Snipe drumming

Evidence of imminent breeding waders on my land in the past few days – a Curlew doing their towering territorial flight thing, plenty of squeaky balloon Lapwing calls, and this evening my first drumming Snipe of the year.
That’s a bit like the first Cuckoo of the year by our standards, and nice to get before [...]

Trees, digging, and a patch tick

Spent the weekend engaged wholly in birding related activity. Yesterday was tree day, planting 20 lodgepoles and ribes flowering currants around the edges of the chicken area in sheltered spots, and then fencing them off so the beak-features can’t strip them of leaves before they’ve had a chance to get established.
 And then back to digging, [...]

I was a gay cowboy before it got trendy

or
 Meet the Ebayers #1 – an occasional series
Isn’t Ebay wonderful? The chance to pick up a bargain without all the trouble of hawking through a trestle table of tat at a car boot sale while a gimlet-eyed Del Boy works out if he’s going to budge on the £1.50 asking price. It’s not only great [...]

Friends in high places

And so today we learn that the Queen, no less, has made a donation from her private income (via the Privy Purse Charitable Trust) to Songbird Survival. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/03/26/eaqueen126.xml
The amount given remains undisclosed, but a spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace confirmed that the Queen gave £301,709 to 346 charities last year, qualifying this particular choice by saying,
“There [...]

Pimp my gibbet

It’s been a while since I last bothered to knock myself out reading Songbird Survival’s latest justifications for why the game-shooting community (sorry, I mean “the general public”) should be allowed to kill (oops, there I go again. That should be “control”) birds of prey. The chance discovery last week that the BTO had accepted Songbird Survival’s pieces of [...]

Strange bedfellows

Followed the link to the February 2008 BTO Atlas newsletter today ( http://www.bto.org/birdatlas/newlsetter_february_2008.pdf )  – a heartening read, right up to the bit about individual species getting sponsors and thereby raising money to support Bird Atlas 2007-2011. The BTO blurb says:
“Our aim is to encourage a wide base of support from companies, organisations and individuals, [...]

Digging

After a frustrating week of trying repeatedly (and typically without success) to see the Kirkabister White-billed Diver, I gave up on birding over the weekend. There are only so many times you can count the number of Great Northern Divers up the east side of Shetland before going gibberingly mad. Thinking about it (not that I’m dwelling [...]

Larks!

More signs of spring being just round the corner this weekend – double figures of Oystercatcher now in my fields, and my first Skylark of the year on Saturday. Followed by either two birds, or two lots of two birds yesterday. (That’s confusing, isn’t it? Saw 2 together, and then later in a different place, [...]

Teal tale signs

Have given up counting how many times I’ve been to Loch of Tingwall trying to see the elusive Green-winged Teal in the past couple of weeks; it hasn’t quite got to the absurd double figure count it took last year to finally connect with the over-summering Killdeer, but it’s still not given itself up easily. [...]

Eider given it one

Now fully recovered from appalling cold, back to the delights of winter birding in Shetland. Took the cowards option yesterday of doing all my local patch birding from the comfort of the kitchen window. Advantages – central heating, out of the biting northerly wind, steady scope, mug of coffee, hot buttered toast, panoramic view of the sea. [...]