Natural Selection

Second home may be pushing it a bit, but every year since 2007 I’ve spent some time on Out Skerries in Shetland. I will be there in a couple of weeks for a few days, if the internet is up to it I will blog about it but I suspect it won’t be so I…

You’d think with the war in Ukraine, price increases and so on there would be plenty to report on. Sometimes admittedly it can be difficult to find a local angle on current affairs. There’s really no excuse however for the Lancashire Evening Post suggesting that an endangered Mauritius Pink Pigeon had probably been spotted in…

At lunchtime today I had a very quick check of Devonshire Rock Gardens and North Shore golf course. There is a public footpath that crosses the course, and whilst you can’t linger it’s worth a fast paced look. I’ve had a couple of Hooded Crow together in the past, a Chough that wandered the Fylde…

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…