On 26th April 2012 at Marquenterre, Somme estuary, northern France I saw a total of 12 Avocets Recurvirostra avosetta feeding by upending in shallow water in a brackish lagoon. When up-ending they completely submerged the front half of the body…
On 4th June 2012, I observed a pair of Blue Tits carrying food into a nest site deep in a natural site in an apple tree…
On 10th July 2012 I was driving between Lake McGregor and Frank Lake in Alberta, Canada, when a bird perched on overhead power lines caught my attention…
On 22nd October 2012, an exceptional fall of thrushes and other migrants took place on the east coast of England. The two accounts presented here, one from Blakeney Point, the other from Spurn, give a flavour of the conditions and the numbers of birds involved…
On 4th February 2012, in a public park in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, I discovered a dead first-winter Common Buzzard hanging upside down from a low branch of an Ash tree, approx. 1.5–2 m above the ground…
I have observed Red-necked Phalaropes Phalaropus lobatus on a number of occasions in the UK and the Middle East (and twice in the Americas) and have always been surprised at how little spinning they actually do. Although not recorded systematically, I was conscious that a ‘spin’ was rarely more than a couple of turns, and most of the feeding carried out while swimming comprised rapid, alternate, sideways picks at the water surface for invertebrates…
During the morning of 23rd November 2011, I was watching a sometimes elusive Hume’s Warbler feeding in Sycamore trees in Lowestoft, Suffolk. When often the bird moved off and was unseen, my attention was drawn to the food items it was eating…
On 3rd June 2011 at the Acebouche Visitor Centre in the Coto Donana National Park, Andalucia, Spain, I observed and photographed a group of Red-rumped Swallows. The weather was fine and extremely hot…
A leucistic Barn Swallow was observed and photographed in southwest Asiatic Russia on 31st July 2010…
On 31st March 2010, near the mouth of the Massa River (Oued Massa), south of Agadir, Morocco, we observed a pair of Zitting Cisticolas. The two birds were first seen mating on a nearby wire fence but then dropped to an inverted position with the female clinging onto the wire and the male (also upside down) holding on to her at the ‘shoulders’…
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