Birding Braunie

Dragged myself over to Amwell NR today on a day off. Only a few birding days to go until my year list starts all over again and I would really like to get it to 160. This by any normal birder standards is pretty meagre but I’m not someone who dashes all over the place to see everything that has rare wings. I mean I could have gone to Berks for the Buff-bellied Pipit at the Queen Mother’s Reservoir but decided to just enjoy a leisurely, if somewhat muddy stroll around one of Lee Valley’s better birding spots in Amwell. I had hoped for barrow loads of Smew with a splattering of Goosander and perhaps a smidgen of Waxwing or Hawfinch. No such luck. Instead I had to be satisfied with a 1st winter drake Scaup that swam around with a small flock of Tufted Ducks on Tumbling Bay Lake. And to give it its due, it is the first Scaup I have seen for a couple of years and it has rocketed my list total up to 155. So I have a little under two weeks to find another five species – won’t be easy but...

Last Sunday, reports came in of a Desert Wheatear having been sighted at Abberton reservoir in Essex. This only the second recored of this bird in Essex with the last one being in 1987. The trouble with this birding lark (poor pun) is that I have to work for a living and can’t drop everything to swan off (and another) to see a rare bird. So I had a tantalising wait each day to see if the bird had been reported and then if it had disappeared. As each day went by, people were posting amazing images of the wheatear and even the BBC got in on the act with a news report on it, telling me it would probably be off as soon as it could because it would be able to tell it was too far north by the shortening days. Great I thought. So it came down to Saturday (today) and with my good bro also planning to visit the site, I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. The early morning air was cold with a threatening swathe of thin rain clouds making the prospect of driving the 50 miles for a pote...

Not sure when the American phrase 'Jaywalking' came into existence but it should now be called Jay-flying and be attributed to Norfolk. There has been a huge influx of Jays across the county and my brother Ant and I saw it first hand as we stopped in Hunstanton for a hot sausage roll breakfast. We witnessed squadrons of Jays passing overhead as we headed for Holme Dunes at the start of our epic weekend of birdwatching on the North Norfolk coast. Holme Dunes NNR (just as it says on the picture) Normally this time of year heralds the right migratory winds from the east that would make any birdwatcher salivate at the prospect of the rarities in abundance falling at their feet. Not this weekend though. With a very light North Westerly, things were quiet on the land and on the sea. Nice day for a stroll though. There were a few wader species on the beach. Knot, Turnstone, Sanderling, Black-tailed Godwit, Redshank and Oystercatcher all allows close viewing with only the oc...

I have decided to go back to basics and learn watercolour techniques properly. I suppose you could liken this to fieldcraft when birdwatching. It’s nearly all about observation and interpretation. I can easily make assumptions about a bird just because it’s what I expect to see and it’s possible I have mis-identified something because I haven’t looked at it properly. So hopefully my Thursday evening watercolour classes will train my eyes and brain to focus on the detail of a subject hard enough to understand it with clarity and confidence. These examples show I have a long way to go! Pear Early Pineapple A bit more graphic Very graphic Detail Final effort

Yesterday morning I stole an hour before work and visited Shoebury East beach. The tide was out but the immature Shag was still around. I managed to take a shot of Shoebury and some large ship and was lucky enough to have a speck on the lens that is the Shag. Spot the Shag There were loads of Pied Wagtails and a couple of Wheatears on the front. Waders included 20+ Curlews , 50+ Oystercatchers and a few Redshank . That’s it. Oh, apart from an irritating dog that wouldn’t stop barking at me or rather my tripod. The owner didn’t have a clue how to control it but if the sea had been in I know what I would have liked to do...

September 1st and the early morning darkness greets me as I step out into the autumnal chill.What summer we had is disappearing fast. And that is great news. Late summer in the world of birding can be a little quiet and everyone has an impatient eye on the calendar and autumn can’t come quickly enough. So today I had high hopes of a good days birding and a trip down to Dungeness felt like a good plan and if nothing else, it should clear the hangover I felt from the night before. Dungeness. Note the complete lack of anything avian in this picture. Funny old place Dungeness. Not just for the dilapidated shacks, perculiar hand-scripted offers for lugworm and shellfish propped up against rusted lumps of marine machinery but the fact that there are quite often days when there are no birds on the land apart from the odd woodpigeon or scruffy magpie. So it can be a bit of a gamble. Overnight rain is no bad thing and if the wind is coming off the sea from a south westerly direction, seaw...

The last few weeks have been manic at work mainly due to one particular client and getting any 'before work' birding has been near impossible and very frustrating. This morning I did manage to get an hour at one of my favourite work patches, namely South Fambridge. I was hoping to see my first autumn arrivals like Whinchat or maybe a Black Tern along the estuary or something. Things were pretty quiet but I was glad for the peace and tranquility this site brings. A few Reed Warblers were still croaking out splutterings of notes but rather half-heartedly now. The shoreline had a few piping Curlew and Redshank while in the distance three Black-tailed Godwits probed and prodded the mud for breakfast. The skies were overcast but the air was warm and scented with wildflower and nothing really mattered. I walked high along the seawall path and any movement in the sky was largely due to Woodpigeons. A few of these pigeons came down on a recently harvested corn? field. A much larg...

Dotterel, circa 1999 Okay, it doesn’t look anything like Sir Peter Scott but you know what I mean. At my age it’s easy to forget what I did yesterday let alone 13 years ago. This watercolour resides in my mum’s dining room and although she is a keen collector of my masterpieces – like only a mum could be, I always forget about this one. Not sure why I painted a Dotterel. It’s a smart bird with the female bucking the trend and being more striking or at least slightly more striking than the male. Rubbish plumage observation and as for the legs, less said the better.

I can’t believe this is my first blog for over a month. It’s true that the months of June and July can be a little barren when it comes to bird watching especially when you are away from the coasts of the UK but the fact is, I have been birding...and thinking. My first thought was why do I go birding? Clearly I love going out to reserves and digiscoping any species of bird; enjoying the habitats and the people I come across. I have trips and bird images I should have shared but to me, they were uninteresting and routine so didn’t or don’t deserve your valuable time reading them etc... Perhaps I’m being unfair on you. Perhaps I expect you to want to see images of rare or interesting birds with tales of woe or intrigue from me? I don’t know. So then I thought why do I do this? I don’t do it to get home to write a blog and I don’t do it to get brilliant photos – that will rarely happen trust me. I don’t want to be top of the top 200, let alone 400 bird club lister list. So what the fu...

Okay, I’ve just proved to myself that I’m not a bona fide twitcher. If I was, I’d have been bashing elbows with all the other birders of Herts, Essex and London over at Stockers Lake, Herts, for the Little Bittern. Instead, I went to Rye Meads also in Herts for Kingfishers and Kestrels. Okay, the Kingfishers didn’t show so just the Kestrels then and a couple of Green Sandpipers if you will. Rye Meads is nice (nice cool not nice twee). It’s been a few years since I’ve walked the boards there but I like what they’ve done with the place. I really wanted to shoot Kingfishers and Rye Meads is the place to do it. My problem was timing. The Kingfisher pair are on a clutch of eggs so activity is low to say the least. I gave it a couple of hours but no change of place between the male and female happened in that time so I gave up. All was not lost though as five Kestrel young, almost at the stage of flight took turns to either defecate out of their nest box or have a gander at what the outs...

Well I’ve been messing around with a website for a few weeks now and although I know it could do with a bit of spit and polish, it does the job. It’s solely dedicated to bird images I take through digiscoping and that’s it. If you want a laugh, go to www.wildgoosechaser.co.uk

You can’t blame rarities when they’re not where they’re supposed to be. After all, they aren’t supposed to be there anyway. Every now and then, I choose to visit a place a rare bird has been seen. In this case, it was a Greenish Warbler at Northward Hill in Kent. It had turned up only yesterday and I was hopeful that it would be around for a day or two. A few of spent a couple hours searching for the Asian Houdini but to no avail. I did find a Nightingale which gave brief views and green and Great Spotted Warblers kept us entertained. I left hoping it wouldn’t reappear and headed off to Elmley Marshes to get over it. This was probably a mistake as Elmley is a vast tract of land with very little cover. With the sun already beating down at a steady 26ºc I was going to be toast. I nearly ran over a Red-legged Partridge as I drove through the entrance gates so that was a new bird for the year. All along the 2 mile track to the reserve there were Lapwings, Yellow Wagtails, Skylarks an...