Chiltern Birder

I decided that I needed to get back to some moorland walking and spend yesterday in South Wales at the edge of the Brecon Beacons. Parking at the Keepers Pond car park in the Blaenavon World Heritage site I headed off onto The Blorenge. Much of the mountain is heather moorland which makes for very difficult walking but I picked up the route of an old tramway leading to a limestone quarry near the summit. The walking was usually easier than in the photo where the top layer of small pebbles has been washed away where it crosses a small stream. As far as birding is concerned it wasn't hugely rewarding, there are red grouse on the mountain but in a number of visits I have never seen one. Skylarks were abundant on this part of the mountain as were meadow pipits. The stonechats seem to prefer perching on the wires of the powerline that serves the TV transmitter mast to the south of my walk but I did get good views of two individuals. What did seem incongruous was a couple of cock b...

We don't see swifts locally but I heard my first of the year a week ago at Much Hadham in Hertfordshire. The following Monday a trip to Haddenham in Oxfordshire revealed some more. That village still seems to have a good population of house sparrows as well. A bee identification chart in a free paper last weekend had me looking at our buzzing friends visiting the flowers. The garden is getting a fine selection and I could count three species just standing still and looking at one point in a flower bed for a few seconds. I found one immediate identification issue, in real life the bees mostly have the abdomen curved making it quite difficult to count the bands. I have picked out both garden and tree bumblebees though. After the bank holiday I noticed that the grass was growing over both regular badger tracks so I reset the camera trap which showed that nothing had been past during the hours of darkness. Something had been at the bottom of the garden, out of range of the camera, ...