Chiltern Birder

As illness had prevented me from taking a holiday last summer, and as I had to use up some leave before the end of the financial year I took a few days down on the South Coast starting with a visit to Dungeness. The most obvious attraction is of course the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway but that is only one aspect of this remarkable ecosystem. From a birding point of vie w there was a lot of interest. Without making any effort I quickly saw black redstarts and wheatears. I didn't have time for serious birding and didn't manage to see the serin that I was told was around. The shingle landscape and the architecture are both fascinating. Look closely at the right hand hut in the photo, the central section is clearly an old railway carriage. The power station dominates of course, show here behind the formeer Trinity House experimental station. The Corporation of Trinity House of Deptford Strond, to give them their full title has a long association with Dungeness with two lighth...

With longer days I am now starting to see things while travelling too and from work. A yellowhammer perched on a phone line, primroses out beside the railway with a muntjac feeding, an egret flying up the Chess valley at Latimer and always the red kites. At home the quince trees are in bud while the forsythia will be over soon and the dogwood will need pruning. Visiting my mother's house I saw a long tailed tit in the next street. Unremarkable except in my childhood we saw nothing except sparrows and starlings. My first bird book was the collected set of british birds cards from packets of PG tips.

I had to drive from Essex to South Yorkshire last Sunday and there were a handful of interesting sights from the car. At Cambridge there was a buzzard over the road while I saw two red kites just north of Peterborough. Presumably these were from the population originating from the Rockingham Forest release. In the same area I also saw a lapwing flying across the road which was probably more exciting these days. A sign of spring was a magpie with a beakful of nesting material.

Tradionally the birds should be choosing their mates today. Maybe not strictly accurate but there is a lot of courtship activity at least audible. I hear green woodpeckers almost every morning but haven't heard a great spotted drumming at all. Curious because I see far more great spotteds during the year. The blackbirds are getting agressively territorial, there was quite a spat going on between two cock birds the other morning while a pair of wood pigeons were strutting around each other on a neighbour's chimney.

I came across a newspaper article recently by somebody commenting that in his childhood he only ever saw sparrows and starlings in the garden. My childhood recollections, on the edge of London, are much the same. We may have had the occasional robin and blackbird but I don't remember them. Certainly there was nothing exotic as a wood pigeon and I didn't see a magpie in the area until I was 17. Now in my mother's garden pigeons and magpies are more likely to be seen than sparrows and starlings. Last weekend I saw a blue tit investigating the nest box and in a garden at the end of the street we saw a fieldfare. Quite a change over the last 50 years.

For a variety of reasons I have only been putting out fat blocks this winter. In the recent very cold weather there has been a total lack of birds in the garden. One bright spot this morning was a wren hopping into the ivy at one corner of the back wall. This is the first wren that I have seen in the garden for quite a while. On Christmas day I had to drive over to Essex for a family visit and was lucky to get a glimpse of a fieldfare on the bushes by the Magic Roundabout in Hemel. Before Christmas I was in Thame and there were about a dozen kites over the town. The concentration of kites over inhabited areas in the snow was quite striking.

Not much to see in the garden recently. I have fat bars hanging at both front and back but only very small quantities are being taken. The only thing of any note was a flock of long tailed tits in the garden a few days ago. However, driving between Latimer and Ley Hill today I did see a small thrush fly into a roadside tree. As it landed it fluttered its wings to show a flash of red. I have seen thrushes in flocks which might possible have been redwings already but that was my first positive identification of the winter.