Birds of Britain

We are making a DVD guide to birdwatching. In the meantime, enjoy this classic from YouTube...

July 2008

Now in a shop near you...

Our July 2008 issue is packed with great photos, news, advice and inspiration to help you get more from your birding this month:

In your garden How to attract mammals, watch mammals and enjoy mammals in your backyard.

Inside Binoculars We all use them, but what is really going on in your bins?

Win Scottish holidays worth £2,230 Enter our easy-to-enter comp. It is, in a nutshell, easy to enter!

Go Birding Special: Dragonflies and Birds 10 walks with great dragonflies and brilliant birds.

Building for Birds We share our homes with a wider range of birds than you may think – here's how to encourage them to nest at your place.

Secret lives: Wren: small bird, big character!

Plus Plus PLUS – UKBS unique site-by-site guide to all the best birds of May 2008; page after page of ideas for July birding, and so much more!

Go buy it! Or subscribe here:

New for the Western Palearctic?

Note the rather Woodcock-/Jack Snipe-like profile, with steep forehead and 'short' bill.



Swinhoe's Snipe, Tohmajarvi, Niirala, Finland, 27.6.08 (digiscope).

Mike Weedon has just got back from Finland, where he caught up with this new European bird, the Swinhoe's Snipe. It was particularly distinctive (and brilliant) in flight, when its bubbly drumming and trilling combined with a bouncing flight on bowed V-shaped wings and plunges to earth with a 'basket' of vibrating tail-feathers.

June 2008

Now in a shop near you...

Our June 2008 issue is packed with advice and inspiration to help you get more from your birding this month:

In your garden An old favourite gets a complete overhaul. Packd with tips and advice for your garden including how to make a wildlife pond.

Reedbeds Everything you need to know (and more) about this brilliant wetland habitat.

Digiscoping v DSLR Mike Weedon puts the two photographic techniques to the test on real birds! Which wins? The results may startle...

Go Birding 10 new exciting bird walks for June.

Secret lives: Fascinating facts about the Goldfinch.

Identify: Young Common, Med and Black-headed Gulls.

It's all in the June 2008 issue of Bird Watching magazine. Don't miss it!

Plus Plus PLUS – UKBS unique site-by-site guide to all the best birds of April 2008; page after page of ideas for June birding, and so much more!

Go buy it! Or subscribe here:

Steppe-ing out

Features editor Matt Merritt writes: Just back from a week in Aragon on a 'fam' trip - birding, eating too much, and drinking lots of splendid wine. I won't even attempt to call it work, because it really was a lot of fun with a great group of people.

One of the things that really struck me was just how huge and empty the landscape is - it's something that takes you completely by surprise in western Europe. Given that around half of Aragon's 1.2 million population lives in the capital, Zaragoza, that probably shouldn't be a shock, but it is. Standing out on the steppes (above left), you can imagine yourself in the middle of the American South West.

Birding highlights included seeing several glorious Lammergeiers, a Golden Eagle on the nest feeding young, more Griffon Vultures than I could even have imagined, a very showy Rock Thrush in the spectacular setting of Castillo Loarre, a displaying Little Bustard out on the steppes, the maddeningly elusive Dupont's Larks, and both Black and Black-eared Wheatears (one of the latter subjecting a male Cuckoo to the most fierce mobbing I've ever seen from a small bird). And then there were Bee-eaters and Hoopoes galore, Alpine Swifts chattering overhead, and a whole host of great warblers, including Subalpine, Dartford, Sardinian, the not-very-aptly named Melodious, and the lovely Bonelli's (basically the southern equivalent of our Wood Warbler).

I shouldn't forget the Nightingales. Other than on the steppes, they were everywhere we went, and when we stayed a couple of nights in the mountaintop village of Alquezar (pictured right), you could hear them singing throughout the night (luckily, we were far too shattered to be kept awake by it). In fact, the local name for them is Ruisenor, meaning 'noisy man', which hits the nail right on the head.

It's a part of Spain that has tended to be overshadowed by the likes of the Extremadura or the Ebro Delta, but it offers fantastic birding in a memorable landscape. You'll be hearing a lot more of it in the future, not least in a forthcoming issue of Bird Watching. For now, here's a picture of our tired but happy group to close with...

PS. As you'll see, the rain in Spain doesn't fall mainly on the plain at all.

Peewit composite

Mike Weedon writes:

When I was a child, I thought the Woodcock was the Peewit – somehow the name suited the extraordinary appearance of this most charismatic of our waders. You could still sort of argue that that is what they squeak between croaks in the magnificent roding display flight.
I had a joyous evening at a site near here on Friday, watching multiple roding Woodcocks, including a pair chasing each other with short excited clipped notes. Grasshopper Warblers were everywhere, Nightingales trying to out-dominate them. Tawny Ows hooted and a Barn Owl screeched repeatedly, while an angry Chinese Water Deer barked out its evil warning.
But best of all was a duetting pair of Long-eared Owls, with one bird even indulging in a spot of wing-clap display.
Pure summer joy for the lover of the glorious, crepuscular gloaming.

Tern tern tern

Kevin Wilmot writes:

A fruitless lunchtime trip for Mike, Matt and me to see a reported Wryneck (it was a Mistle Thrush!), ended with one of the most amazing sights I've ever witnessed on my local patch at Ferry Meadows near Peterborough.

As we splashed into the damp car park at Gunwade lake, we were greeted by what can best be described as a 'swarm' of terns, more than I'd ever seen at once. Incredibly, they were nearly all Arctic Terns, stopping off on their way to their breeding grounds in the high Arctic. A quick count revealed more than 150 of them – pale, graceful, red-billed beauties that Mike was quick to photograph with his DSLR (see photos above). The mirrored surface of the windless lake lent a surreal feel to an incredible half-hour.

Lunchtime twitching

The BW team twitched this delicious Redstart on 16.4.08. This is a digiscoped shot by Mike Weedon.

Flying Mallard

Mike Weedon writes:
My daughter Jasmine (just turned nine) took this video of a drake Mallard taking off from the edge of our pond. She filmed it with my old digiscoping camera, the good old Nikon Coolpix 880.

The Urban Birder – How not to make a nestbox!

David The Urban Birder Lindo shows off his best effort at building a nestbox on BBC's The One Show

Fieldfares

Matt, Kev and I (says Mike) all went twitching a local Ring Ouzel this lunchtime, found by Peterbrough recorder and champion local bird-finder Brian Stone. And very nice it was, too (for pics, see here).

We then took a wee drive around to find an ouzel of our own. We had no direct success, but saw one or two Buzzards (always nice) and bumped into a couple of surprisingly approachable Fieldfares – perhaps a pair. So approachable were they that I was able to wander back to the car, grab Matt's scope and come back and digiscope them before they scarpered.

Here are a couple of shots (one of each bird). Note how dark and well-marked one is (which we took to be a male).

Armchair birding

Matt Merritt writes:
One of my most regular moans is about having to sit around at home waiting for deliveries, meter readers – you know the sort of thing. Well, never again.

On Saturday, I was up early because a firm was coming round to do a safety check on my gas meter. As is always the way with such things, they said they’d be around “between 8 and 2”, and so I found myself sitting there in front of the TV, whiling away the hours, and itching to get outside to look for a few spring migrants.

I live in a large, industrial village, and much as I like it, the one big problem with my house is that it’s near impossible to watch birds from inside it. At the back (it’s a terraced house), outhouses and walls block the view of the garden, while at the front, there’s a window box and a tiny patch of gravel, and then across the road an old factory (converted into multiple work units) and an old people’s home.

Oh, and between those two, there’s a patch of weed-strewn dirt and gravel used as a car park for the work units. Occasionally it attracts a Jackdaw or a Blackbird or a Robin, or even a Woodpigeon, but not a lot else. On this occasion, I was watching a pair of Jackdaws (probably the ones who nest in my chimney pots) collecting nesting material from it, and noticed a small, dull, Robin-sized bird moving around beyond them. Trouble was, it was partially obscured by grass and weeds, and I’m ashamed to say that for quite some time I was far too lazy to go and get a pair of bins to get a decent look at it, or to go upstairs to get a more unobstructed view. Finally, though, a brief full-length glimpse showed it to be considerably slimmer than a Robin, and I began to get just a little bit excited.

As soon as I got the bins on it, it turned away from me, revealing a rufous tail, constantly flicking as it picked its way over the ground. The rest of it was a pretty uniformly mousy grey-brown. A female Black Redstart, and not 25 yards from my front door!

Trouble was, my scope was in the car outside, and going out to fetch it might have frightened the bird off, so I spent the next half-hour watching it from inside the house. It occasionally flew up onto a nearby fence, or to the roof of the old folks’ home, before resuming its dashing around after insects. At last, it retreated to the far corner of the car-park, so I dashed out and got the scope, and watched it for another half an hour from as close as I dared.

I’m afraid I’m not signed up to any bird news services, so couldn’t spread the word very easily, and anyway I was far too absorbed to take my eyes off the rare visitor. In the end, it disappeared into the nearby park, which meant me dashing round the corner to the main entrance and searching for it, fruitlessly, for about an hour. After that, it was home to jot down a few descriptive notes and email the sighting to LROS.

Predictably, I spent the rest of the weekend trudging round likely spots searching for migrants, and turning up nothing more than a few Wheatears and Willow Warblers, so the moral of the story for me is never to ignore the birds just outside the front door, and more importantly, never to complain again about being stuck in waiting for this or that caller.

Events

In addition to the events listings in Bird Watching magazine, we will be listing birdwatching-related events on this blog. Scroll down the sidebar to just below Breaking News, click on the link, and you'll find April 2008's events.

If you have an event that you'd like added to the listings, email us at:
birdwatching@emap.com and we'll post it.

May 2008

Now in a shop near you...

Our May 2008 issue is packed with advice and inspiration to help you get more from your birding this month:

Major binoculars survey. An in-depth look at four of the best 8x32 binoculars on the market.

Finders keepers. Seven unmissable pages to help you find that bird-of-a-lifetime.

How to photograph birds in flight. All you need to make your garden the place to photograph birds.

Win! A holiday in bird-rich Scotland.

Go Birding. 10 exciting bird walks for the month of May.

Photography special. Portraits of London Grey Herons.

Secret lives: Fascinating facts about the Great Crested Grebe.

Identify: Kites and Marsh Harrier in flight.

It's all in the May 2008 issue of Bird Watching magazine. Don't miss it!

Plus Plus PLUS – Ten new Go Birding walks to try; unique site-by-site guide to all the best birds of March 2008; page after page of ideas for May birding, and so much more!

Go buy it! Or subscribe here:

Drummer

Drumming Great Spotted Woodpecker digiscoped in video by Mike Weedon at Woodwalton Fen NNR, Cambs, on 24.3.08.
Pump up the volume!