Recently I was in the Wiltshire riverside town of Bradford-on-Avon. It’s a pleasant place to visit, and I can recommend it, but I was there not the see the town’s attractions, but rather a rare visitor to our shores, a bird called a ‘dusky warbler’. Despite breeding in the Taiga of Eastern Russia and the palearctic, this diminutive little bird – smaller than a sparrow, bigger than a wren – migrates substantial distances south to overwinter in South and Southeast …
Tag: bird
What links Homer, Shelley, Coleridge and Keats, and also Shakespeare and Chaucer and T.S. Eliot? It would have to be something pretty special, wouldn’t it, to inspire many of the greatest writers in history? It is something special. I know, because after four years of trying, I have finally both heard it, and seen it. I’m standing on a grassy track that weaves through a dense, scrubby woodland, home to coppiced willow and hazel, laced through with bramble and other …
Even the name ‘Osprey’ sounds somehow exotic. These large, fish-eating raptors are truly unique, truly one of a kind, the sole species of their genus, and their genus is the sole one in their family. Or to put it another way, osprey sit alone at the very end of a very bare single branch of the family of life. They may look a little like eagles, they may behave a little like eagles, but they are as different to eagles …
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