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Jun 2022
1:41pm, 17 Jun 2022
2,026 posts
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Ally-C
With my phone he was a few feet away.
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Jun 2022
5:07pm, 17 Jun 2022
6,176 posts
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um
Finally got a cuckoo ...
and with a bit of zoom
(It was a little bit more than a few feet away. As we watched, it turned out there was a pair of them. Far to far away for a group pic though)
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Jun 2022
8:22pm, 17 Jun 2022
3,338 posts
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flyingfinn
Great shots Um
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Jun 2022
8:43pm, 17 Jun 2022
3,718 posts
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jacdaw
Baby curlews this evening, but also some groups of 10+ oystercatchers and lapwings. Presumably failed breeders / finished breeders / didn't bother breeding?
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Jun 2022
5:11pm, 18 Jun 2022
2,035 posts
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Ally-C
Forgot to mention the other day, it was really sad to see how many Gannets had succumbed to the avian flu that’s going about🤬
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Jun 2022
8:30pm, 18 Jun 2022
55,776 posts
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alpenrose
I'm pretty sure I saw a pair of red kites this afternoon, just on the edge of town (Bournemouth). I saw one once before in the area a few years ago but until now they've not really come this far south.
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Jun 2022
9:45pm, 18 Jun 2022
2,200 posts
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Heinzster
I forgot to post, but I saw a red kite near Dublin Airport last week. I have seen them in England, never Ireland. I believe they have been reintroduced into Wicklow, so hopefully heading North!
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Jun 2022
6:35am, 19 Jun 2022
5,889 posts
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TheScribbler
There’s cheeping from the nest box again, so it sounds like the sparrows have had a second brood.
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Jun 2022
8:26am, 19 Jun 2022
6,181 posts
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um
ar - they're fairly common here, sometimes over the house (Whiteparish) and we often see them on the A36 (as the bypass starts, leaving Salisbury) and around the Landford Poacher junction. I guess plenty of road kill to keep them fed.
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Jun 2022
10:49am, 19 Jun 2022
4,228 posts
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J2R
Here's a brief trip report from my 10 day holiday in the south west of France, which I returned from on Thursday. On the whole I was a little disappointed with what I saw (with some notable exceptions), as I was expecting to see and hear far more birds around me in the countryside (sparser human population, far more wild and semi-wild landscape) than I do in the UK and that was far from the case. Maybe the heatwave there was a factor. Nonetheless there were some delights!
First 5 days were spent on the coast. On arrival at our apartment right by a little beach, I heard a nightingale singing close by, in the daytime! And that was a constant throughout the holiday, both on the coast and in the mountains inland - there were nightingales everywhere, dozens and dozens of them, singing away throughout the day (but not, curiously, at night). Never heard so many in my life.
Other birds of note on or near the coast were yellow-legged gulls (subspecies of herring gull, common there), Sardinian warblers (a first for me), Dartford warbler (heard, not seen), a golden oriole (once again, heard not seen), corn buntings, loads of black redstarts. And everywhere in the little town, oodles of screaming swifts, echoing through the narrow streets.
We then moved inland for a few days to a little village in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Here I started picking up various new warblers in the scrubland, with the help of the amazing Merlin ID app, which identifies in real time, with considerable accuracy, the birds you can hear around you. I heard and then saw Melodious Warblers, Orphean Warblers and Subalpine Warblers, the app being an invaluable tool for doing so (even if I did feel I was cheating). At one point the app picked up a Wryneck nearby, and I'm pretty sure it was right, although the fleeting glimpse I saw of the bird was not enough to confirm. I also saw and heard a couple of Firecrest in holm oak woodland on a mountainside.
One evening at dusk we went up to the top of the little hill behind where we were staying and heard nightjars churring, along with a distant Scops owl.
For me the birding highlight of the trip was a visit to the astonishing Chateau de Peyrepertuse, a ruined fortress castle on the top of a high crag. As we got up to it, a Booted Eagle soared overhead, followed by a Griffon Vulture. Then as we looked down from the castle walls we got a lovely view of a Blue Rock Thrush flying below and perching on another wall below us. We had heard them the previous day up in the mountains but hadn't had an unmistakeable sighting until this point.
So, plenty of goodies. But, as I said, the oddity for me was how quiet the woods and bushes were by comparison with what I'm familiar with from here. Maybe, as I said, it was a heatwave issue (the temperature was over 30C all the time were were there, up to 37C a couple of days), and had we gone out at dawn we'd have heard more.
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Bird song watch
Jul 2024