Birding Braunie

Hmmm? I guess you can see a pattern forming here can’t you? And you’d be right too. Writing a blog was easy when I only ventured out once or twice a month birding but now, as a freelance chappie, I find I have quite a few pockets of time in my week and rather than watch Antiques Road Trip or other such banal TV or even do any housework, I find myself suddenly in a local nature reserve asking myself 'How did I get here?' So my point is, I would have to use the pockets of spare time I have, to write the blogs that record the events of that spare time and thus, I wouldn’t have any spare time to write about anything other than writing non-existent blogs! See? So I save them up for moments like this. The month kicked off in the Lee Valley on a dark mid-morning (a feature of most of my ventures out) and a 2 hour walk around the south part of Fishers Green covering Hooks Marsh and Hall Marsh. I had a low-flying Red Kite over Hooks but failed to focus the telephoto on it. My lens,...

You can’t choose your parents but you can choose a better weekend to go birding on the North Norfolk coast to be frank. However, a weekend that required planning cheap accommodation and at least a month for Ed to tap in all the birding locations I had set him, choice wasn’t an option. We met at my house (made of brick so any huffing and puffing of the wind made no difference) and we had pig in a roll for breakfast (clearly one that had a house of straw) and then loaded up the Ed’s Qashqai which I was blown away by, by the way and set off toward our first port in a storm, Santon Downham. I had hoped for Brambling here but as things went, we had little to see at first with only a fleeting glimpse of Siskin and a Nuthatch . We took the path along the Little Ouse towards the small church before playing out a scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Ed holds on.  The light was poor and the light rain affected our optics and glasses but we soldiered on. The walk back t...