canada Warbler as the diminutive slaty-blue and lemon-yellow bird sifts caterpillars behind a verdant shroud in central Colombia’s highlands. “Oh yeah!” Jim shrieks happily, his camera firing an excited salvo. “I really wanted to photograph this bird.” Jim is global marketing manager for BirdLife International, a worldwide charity whose UK partner is the RSPB. His delight is all the more intense because he has recently recruited ProColombia (the tourist board of this South American country) to support endeavours protecting Canada Warblers on their Andean wintering grounds by becoming a ‘Species Champion’ for BirdLife’s Preventing Extinctions Programme. Last year, this initiative celebrated its 12th anniversary. I remember clearly its launch, which took place amid a great…

POSTCODE: DE65 6PD GRID REF: SK 295 280 MAPS: OS Explorer 245, 259, OS Landranger 128 PARKING: Park on the rough area at the start of the lane, just off Willington Road. There’s room for at least 6 cars TERRAIN: Muddy paths with big puddles – wear wellies ACCESS: All hours, year round. Hide (you need the code from Derbyshire Wildlife Trust) is wheelchair accessible, you could drive as far as the information board FACILITIES: None on site, but Willington has most of what you need…

There was a heavy thump as a parcel came through our letterbox and onto the doormat. A new bird book had arrived to be reviewed. I opened the cardboard packaging to reveal a large book entitled ‘What is a Bird?’ sporting a colourful illustration of a beautiful Inca Jay on the cover. Inside, the pages were packed with coloured photos of birds, close-ups of feathers and bills, diagrams, charts, maps, tables and more. I turned a few pages just to get a feel for the book. An hour and a half later, I reluctantly put it down and got back to what I was supposed to be doing that morning! It was a fascinating study of all aspects of what it is that makes a bird a bird, starting with…

DAY 1: Arrive Walls Farm by 2pm, settle in to your comfortable cottage accommodation. After a cup of tea and settling in, we will head off for an afternoon visit to Somerset’s Avalon Marshes complex hopefully to view the spectacular display of Starlings in a murmuration prior to their roost in the reedbeds. In the evening, a welcome dinner including canapés and wine will be served in Walls Farm with your hosts Stephen Moss, and Graeme and Kay Mitchell. There will be good birding chat and you will be briefed further on our planned birdwatching excursions. DAY 2: Breakfast is in your cottage. Morning visit WWT Steart Marshes near Bridgwater. Many thousands of Lapwing and Golden Plover overwinter here along with many different duck species. A good place, too, for…

RED-THROATED PIPIT The Red-throated Pipit is typical member of the pipit tribe: cryptic and sometimes difficult to identify. In the UK it is a sought-after birders bird. Superficially similar to the more familiar Meadow Pipit while in non-breeding plumage, its breeding garb is very distinctive with varying degrees of brick-red on its throat and upper breast. It is a native of the boreal regions of northern Europe and Asia migrating south into southeastern Asia, Africa and locally in the Middle East. In the UK, they principally show up sporadically during the autumn and never seem to hang around for long. In places like Eilat and Aqaba they are common migrants that sometimes overwinter to be found inspecting sports fields and waterside edges for food.…

Ruth Miller: Snow Bunting – a few show up on our North Wales coastline each winter. They are always a delight to see Ian Parsons: My favourite winter bird has to be a Merlin dashing across the estuary marshes, the perfect mini-hunting machine Dominic Couzens: It’s an unusual one – Water Pipit. I love the fact that it migrates the ‘wrong’ way in autumn David Lindo: It’s got to be the Iceland Gull! I barely ever see them down south but they are gorgeous!…

It is still a bit early in the year to say whether it will be as rarity-packed as 2020. But, we will have our customary guess that some outlandish rarities will turn up this month, including these three, perhaps. TENGMALM’S OWL The people of Mainland Shetland are probably getting sick of Tengmalm’s Owls by now (only kidding!) with different individuals appearing in the last couple of winters before this one. Will there be another of these gorgeous little (not Little) owls this year? KELP GULL One of the black-backed gulls, these are southern hemisphere birds. But, with records as close as northern France in February to March 2018, surely the first confirmed UK Kelp Gull is coming soon (there was a possible juvenile in February 2018, in Lancashire)… PIED-BILLED GREBE…

You will not be surprised to see me called a grumpy old birder. Indeed, I have been called a miserable old git ever since I was a miserable young one. The way the world is, it seems appropriate to rail and grouse against agri-business, unhampered mega corporations and governments who form committees to think about what inaction they can spread over the longest possible period. When local councils appoint a tree warden (and will soon be obliged to come up with a tree-planting programme) I am not even slightly dumbfounded when they happily chop down mature native trees wholesale and plant a few non-native saplings. Local politics seems founded on dumb! I am too scared of litigation to ever accuse a local council of taking kickbacks when they build houses…

I am a birding beginner, with only a couple of years’ experience through my role as art editor of Bird Watching magazine, but I get to see fantastic pictures and read great articles in putting it together. Our June 2019 issue featured an excellent article by Oscar Dewhurst about the plight of Kittiwakes trying to nest in buildings around Newcastle’s iconic Tyne Bridge. In that hazy, pre-lockdown summer of 2019, I needed to visit Newcastle with my older son, as one of his possible university location choices. I’ve always been interested in wildlife and, as a ‘townie’, have tried to get involved where I can. I’ve been on various birding days with the editorial team, but they’ve always been out in the countryside. As much as I appreciate the great…

POSTCODE: DY12 2LT GRID REF: SO 771 763 MAPS: OS Explorer 218, OS Landranger 138 PARKING: Follow the signage along Dry Mill Lane, Bewdley to the small car park by the old railway bridge TERRAIN: A variety of tracks from level ground along the old railway line and in the forest to sloping paths down into the valley bottom to the river ACCESS: Full public access throughout the year FACILITIES: None on site but the main Forestry Commission car park at Callow Hill has an information point, café and toilets. (grid ref: SO 749 739)…

When I was younger, I had a wonderful mentor. He taught me many things about birding, along with a healthy dose of good principles and a bemused, detached world-weariness. In common with all the best mentors, he had his eccentricities, and one of these was a slavish disgust of all introduced birds. He couldn’t bear them; he would not deign to look at them or even talk about them. He was a Ruddy Duck-hater before it was fashionable, and the only Mandarins that were acceptable to him were oranges in tins. The unquestionable beauty of a Pheasant passed him by. If there was a Red-legged Partridge in a field, he would literally turn and walk the other way. Remarkably, though, for a stubborn man, there was one species that somehow…

The genus Numenius comprises eight or nine species of wader, depending on which authority you choose to believe. Collectively, they are better known as curlews and whimbrels: large, long-legged birds with long, or very long, downcurved bills. Of their number, two species – Slender-billed Curlew Numenius tenuirostris and Eskimo Curlew N. borealis – have almost certainly become extinct in our lifetime. The former species bred in Siberia and wintered around the Mediterranean, and its demise was probably the result of habitat loss and degradation; the latter species, once one of the most numerous shorebirds breeding on the North American tundra, was hunted to extinction; at the height of their destruction, it is said that sometimes two million birds were killed each year. Closer to home, the Curlew is a breeding…

VICTORINOX SWISS CHAMP WOOD, £105 A Swiss Army Knife that is embellished with Walnut wood from European forests and has a low carbon footprint. It boasts 29 ‘functions’ – though the key ring doesn’t really count in my book. There are blades for cutting fruit or cheese when you stop for lunch, a bottle opener and corkscrew for celebrating great birds, screwdrivers, scissors and pliers, a ruler, a magnifying glass, and for idle moments in the hide, a nail file… 91x33mm. 185g. victorinox.com BORN TO REWILD T-SHIRT, £19 Some readers may be hearing Steppenwolf in their head already; others will wonder what on Earth I’m going on about. Get your motor running… It’s a great play on words and a great conservation story to promote. These organic cotton T-Shirts are…

BIRD OF THE MONTH LAPWING With 650,000 wintering individuals, the Lapwing is one of our most abundant waders. ‘Individuals’ is a curious word to use, though, as Lapwings are very much flocking birds. Perhaps because of their general familiarity, we tend to overlook the fact these are truly marvellous-looking (and great-sounding) birds. Any bird with a crest is a good bird, of course, but this one is also cloaked in exquisite iridescent greens and purples, and has the most ridiculously broad wings, quite unlike any other wader ever likely to appear in a British field. Fields and pit margins are the place for these birds, rather than wading out in deeper water. They will stand in water when bathing and resting, though. But feeding is done plover-style, using those big…

Regular readers of this column will be well aware that I live in Peterborough. To be more precise (though, no stalkers, please), I live in a part of the city called West Town, which is pretty central, but west of the main railway (the East Coast Main Line). Our house is about a mile from the cathedral and less than a mile from the River Nene and Peterborough’s rowing lake (the latter two substantial bits of water having a bit of an influence on what is possible, bird-wise, in our neck of the city). And, don’t tell my dear wife Jo, but one of the reasons I wanted to move to our house (back in late 2000) was because it was 300m away from nesting Black Redstarts (which I thought…

Statue honour Emily Williamson, who founded the all-female Society for the Protection of Birds in 1889 (it later became the RSPB), is to be honoured with a statue at her former home in Fletcher Moss Park in Didsbury, Manchester. In partnership with the Emily Williamson Statue Campaign, the RSPB is inviting sculptors to submit designs to commemorate its founder. The short-listed maquettes will be unveiled in July 2021, marking the centenary of the Plumage Act. The public will then vote for their favourite. As good as income High biological diversity in our immediate vicinity is as important for life satisfaction as income, say scientists from Senckenberg, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), and the University of Kiel. The researchers showed that all across Europe, the individual enjoyment of…

Habitats can change quicker than you think, and will do, if left to themselves, which is one of the reasons that we regularly revisit Go Birding sites. Wetlands will silt up and start to turn into scrub, and then forest, for example. And those changes can mean changes in bird populations. They’re not necessarily bad news, as long as alternative habitat is created to replace any that disappears. When it isn’t, a problem occurs. Nightingales, for example, need a very particular kind of woodland, with a certain density of understorey. At sites where this is managed, such as our local Castor Hanglands NNR, that means a stable and even slightly increasing Nightingale population. But in other places, the habitat can be ephemeral, and so can the birds. In spring 2019,…

We have, of course, covered birds in gardens a few times before in the monthly ID Challenge series. But we make no apologies for returning to the garden once again, to look at birds which may appear there on a day in the bleak midwinter. Gardens are, after all, where many (if not most) of us cut our birdwatching teeth. If you can get to know the birds on your doorstep (or very near it), you have a good grounding in birds! As a rule, most garden birds are woodland species, seeing our back yards as something resembling their ‘natural’ habitat. But that is not always so, particularly in winter. Anyhow, all you have to do is put a name to the six birds shown here, all of which can…

COLLECT & KEEP Every month we bring you 10 more sites to build up your GO BIRDING collection DUMFRIES & GALLOWAY MAX MILES ON FOOT: 4 MIN TIME: 4 HOURS DEVIL’S BEEFTUB Spectacular scenery and varied birdlife The total area of this Border Forest Trust reserve covers 1,580 acres, and has a number of new broad-leaved plantations, wetlands, burns (the start of the River Annan), as well as active sheep farming. The history of the Beeftub was as a site for stolen cattle used by the reivers, marauding Border folk including both Scots and English families. JOHN MILES WHERE TO WATCH 1 Once you’ve left Moffat, you drive up a narrow road heading towards Corehead. Look out for waders in spring feeding along the way, with Curlew and Lapwing likely.…

POSTCODE: TN29 9PS GRID REF: TR 062 197 MAPS: OS Explorer 125, OS Landranger 169 PARKING: Park in the Dungeness RSPB car park opposite the reserve entrance off Dungeness Road TERRAIN: Mostly on unmade tracks and on level ground. For those with mobility problems view from pull-ins along Dengemarsh Road ACCESS: Open access on public rights of way throughout the year FACILITIES: Dungeness RSPB Visitor Centre and toilets on the reserve. Convenience stores, pubs and toilets in nearby Lydd…

• Five nights in Nethybridge at the comfortable Mountview Hotel, home of our hosts, Heatherlea, and two nights comfortable en suite hotel accommodation in Thurso. All rooms are en suite, with TV and hospitality tray. There is no single supplement, and guests are never expected to share. • Full Scottish breakfast, a substantial packed lunch, and a delicious dinner. • Six full days birdwatching. • All transport by comfortable PCV minibus. All estate access and ferry fees. • Guidance from a professional Heatherlea Group Leader • Checklist to record sightings and notes Please note: all itineraries are given as a guide only. Actual holiday content may vary according to the judgement of your guide, and elements beyond our control (eg weather).…

Aqaba is the only coastal city in Jordan and is situated in the southernmost part of the country. It borders Israel and indeed, is directly opposite Eilat, a location that is well known for its birding riches. I travelled during November 2019, having been invited to explore the wider country as well as to indulge in some quality urban birding in Aqaba itself. I stayed with my hosts the Hyatt Regency Aqaba Ayla Resort, an extremely swish five-star hotel complex set in the grounds of a high-end golf course – itself a fascinating birding venue. More about that later. I spent the ensuing days on excursions visiting cultural sites such as the amazing Petra, and Star Wars-like dramatic landscapes at Wadi Rum. I encountered incredible desert birds such as Sinai…

Birds on the Brink is a conservation grant-awarding charity (Charity No: 1188009) that owns the competition Bird Photographer of the Year. Grants are awarded to projects that support bird conservation, typically offering between £200 and £1,000 to small groups or individuals carrying out grassroots conservation work that has measurable impact. It was borne of a passion for wildlife and in particular birds, and is a response to the seemingly unstoppable process of human environmental exploitation and biodiversity’s steady progression towards extinction. At its heart there is a recognition that all is not yet lost and Birds on the Brink aims to inspire people to care using striking imagery – to capture the imagination and thereby nurture interest and compassion. Bird Watching magazine is proud to support conservation and money generated…

THE STUBBORN LIGHT OF THINGS MELISSA HARRISON, FABER, HB £14.99 This is a collection of work by Melissa from her writings in Nature Notes for The Times. They range from 2014 to 2020, and cover geographical areas ranging from South London, Dartmoor and Dorset to her new home in Suffolk, although the stories do venture out of these areas, too, covering topics in the news at that time. They do cover a lot of bird sightings, as Melissa has a dog which takes her out walking at least three times a day! This is an easy to read book, and ideal for those long winter nights. ALL THE BIRDS OF THE WORLD EDITED BY JOSEP DEL HOYO, LYNX £85 This is one amazing book which, as the title suggests, covers…

It’s fair to say that, this time last year, not one of us would have predicted just what an extraordinary 12 months was ahead, and it would be a brave person who stuck their neck out now and said they know what to expect in 2021. But we do know that birdwatching has played a big part in getting many of us through the difficult times, providing a focus for vital exercise, a connection with nature, with all the rewards and consolations that brings, and a sense of achievement at a time of almost overwhelming circumstances. We hope our #My200BirdYear challenge has played its part. Many of you reached the 200 species mark despite the restrictions placed on travel, to which there is only one possible reaction – BRAVO! That’s…

If you’re confident, or if you’ve completed the challenge before and want a fresh slant on it, you can add your own twist. Here’s a few you could try… 1 Self-found birds Two-hundred would probably take some doing in the UK, without a lot of travel and luck, but it’s possible if you get to go further afield (even if it’s only a beach holiday in Spain). So, no twitching, and no looking at your bird club’s sightings page. It will improve your ID skills enormously, especially in picking birds out of flocks (you’d probably need to find the likes of American Wigeon among Wigeon, for example). 2 Photographed birds You need a record shot of each one – it’s that simple. It doesn’t have to be anything award-winning, but…

Harsh winter weather, of course, can cause all sorts of bird species to move from their usual haunts in search of food, or shelter, rather like the Kingfishers that Ian Parsons has written about (see page 24). In the past, cold snaps and heavy snowfalls have seen, for example, Woodcocks turning up on readers’ patios. But even in a fairly average winter, or in fairly average winter temperatures, birds are on the move at this time of year, as supplies of natural food start to run low. And that can make some otherwise elusive species easier to see, as well as sometimes giving you the chance to help them out along the way. So, here are 10 species or broader groups n of birds to look out for as the…

Of course, the beauty of birdwatching is that pretty much anything can appear at any time, but the species on this list can all be expected to turn up in the UK over the course of a year, so use it to record what you’ve seen, and to work out where and when your best chance of seeing each bird is. Habitats are generalised guides to where each bird is most frequently encountered. They are not hard and fast. Similarly, the indicators of the time of year are just indicators about when a bird is most often seen, not fixed rules. XXX Common XX Less common or scarce X More scarce or rare R Resident all year S Summer visitor W Winter visitor P Passage V Vagrant (rare)…