Natural Selection

The love life of zoo animals isn’t normally of great interest to me, but as I was in Dalton yesterday I decided to check on the report that the free flying storks were nesting. Sure enough a pair could be seen from the A590. The image above is through my telescope. I don’t know how…

Today kicks off what birders often refer to as the magic month of May. It’s so named because it’s one of the best times for finding and seeing birds that are passing through. I had a junior parkrun to oversee and a work social walk to attend so whilst I would love to have seen…

At this time of year a number of Lancashire sites both coastal and inland are key staging posts for Whimbrel, a migratory cousin of the more widely known and similar Curlew. For a number of years a couple of coordinated counts have been done about a week apart at these spring roost sites to monitor…

Whilst I was up in Barrow yesterday I saw a number of posts on social media as people received their Shetland Bird Reports through the letter box. It’s always a joy to read this so I hoped mine had arrived, and it had. In one sense it’s obviously an easy sell to make the Shetland…

On the way to watch Barrow secure their Football League status for another season I stopped off at High Carley to do a breeding bird survey in the tetrad SD2675. It’s a nice rural square and when I’ve done the two transects I also get to check an out of the way expanse of water…

On Good Friday I was up in Barrow to watch the Bluebirds play league leaders Forest Green. If I said that I travelled more in hope than expectation that would overstate the optimism involved, but I was pleasantly confounded as a brilliant 4-0 win set up a potential Great Escape from relegation. Before that though…

Listening to a proper dawn chorus is always worth the effort of getting up early. As I parked at Staining Nook this morning it was hard to believe what I know about avian populations in Blackpool and Britain. It was wall to wall (or tree to tree) noise, a crescendo of birdsong. It was life…

At this time of year a few birds that generally breed inland stop off on the Fylde coast on their migration in small numbers. They include species like Pied Flycatchers, Redstarts and Wood Warblers that turn up in Stanley Park and other pockets of trees like the Pleasure Beach bushes I mentioned in a recent…

Regular readers will know that I’ve been revisiting some books I’ve read previously in line with what’s current in my birding and blogging. Following on from Wintering by Steven Rutt I had a second look at Landfill by Tim Dee. I am glad I did. Landfill looks at the relationship between mankind and gulls, in…

As I was passing North Shore after work to collect Jane from the college I had a quick stop at the go kart track and former boating pool to look at the waders. I assume that many of the Turnstones still here well into the spring are non-breeders, though I could be wrong about that.…