Natural Selection

I was successful in a competition run by the North East Scotland Bird Club last week, and the prizes arrived today. As well as a couple of North East Scotland Bird Reports there is a splendid calendar by Ron Macdonald and a couple of his greeting cards with images of Blackcap and Golden Plovers. I’ve…

I’ve looked at a lot of Pink-footed Geese today. First up was a flock of around 600 birds by the main road at Hamilton. These were fairly close and settled as the picture below hopefully conveys. Then via Pilling and Conder Green onwards to the Goose Watch at Aldcliffe. There were decent flocks both on…

This blog was supposed to be about my creative writing, but generally functions as a birding diary. Today I was on a Lancashire Litfest nature writing workshop with Anita Sethi and a number of amateur writers, so it seemed a good day to redress the balance a bit. Anita wrote a book ‘I Belong Here’…

I was back at Little Singleton before work this morning. Again I struggled to find many geese, initially I could see only three Pinkfeet, but as more joined them on the sandbanks it became clear there were hundreds in the saltmarsh. V35 from Svalbard was present for at least its third day. The white neck…

An early jaunt before work to see if the geese were still at Little Singleton. They were, but a lot of them were out of view behind hedges bordering the pasture they were feeding in. The Svalbard collared bird was still in the flock. There was also a lone Greylag in with the Pink-feet, see…

I dropped Jane at her early gym class this morning, and for the first time it was light enough to do some birding rather than go home and wait. I headed for Skippool, where the many yachts in various states of repair and disrepair always look good on a sunny spring morning. There wasn’t a…

After work I went to Marton Mere, partly for a change of scene and partly in case the first Sand Martins had made it. In the event no martins came in towards dusk, and my attention focused on the mini-murmuration of Starlings. There were probably no more than 400 birds even at the peak as…

Last week I wrote about unsuccessfully looking for migrating Whoopers early morning off Blackpool. The last couple of mornings have been more successful. Yesterday Jane and I were due to volunteer at the junior parkrun, but with lighter mornings this still gave an hour or so beforehand to work with. We parked at Rossall Beach…

Yesterday I joined nine or ten other Cumbria Bird Club members for a walk onto Foulney Island. This trip report is written with people who don’t really know the area in mind. Foulney is on the north west lip of Morecambe Bay. You access it from a car park half way along Roa Island causeway.…

I was up in Barrow today for a Cumbria Bird Club outing on Foulney Island, and then the football. I will write up the Foulney trip tomorrow, the less said about the football the better as although they drew it’s looking increasingly bleak in terms of League status. On the way up to these engagements…