Chiltern Birder

With the fine weather and a holiday it seemed a good idea to take advantage of the fact that I live in some very beautiful countryside. A walk in the Ley Hill area took me up Broomstick Lane, where escaped cultivated bluebells were mixing with the wild. Then into Cowcroft Wood where a substantial badger set seems to have had somebody digging. (I won't add my thoughts on that as Blogspot has rules about bad language). Although birds were audible there was nothing to be seen and the walk continued out onto Ley Hill Common and along the side of the golf course towards the community wood, now named Crabtree Plantation. One tree had several hollow sections where branches had fallen and a nuthatch was taking advantage of the previous night's rain to plaster mud around one of these. Its mate was on the next branch. A little nearer the road was a recently discarded pair of bright red knickers, I did wonder if the cloudburst had cooled somebody's ardour rather precipitately. In the ...

Leaving the house yesterday morning I was suprised to see not red kites circling overhead but two buzzards. I do see them occasionally in my part of the chilterns but not with any regularity. Just to retain a semblence of normality however, barely more than a dot in clear sky there was also what was obviously a kite. Its curious how you learn to identify birds, it was definitely too far away to even pick out the forked tail but the whole "feel" of the bird was unmistakable.

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.