Glis glis

Snow! There’s a steady stream of thrush species landing in the fields and trees near our house; it looks like the heavy snow to the east has pushed them over to us – what a sight!!

Tagged by Andrew: Pick up the nearest book. Open to page 123 Find the fifth sentence. Post the next three sentences. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you. “It feeds mainly on insects, which include earwigs, gall-insects, beetles, moths, ants, blow-flies and tipulid flies. It also eats spiders, centipedes and worms, while its vegetable [...]

It looks like the effects of MSC Napoli are worsening – a new slick has formed =( Hurray for the wonderful RSCPA workers and volunteers, who are working hard to help the birds… Wish I could help, especially as it’s all happening so close (apparently they originally intended to get the ship to our beach [...]

Hurray! The Brent geese are back! =D

We watched the first episode (Born of Fire) of BBC’s new series on Galapagos the other day… I don’t think I’ve said “wow” so many times since Planet Earth was on XD I’d never quite realised that marine iguanas can actually stay underwater for up to half an hour to eat the algae – and [...]

Alarm sounded for farmland birds Widespread farmland species including the skylark, grey partridge and bullfinch are continuing to decline… I think that DEFRA’s newly introduced Environmental Stewardship scheme could well settle down and produce results over the coming years – small changes in farmland habitat management can make a big difference (see Kemerton Conservation Trust).

Recently, Tom and I were discussing swan species we’d seen, and I dug out some photos of a pair of swans I’d seen in Solihull in January 2006. I realised I hadn’t ever identified them, so with help from Tom and nice people on Flickr I found out. It seems that they were hybrids – [...]

Happy Easter all! We went to Slapton Ley yesterday, and saw lots of nice birds including a Cetti’s warbler (which rather bizarrely seemed to have white wing bars), and a marsh harrier =D The Cetti’s warbler song is very loud and distinctive (especially when it’s going on all around you), but you’ve got to love [...]

Hurray, I finally drew a proper Glis glis for my site! =’) And we saw a greenshank today =D

A few weeks ago, we took an RSPB avocet cruise up the Exe estuary (well, we thought it was RSPB – turned out to be Stuart Lines, but it was excellent nonetheless!). We saw lots of interesting species such as glaucous gull, grey plover, golden plover (lovely plumage!) and sanderling (so cute!). Juvenile gulls learning [...]