Hardly earth shattering but this morning there was a female Blackcap on the fat ball feeder in our Southwick garden, a bird I see less than annually here in the winter months.
In early May, Bridget and I visited Morocco for the third time using the services of the excellent Gayuin Birding Tours http://gayuin.com Most of the photographs in the blogpost that follows are mine except for a few of the better ones taken on 8th May by Hamid Birdwatching https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100010514010519 Tuesday 3rd May Our half full EasyJet flight from Gatwick North Terminal departed bang on time at 06:25, arriving just over 3 hours later at a cloudy Marrakech. Immigration was the usual protracted affair (how long does it take to scrutinise a passport?) but surprisingly there was no checking of our Covid paperwork and seemingly no need for the ‘mandatory’ PCR tests we’d had done less than 48 hours before. Having reclaimed our baggage and changed some money into local currency (£1 = 11.7 Dirham), we headed out of the arrival hall where the familiar face of Hamid was there to meet us and our first Moroccan birds ( Kestrel , Pallid Sw...
Sunday 23rd January Being unwell on and off since mid December has left me feeling down in the dumps at times. A phone call from Gareth asking if I wanted to go birding and more specifically if I wanted to go and see the Hume's Leaf Warbler cheered me up no end, especially as the last Hume's I saw in the UK was the Belle Tout bird way back in December 2007. Gareth had seen the bird a few days before so knew exactly where to park on Eastbourne seafront. Within seconds of reaching its favoured area of Holm Oaks on King Edwards Parade, opposite Staveley Road we heard its distinctive Pied Wagtail-like call and had several brief views of it moving through the canopy but never pausing for more than a second or two at a time. Over the next hour or so it repeated the performance several times calling frequently though the views we had were never prolonged. Back in early December, Gareth had the good fortune to find a Shore Lark on the beach at Pevensey Bay. It has been present ever s...
Friday 18th March Lesser Spotted Woodpecker is one of my favourite birds. When I first started birding in the 1970s it was a bird I saw fairly regularly in Horsham (where I grew up) in the alders along the River Arun, anywhere from Blackbridge Lane through to Kerves Lane, a distance of about two miles. On one memorable occasion I even had the good fortune to see four together near where Denne Road crosses the Arun - two pairs involved in a territorial dispute and one of the few times I've seen the butterfly display flight, in which the birds fly with exaggerated wingbeats and broadly spread wings. The last few times I've looked along the Arun I've drawn a blank, hardly surprisingly given the calamitous decline that has occurred nationally in recent years. It's been 3 years since I last saw a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker in Sussex, so with the forecast predicting wall to wall sunshine and temperatures inland up to 16C, we visited a wet woodland in north Sussex where I...
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