The Good Bee – book review

'The Good Bee - A Celebration of Bees and How to Save Them' (2019) is written by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum, features illustrations by James Nunn and is published by Michael O'Mara Books to coincide with World Bee Day...

My Holiday Birding Highlights from East Anglia

East Anglia is one of the best birding areas in the UK; in particular its coast, which is for the large part not greatly built-up and has a fantastic mix of interesting and rare habitats like dunes, reedbeds, lagoons, estuaries,...

Orchids & Moths up on the Downs

Summertime. The Downs were calling me again. I knew it was time to walk their soft turf once more; I knew it in my head, in my heart and in my bones. The orchids would have their colourful heads above...

Northumbrian Islands & Yorkshire Reedbeds

The Farne Islands are a cluster of flat-topped rocks protruding just above the skin of the North Sea a few miles off the coast of Northumberland. So close to the surface of the waves are they that they barely make...

The Quest to see 100 birds in a day

Why is the number 100 always such a big deal? Seriously, 100th anniversaries of historical events are always special and made a fuss of, why isn't the same treatment given to the year before or the year after? And when...

A walk down Cuckoo lane

I have only seen one Turtle Dove in the UK before, in 2015, so I was keen to see another this year because a) they may be extinct as breeders in the near future, b) they are beautiful, iconic birds...

Birds and Prejudice

I saw something this week that upset me quite a bit. There was a post on an (unnamed) county birding Facebook group which raised the question of culling corvids (I won't elaborate but the poster was clearly against it). In...

Endemic birds in Tenerife

Tenerife is the largest of the Canary Islands, which were formed from volcanic sea mounts and sit in the Atlantic Ocean some 100 km off the coast of Morocco. Tenerife is home to a limited variety of birds, but many...

Garganeys Galore!

Who needs whiskey when you've got ducks? In Britain we have around 20 different species of regularly occurring wild ducks, some of these are resident and breed here, others only appear for the winter. But one, just one, has a...