10,000 Birds

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Last year I hardly went to New York at all (surprising, really, given that the airline I work for has seven daily flights), but this year I’ve been enough to apply for residency. No complaints from me, of course: I really like birding the State (and up until a few weeks ago when Mike moved […]

Common Moorhen Gallinula chloropus chloropus
UK. Various dates

As its colloquial name suggests this is a common breeding bird of marshy environments and lakes with plenty of bankside undergrowth. It is sometimes a secretive bird, scurrying back into cover when disturbed, but most birders (and many non-birders) will know them as being quite tame in many areas […]

As Mike mentioned in his Where are you birding this final weekend of July 2008? post, I’ve been wearing one of my other hats for the last two days as a co-founder of the conservation organisation Birds Korea. I was extremely happy/pleased/honoured to be able to help organise the UK part of a Europe-wide trip […]

Pretty well, thanks for asking (and, yes, that is the best line I can come up with after just thirty minutes sleep and six hours wandering around a park in Nigeria, sorry).

I have to say I was really looking forward to this trip. My Year List has been idling rather than surging ahead (Graham has […]

Blue Crane Anthropoides paradisea
Agulhas Plains, Cape Province, South Africa. April.

One of the smallest of the 15 crane species worldwide the Vulnerable Blue Crane is the national bird of South Africa. It’s endemic to southern Africa, with more than 99% of the population occurring within South Africa (a small disjunct breeding population of approximately 60 individuals […]

I just realised I haven’t written a word of a visit to my home patch last week by the NY blogger and birder Carrie Laben of Great Auk - or Greatest Auk? If I visit a blogger somewhere and they don’t write about it within a few days I start fretting that I must have […]

Sharpe’s Longclaw Macronyx sharpei
Magumu (north of Nairobi), Kenya. June 2008
 
Occasionally I get a ’sharp’ reminder that while I’m flying around the world having a great time and building up a reasonable year-list, some of the very birds that I’m fortunate enough to go looking for are declining rapidly and are seemingly heading unstoppably towards […]

We’ve had a fantastic response to our latest give-away competition, and the emails have been pouring in. Sadly, though, a few cynical readers/visitors have hinted in those emails that they think that things are not all - well - ‘above aboard’, that we may have ever so slightly ‘bent the truth’ in the way that […]

When I was not revelling in numerous species of terns yesterday (June 19th) I spent a happy hour on Po Toi trying to photograph some of the island’s stunning butterflies. One in particular I spent a while trying to sneak up on was the large, bright, and very active Red Lacewing Cethosia biblis: I’m glad […]

I’ve been in Hong Kong for three days and it hasn’t stopped raining until today. And rain in HK (as us lazy types like to type it) is not for the faint-hearted. The world turns a slate-grey, the view from the hotel window disappears in a cloud of drizzlymist (that’s just for you Corey!), and […]

Just for a change I thought I’d take a field trip in the UK last weekend. And just for a change it wasn’t birds I was looking for, but orchids. Yes, occasionally a young man’s fancy turns to flowers and what better flowers to look for than orchids - those beautiful and exotic plants that […]

Rooiels and Betty’s Bay
30 May 2008
 
Getting up early after such a previously great day’s birding (Birding the Cape: the west coast) is not all that difficult - actually not difficult at all - and when my guide Brian arrived at 07:30 I was raring to go. Unfortunately so was the rain. In fact I’d been […]

When I first started birding long, long ago (how long? pre-computer, but post the printed word thankfully) one of the birds that got me firmly and eternally hooked was a species that we here in the UK know as “the robin”. A small, rotund, fiery bundle of aggression and sweet song, the European Robin Erithacus […]

The Greenish Warbler Phylloscopus trochiloides is an abundant insectivorous Palearctic migrant breeding from eastern Europe across a broad swathe of the Boreal zone as far east as the Chinese coast. Birds winter in a far narrower area of the tropical deciduous forests of India, Sri Lanka, and east Asia. A small, slender, insectivorous species found […]

I’m just back from a superb two days birding in Cape Town, South Africa (just two days? For those who don’t know I work for an airline - I come, I go, what can I say…) with Brian Vanderwalt. It’s going to take me the best part of next week to work through all the […]

On May 16th (after visiting both Marievale and Suikerbosrand on the 15th) I spent the morning driving up and back down the Zaagkiuldrift gravel road to Kgomo-kgomo - a lightly-used, exotically-named dirt road that cuts between privately-owned farms and game reserves in excellent thornveld to the north of Pretoria. The road more or less follows […]

A couple of days ago I posted a short trip report on a visit I made to one of my favourite spots on earth - Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve in South Africa. Writing the post reminded me of just how many birds I’ve seen at this one small site, and I thought I might put a […]

After a few hours birding on the morning of May 15th at the excellent Marievale Bird Sanctuary I headed over to one of my favourite places anywhere - the Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve. Just a thirty minute drive from Marievale, Suikerbosrand NR protects a superb area of the highveld sandwiched between farmland and townships, an undulating, […]

Right. Hands up all those of you fed-up with Mike and Corey’s posts on tens of thousands of wood-warblers migrating through various parks and forests in New York. Anyone? Do I see a hand, any hand…just one would do…how about you sir, over in the corner? No? There must be someone…? I guess not - […]

We birders are a most fortunate bunch. Not only are we spoilt for choice when it comes to high-quality optics, birding holidays to suit every budget and every level of interest, birding blogs (like this one!) and websites serving us with all kinds of information and avian adventure, we’re also being offered books of astonishing […]