Natural Selection

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…

In the last couple of months I’ve read a couple of new books by Patrick Barkham and Patrick Galbraith. Here are my brief thoughts. I didn’t know Patrick Barkham had released a collection of his newspaper and magazine articles until I saw it in a Didsbury bookshop. I have a backlog of nature books from…

Western Subalpine Warbler by Nathaniel Dargue Introduction There are no resident birders on Out Skerries, so like last year I am doing a review after the last knockings of the autumn. If there are any further notable sightings I will repost an updated version. In the context of ever declining numbers of migrants noted by…

I thought the presumed Pallid Swift might have roosted on the eastern face of St John’s clocktower. I spoke to Jane about it and we agreed I should go and have a look first thing in the morning in case this was correct. I was in St John’s Square at 6.30 for dawn. It was…

Pallid Swift montage by De Ruwe Philip from Facebook There has been an unprecedented influx of Pallid Swifts into Britain in the last four weeks, as birders reading this will know. In the first week I was actually watching the odd one in Porto Santo. The second two weeks I was in Shetland; they got…