Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 i Birdwatch

OUT of allthebirdingtrips I’ve been on in the Western Palearctic, my April 2018 visit to Mauritania ranks among the most enjoyable. They may not be for everyone, but I love deserts. There is something enchanting about the vastness and emptiness of these landscapes. Knowing that there might not be a settlement for tens or even hundreds of kilometres is something that I find strangely comforting. It’s a reminder that true wildernesses still exist on a planet that has long been impacted and shaped by human activity. The heat can be unbearable during the middle of the day, with conditions too intense for doing much more than seeking shelter when the sun is at its highest, but deserts support so many special species that cannot be seen elsewhere. The Sahara in Mauritania…

FLAMBOROUGH Head is an area that is well loved by birders, holiday-makers and day-trippers alike. I am from Leeds but spend much of the time between March and November at Flamborough due to being retired and having a static caravan at Thornwick Bay. My usual morning walk is from Thornwick Bay caravan site to the clifftop and north towards Bempton. I then turn back and walk steadily down towards Thornwick Bay. On Sunday 8 June I decided to conduct my daily walk in reverse, starting from Thornwick Bay and heading towards Bempton. Setting off with my Border Terrier, I had just passed through the gate on the track to Bempton when I was stopped in my tracks by a mystery bird singing a song which I was sure I’d never…

Rutland Water lies in the heart of the eponymous county, which has the distinction of being the smallest in England. It is the UK’s largest artificial reservoir, covering approximately 1,200 ha. Constructed in the early 1970s, water started pouring into the two valleys in 1977, and two years later the reservoir was full. From the outset this massive body of water was designed to host many waterbased activities while providing drinking water to the growing population in eastern England. Fishing, sailing, canoeing and other land-based pursuits were high on the agenda on completion of the project. Fortunately, the 1973 Water Act in England and Wales allowed for provisions regarding nature conservation. This act required water authorities to consult with nature organisations and provide areas for wildlife. Anglian Water, then a…

In 2022, the lowest-ever annual total of Ortolan Buntings was recorded in Britain, as per the most recent Report on Scarce Migrant Birds. The lowestever total before that? The previous year, 2021. The reality in 2025 is that Ortolan Bunting is appearing on our shores in diminishing numbers, become trickier to see and is heading in a direction that is unlikely to be reversed. The rise of noc-mig – nocturnal sound recording – during the last decade has perhaps masked this drop-off; Ortolan Bunting is something of a poster bird for this birding niche, with new ground being broken in Britain since the mid-2010s and the revelation that the species passes somewhat regularly over listening stations in Dorset and elsewhere at certain times of year and in certain weather conditions.…

Leica APO-Televid 82 mm telescope IT’S been a long time since we saw a new premium scope from Leica – 18 years in fact, when, in 2007, the renowned German manufacturer launched its last 82-mm Televid. Apart from a few minor tweaks, there had been nothing since – until now. Launched at the 2025 Global BirdFair in Rutland is a new Televid line-up that includes two key 82-mm models – the APO-Televid and the Televid HD – as well as a new 20-60x zoom eyepiece and a new set of Televid digiscoping accessories. Having enjoyed a preview in Portugal, where components for the new range are manufactured, I was subsequently lucky enough to be given the chance to put the top model and its new zoom eyepiece to the test and…

SPOTTED Flycatcher may not be the most eye-catching species on the British list, but it’s a great bird to watch. August is a good month to find them. ‘Spot Flies’ might be finishing off raising a second brood this month, roving the hedgerows and woodlands in family groups, or turning up on the coast as they kick off their migration properly. While they perform much of their back-and-forth sallying at a neck-aching height up in the canopy, birds will feed lower down at times, and this is when they will offer the best photographic opportunities. Insects might be lower down earlier and later in the day or during cooler weather. Overcast conditions could work well, as long as you’ve got a backdrop of vegetation rather than grey sky. Overall light…

WITH autumn migration well underway, I have many happy patch memories for August – whether it be searching the scrub along Titchfield Canal Path for passerines or trawling through the congregations of waterbirds on the scrapes at Titchfield Haven. Notable finds during this month have been varied with fly-over European Honey Buzzards in 2016 and 2020, Pied Flycatcher in 2020, Spotted Crake in 2018 and, more quirkily, the now locally rare Marsh Tit. But August isn’t all about finding rarities. Indeed, a highlight is experiencing the joy of migration in full swing and the many variations it brings. This might be seeing Whinchats, Northern Wheatears or hirundines lined up along a fence line, recording 10 or more warbler species in a day or enjoying a short-staying group of waders during…

For this month’s twitch reflection, we head back to the last day of July 2016. A hot and sunny summer’s afternoon in Suffolk was interrupted when news broke of a Western Swamphen at Minsmere RSPB. Although plenty connected with the bird that evening, it was the first few days of August that saw hundreds of birders from all over the country heading to East Anglia to enjoy what would go on to be accepted as a first for Britain. The swamphen was fairly obliging on a reedy pool behind South Hide, though could go missing in the reeds and rushes for long periods. That summer of 2016, there had been some buildup to this national first. In June and July, a series of extralimital observations of Western Swamphen across France,…

THRILLING news from Iceland involved the nation’s first Ancient Murrelet at Kópasker from 13th. For nearly 30 years, the returning adult on Lundy, Devon, between 1990 and 1992 stood alone as one of the most unexpected WP vagrants of all time. Since 2021, however, there have been at least three records from four countries (Sweden and Finland in 2021, Spain in 2023 and now this Icelandic bird), leaving many British birders to ponder whether this auk may soon be unblocked on home shores. Ancient Murrelet is the second Pacific alcid to have been recorded in Iceland after a Crested Auklet was collected off the north coast in August 1912. Other Icelandic finds included an apparent pekinensis Common Swift (a potential first for Europe if confirmed), Wood Duck, Hooded Merganser, Oriental…

Two locations are musts for any birder wanting to experience the spectacular spring and autumn migrations of birds of prey and storks in Europe. In the east, the Bosphorus is the gateway for these soaring birds between Europe and the Middle East; in the west, the Strait of Gibraltar is the focal point for flocks crossing between Europe and Africa. They come from much of western and central Europe as they seek to avoid long sea crossings. The number of storks and raptors crossing the Strait of Gibraltar totals more than half a million during autumn migration (late July to early November). With a similar number noted during their return in the spring (late February to late June), this makes a total of approximately one million birds crossing during the…

Hornsea Mere, the largest freshwater lake in Yorkshire, acts like a magnet for Little Gulls as they arrive in the North Sea during their east-to-west autumn migration. However, this has not always been the case. My first encounter with this species was finding a long-dead corpse on the shoreline at the mere on 30 November 1954. The remains of the bird were sent to Bolton Museum and identification was confirmed as a juvenile Little Gull – the first record for Hornsea Mere. A rapid rise Until the end of the 1950s, Little Gull was at best a scarce bird in Britain and Ireland. It was not until the 1970s that numbers gradually increased. In the 1980s, the highest totals of birds recorded at Hornsea Mere were 170 in August 1980…

Should birds be named after people? In 2023, the American Ornithological Society voted ‘No!’ It has started the process of changing about 150 common eponymic names, arguing that this will ‘address past wrongs and engage more people in the enjoyment, conservation and study of birds.’ I am co-author of Biographies for Birdwatchers: The Lives of Those Commemorated in Western Palearctic Bird Names (2022), which provides biographies of 163 people with species named after them, as well as 170 individuals commemorated in subspecific eponyms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I see the issue from a different perspective. Researching these characters, many of them outstanding naturalists of diverse nationalities and occupations, has added extraordinary richness to my birding experience. Even just dipping into their lives can give us important glimpses into history and help us…

AS much as I love the freneticism and abundance of spring and high summer, the quieter, lazier days of August hold a special place in my heart. It’s a month when natural landscapes – your garden included – can feel as though they are beginning to wind down towards autumn. In fact, there is a particular date that always seems to do it for me: 11th. Once we reach that second week of the month, it really feels as though we have passed a point of no return. The days are still long and warm, but there’s a softness to the light, the mornings are bathed in gold and the once-urgent chorus of birdsong has quietened to the odd contact call or the squeaks of juveniles. After the riot of summer…

MORE than 220 bird species are known to be co-operative breeders in some way, with close relatives or unrelated individuals acting as helpers. More than half of these will breed in a family-based group, with 30% also including unrelated birds, and 15% mainly nesting with strangers. Most are found in tropical regions, especially in Australasia and Africa. Passerines account for a large proportion of co-operative breeders, but numerous families, such as woodpeckers, bee-eaters and kingfishers, contain many species which use this breeding method. One species from Australasia, White-rumped Swiftlet, has an extraordinary strategy in which the female lays two single eggs many weeks apart, enabling the first nestling to incubate the second egg. British birds which are known to use co-operative breeding include Carrion Crow, House Martin and Long-tailed Tit.…

NEWS broke of a probable Blue-cheeked Bee-eater on the small island of Iona, nestled off the south-west coast of Mull, Argyll, on the evening of 9 June. Although there were no images, the description of the bird – ‘uniformly green, large tail projection, limited pale throat but hard to discern colour, black stripe through eye’ – left little room for doubt. With a dozen previous occurrences in Britain, Bluecheeked Bee-eater remains one of the rarest species to have reached these shores. It has proven notoriously hard to see, too, with birds in East Yorkshire in 1989 and Shetland in 1997 the only individuals to be truly twitchable in living memory. More recently, one lingered for three hours at Bockhill Farm, Kent, in July 2009, but unless you were in the…

I’ve been listing for as long as I can remember. I think it’s something that is hard-wired into many people, perhaps linked to the hunter part of our hunter-gather beginnings as a species. Personally I’ve kept bird lists for train journeys, including the same one repeatedly as an internal competition, as well as hospital-bed lists, and not just house lists but also room lists. You name it and I’ve kept a list for it! What I have never been is a competitive lister. Despite having a list for everything, the only ones I have ever taken seriously are my self-found list (297) and my local patch list (265). I’ve never really seen the point of chasing all over the country to see birds, just to add them to an arbitrary…

South Polar Skua made pelagic headlines in the autumns of 2023 and 2024 with unprecedented influxes involving a dozen or so evidently healthy birds off south-west England. To put this into context, there had been only three previous British records and none since 2002. The first British record involved a scavenging bird on the beach at West Bexington, Dorset in January-February 1996. Thereafter, individuals were taken into care in the Isles of Scilly in October 2001 and at Aberavon, Glamorgan, in February 2002. For reasons unknown the status of South Polar Skua in British waters has changed. It may be easier to understand the extent of this change with increased knowledge among British birders of the movements of South Polar Skua and how to separate it from Great Skua. Movements…

Visiting the Western Palearctic’s most remote areas is essential for the keenest regional listers, and few places in the WP feel as far-flung and challenging to visit as Mauritania. Dominated by the Sahara Desert, this country is four times the size of Britain yet has a human population of only five million. Many of its inhabitants live nomadic lives and it’s not hard to see why – you can travel for hours through the country’s barren yet spectacular desert interior without seeing so much as a single acacia tree. Birders have been travelling to Mauritania on and off for the last couple of decades. A few teams visited in the mid-2000s – back then, it was thought to be the only country in the WP where Cricket Warbler, Sudan Golden…

Nikon NIKKOR Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR lens SUPER-telephoto zoom lenses offering 600 mm at the long end with a maximum aperture of f/6.3 have become immensely popular among bird photographers in recent years. And with good reason: they offer excellent reach at a manageable size and reasonable cost. The Nikon Z 180-600 mm f/5.6-6.3 lens is designed for the company’s mirrorless cameras (including the Z50 II, Z8 and Z9), and is a very fine example of the breed. Weighing in at just under 2 kg and measuring some 32 cm in length without the lens hood, this is a substantial lens. For many photographers it will be one that they can use handheld in most circumstances, and I found it very comfortable to carry around. For long sessions or those…

MODERN cameras offer a dizzying array of customisation options. If you want to, you can recalibrate all your camera’s buttons and completely jumble up their functions. Mostly, recalibrating all those carefully assigned buttons to perform different tasks won’t make any sense, but what about the AF-ON button by your right thumb? By default, this button starts autofocus (AF) and metering. These functions are also operated by half-depressing the shutter button, so why do you need another one? Many bird photographers actually make heavy use of this button and swear by a technique known as ‘backbutton focus’ (BBF). The idea here is to remove the AF and metering functions from the shutter button and leave these jobs entirely to the AF-ON button, while the shutter button still takes care of taking…

BIRDS utilise a wide range of natural materials to build their nests, but more and more are incorporating discarded artificial materials. This is nothing new, with Red Kite’s habit of stealing laundry being mentioned by Shakespeare. The availability of rubbish in the modern environment offers birds an alternative to plant-based material, and the indestructibility of plastics, metals and other manmade substances may mean that nests are more resilient. Unsurprisingly, the greatest use of waste items appears to be in areas where they are most available. One 2023 study showed 176 bird species using litter within their nests, with nearly 35,000 nests recorded. More than half of the items analysed were made from plastics, with 20% made from cloth, 9% paper and 5% metal. While some resemble natural material, many plastic,…

■ Great autumns remembered In the first article of an occasional series on epic autumns, Richard Bonser reflects on the quantity and quality of classy rarities that were found in 2008. ■ The gull from the storm September is the best time of year to connect with Sabine’s Gull in Europe. Niall Keogh profiles this attractive and desirable larid, which can be a tricky bird to see anywhere in Britain. ■ Suited and booted For the rarity finder, this time of year offers the outside chance of two rare and very similar-looking Iduna warblers: Booted and Sykes’s. Andy Stoddart provides an identification walkthrough. ■ Going green across Europe Ponç Feliu Latorre tells the epic story of his green big year across the continent in 2024, with thrills and spills aplenty…