Natural Selection

Picture copyright Alex Dacre Thursday was my birthday. Jane and I had gone up to Barrow the night before and stayed at the Abbey House Hotel, taking in the Barrow-Tranmere football match. I nipped to the Holker Street ground to pick up Jane’s ticket for the match. It was blowing a hooley and getting a…

It’s well known that there is, or perhaps was, a wildfowl collection on Grange ‘Duck Pond’. The wildfowlers who maintained it may have given up on it now, as the clipped birds were literally sitting ducks for an unusual line of theft before the pandemic and were stolen. But either way the Bar-headed Geese thrived…

After a spell of bleak weather it was nice to be volunteering at parkrun in Stanley Park on Christmas Eve. A bonus was that the park had reopened following the avian flu outbreak and I was able to get a WeBS count in. The highlights of this included over 100 Gadwall and a Little Grebe.…

In February I wrote about the withering on the vine of birding humour. I was talking about this subject yesterday with a long standing birding friend, and we agreed there was still a dearth of good comic writing about contemporary birding. https://wordpress.com/post/natural-selection.uk/850 Today Birdwatch magazine dropped through the letterbox. I instinctively turned to the inside…

No I haven’t been deceiving or betraying anyone. Rather over the last week I’ve done a couple of contrasting but equally enjoyable Marinelife surveys in the Irish Sea. This blogpost will hopefully convey some of the experiences. Ten years ago Marinelife started operating in the Irish Sea on the former Fleetwood-Larne route, and needed local…

Snow Bunting from my archives taken on Out Skerries After yesterday’s unseasonal Swallow I decided to try and see some birds more appropriate to December on the Fylde Coast this morning. I was tail walking at Fleetwood Promenade parkrun and got there early to have a look for the Snow Buntings, which have increased to…

After I’d dropped Jane off at work and was heading to a meeting in North Blackpool news came through of a ‘reported’ Swallow not too far away. December or not most people know what a Swallow looks like so I decided to stop and have a brief search for it. The bird club WhatsApp said…

Today after the junior parkrun the Blues Skies charity did their annual Elf Run on the same course. We provided some marshals, and this year I took part in the 5k event. This gave me the opportunity to use the dreadful pun above, but there is a more serious point to this post. Birding and…

Just a short blog to say that I will be reading from my piece at the launch of this new Northern nature writing anthology tomorrow night. I am doing the opening paragraphs of my short piece about Barrow AFC and Ormsgill Reservoir. The in person event at the Storey Institute in Lancaster is sold out.…

Black-necked Grebe at Kincraig Lake by Cliff Raby On Tuesday this week I went to the final meeting of the Friends of North Blackpool Pond Trail Group. For the best part of a decade they’ve been putting on moth and bat walks, pond dipping and so on. They do this on the Kincraig estate near…