Ok, fair enough, it’s not a bird, but rather a species of bird. It’s unusual in a number of ways, not the least of which is that it seems to like living near people. But it was particularly fond of World War Two, because Hitler’s bombs produced lots of rubble, and if there is one thing a Black Redstart likes, it’s rubble next to water and next to people. The Black Redstart is a very scarce bird. The British population …
Category: Birds
It is an odd relationship. You always find Golden Plover in the company of Lapwing, but you don’t always find Lapwing in the company of Golden Plover. It is as if the Golden Plover, a flighty, twitchy bird always living on its nerves, needs the reassurances of Lapwings around it, while Lapwing are quite relieved to spend a day away from them. At rest, the Plover surround themselves with Lapwing, living in the centre of the flock, as if the …
It was one for sorrow, two for joy in the rhyme of my childhood. It went as far as ten, but never reached thirty-five, so now I’m unsure of my fate. I’ve walked just five minutes from my home, to search for damselflies in the series of small pools that are part of an optimistic flood relief scheme created alongside a local housing estate. As I arrive, the flock of magpies, more than I have ever seen in one place …
I hear it long before I see it. A high bubbling call, that loops up in pitch like a referee with one of those old-fashioned pea-whistles getting increasingly annoyed. It’s a song of desolation and loneliness, a haunting sound that I associate with moors and estuaries, with vast skies and open spaces. It’s the call of a curlew. It makes me pause. Seventy years before, Blakehill Farm would have throbbed to the sound of wartime Dakotas taking to the skies. …
It’s just after dawn on a freezing cold April morning, and at the side of the track I’m standing on, the flailed edge of a grove of coppiced hazel has formed a deep, jumbled jackstraw layer of faded brown stems and splintered sticks. It’s a common sight in nature reserves at this time of year, yet from within it I am hearing a sound that seems utterly alien to the British countryside. It starts familiarly, like the high trilling of …
Yesterday, I heard a cuckoo for the first time this Spring. Which was hardly surprising, because it was sat about fifteen feet away from me at the time. This was no captive bird, however: this was a truly wild bird, newly arrived from Africa. Colin, as he is known, is undoubtedly the UK’s most famous cuckoo. He has been arriving at the same site in Surrey for years. Estimates wary: some say he has been here for seven years, some …
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