Birding Braunie

Hmmmm. It’s late November and with only one month left until the end of the year, my Year List is looking pretty shabby. I have kept records since 1997 and this year is looking close to being the worst. Before today, I was floundering on 142 species and to highlight the pure pathetic state of this, my lowest total ever was 144 when I didn’t even own a pair of proper binoculars. For example, I still haven’t seen kingfisher, brent goose or rock pipit this year and before today, nuthatch, treecreeper and siskin were nowhere to be seen. Dire straits indeed. So something had to be done. Now I could have nipped over to Epping Forest for these birds but I have always loved and enjoyed an ancient woodland near Cuffley. The Great Wood at Northaw is one of the best woodland I have ever walked. Made up mainly of Oak, Ash, Birch, Hornbeam and pockets of Sweet Chestnut, this SSSI ( Site of Special Scientific Interest) Some trees The wood has three main trails, red, blue and yellow. The ...

Just a quick stroll around Wanstead Flats this morning in search of Ring Ouzels. The Flats were busy with numerous footie games being played out so birdlife was muted  to say the least. The usual spots for the Ouzels were quiet with only a female sparrowhawk and a kestrel adding any interest. Kestrel With the rain starting to come down, I gave up any chance of seeing any of these wonderful thrushes and headed back to the car park. The walk back was better with 8 skylarks, 3 meadow pipits, 12 swallows, one male stonechat and a green woodpecker to make the trip worthwhile.

Well, every other London birder seemed to have seen the tern this week so why not join the list. Tubed it over to Hyde Park Corner at dawn and took a stroll around the Serpentine. Ring-necked Parakeets called loudly as they flew over and I estimated there were around 10-15 in the trees around the lake. The Serpentine, Hyde Park On the water, gulls including Black-headed, Great Black and Lesser Black-backed and Herring woke from their roost. Egyptian, Greylag and Canada Geese honked at joggers as they well jogged by on their early morning fitness regime. Cavalry horses marched along the Serpentine Road as the sun dispersed the early morning fog that lifted from the lake. No sign of the tern yet but it had been seen up by the bridge and as I approached I saw a small tern skimming the water and then it was gone. Where was it? Below the bridge, was a line of posts and the white-winged black tern sat perched on the edge of one of the posts. Don’t bloody move I thought and I found a...

When the first tinges of autumn touch the early morning air, the expectations of increasing my British tick list grow. September and October are always full of promise and it is with an extra energy and enthusiasm that I venture out in the dimly lit morning. There are so many good places to go birding that the choice can sometimes be a bad thing. Do I go to Norfolk (again) for an arctic warbler or do I go to Hampshire for an Isabelline shrike? No, I thought, I’d go to sunny Kent for a Wilson’s phalarope. I suppose, I just like the word, Phalarope. It reminds me of something the Monty Python team would use to great effect, especially if it was dead. The dead Phalarope sketch. It may be that or it may have been because where the bird had been found is a wonderful reserve. Nestled in the Stour Valley, close to Canterbury is Stodmarsh, a wetland with a huge expanse of reed bed as well as woodland and grazing marsh. I also estimated that I could poodle over to Dungeness in the afternoon...

Norfolk is one of the premier counties for birds. Not only does it hold some of our more scarce breeding birds including stone-curlews and golden orioles but it also plays host to a hat full of migrants each spring and autumn. In my mind, I had planned a sketchy idea of the places I wanted to go to. It looked a bit like this: Weeting Heath, Titchwell, Cley-next-the-sea and Snettisham. Overall, this stayed in place with the exception of Titchwell that annoyingly was as good as closed for pathway renovation. So anyway, first stop would be Weeting Heath. Weeting is situated just west of Brandon on the edge of Thetford Forest. This is brecklands country, an unusual  landscape with sandy heaths covered in gorse and ragwort and lined with Scots pine. Weeting Heath This site is famously important for a quite strange looking bird called a stone-curlew. It looks like something the artists at Pixar would dream up for a movie. It all seems out of proportion with huge eyes and a quit...

Why did I agree to this? It’s 4am and my daughter Tanya, bag packed (quite a small one for a change but that’s EasyJet for you) pushes me out the front door towards the car. Still, the reasonably short drive to Gatwick carrying three excited young ladies isn’t too bad when the roads are clear and the sky is blue. Now, I’m not one to miss a bird watching opportunity and one certainly presented it to me as I realised I would be within easy reach of Thursley Common and could be there for 6am. I’d been there a couple of times and with my trusty SatNav I just tapped in Thursley and figured the reserve would be easy to find. Think again Braun. The Thursley bit was easy enough. I passed some pretty little villages and pubs making a mental not of their names but now as I write, I can’t remember any of them. Thursley is just off the A3 near Godalming. The common is actually a vast area of heath and mixed woodland and a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). The trouble is, the car park i...

My early morning starts really have been bearing fruit or rather, birds. This morning I took myself off to a decent patch of scrubland in Chigwell, just off Five Oaks Lane. As per usual, the air was filled with birdsong, notably at least seven song thrush and maybe four or five willow warblers. Parking is difficult at this site. The area consists of a wide area of scrub with young hawthorn and rosehip bushes the grass is high (and wet with dew) so walking through this before the sun has had a chance to dry it out is rather uncomfortable. The scrub is surrounded by mainly oaks but with some fir and some other stuff – don’t really do trees. To the east is Havering Park and to the north, Hainault Forest golf club. There were plenty of birds to be seen. There were Great spotted and green woodpeckers in the wooded areas along with 3-4 blackcaps and many song thrushes. Dunnock The scrub held linnets, greenfinches, dunnocks and a couple of reed buntings. The scrub also had a very s...

I now have a second blog which can be viewed at http://theartofbirds.blogspot.com/

Another quick trip out this morning at 5am, this time to Sewardstone Marsh. Still part of the Lee Valley Park, Sewardstone Marsh is a small and relatively productive habitat with woodland, open scrub and marsh. It sits beside the King George V reservoir which makes it a useful spot for migrants. Sewardstone Marsh at Dawn The marsh had always been a strong site for the elusive cuckoo and a good site for nightingales. Unfortunately, there were no nightingales here this year but I did hear a cuckoo and kept my fingers crossed that one would at least show in flight. There were plenty of sedge warblers and whitethroats in the scrub area. Sand martins and swallows wheeled over the meadows by the Navigation canal. Blackcaps, chiffchaffs and one or two willow warblers sang from the trees along the pathways. They would give themselves away but flying short haul from one section of cover to another. Always difficult to focus on – near impossible to photograph. However,...

As a lot of my friends will tell you, I’m rather partial to a glass or two of wine. I can often be found scanning the shelves of Sainsbury or Tesco looking for that decent Pinot Noir or Grigio. Now this isn’t because I’m an expert on wine, far from it. What I’m looking for is a good, affordable wine that comes with a cork. It seems to me that 70% to 80% of bottles on our supermarket shelves are screw top and not cork and this has nothing to do with the environment. Retailers are understandably keen to deliver a good wine experience to their customers and screw cap bottles safeguard the old problem of a corked or tainted wine.  Customers feel confident the wine they buy will be drinkable and that is what we all have come to exp ect. In fact, I have even noticed that less and less diners feel the need to taste the wine before pouring. That’s how confident people have become. What has been overlooked, is the effect this has had on the cork forest industry. And here, confidence is at...