Nearly christmas

Dear Santa,
For Christmas I would like:
A brambling
Two waxwings
Three Sabine gulls
Four wilsons phalaropes
Five Lapland buntings
Six red-eyed vireos
Seven leach's petrels
Eight wandering albatrosses
Nine curlew sandpipers
Ten white-tailed eagles
Eleven pied kingfishers
Twelve snowy owls
Thank you
Say 'hi' to the reindeer for me
Lots of love
The teenage twitcher

birding doldrums

my life seems to be in the birding doldrums at the moment, with no appearance of the bird whose name shall not be typed (brambling) yet and the only occasional skein of geese flying over to tell me it's winter. however December is a month in which the garden birds take centre stage; my trees are taken up by blue tits and house sparrows, their numbers swollen from a summers successful breeding. with the robins pronouncing the nearness of Christmas (12 days!!!!!) i am going on a major nest box and feeder campaign. with 5 acres of land, which i will one day call my own, I'm planning to go a little O.T.T.

Poetry in Motion

Today I was stood still as a flock of starlings flew over my head, I could hear the 'whoosh' of their tiny scissor-like wings. Starlings lend themselvesto poetry well, their flowing mumations through the sky are an insparation:
The Starlings   by Jesper Svenbro translated by John Matthias and Lars-Håkan Svensson
Late one afternoon in October I hear them for the first time: loud-voiced palavering, whistles, murmurs, quarrels, bickering and warbling, croaking and chatter in the high plane trees of the street. The leaves are all turning yellow this time of year, causing huge yellow sunlit rooms to appear at the level of the fifth and sixth floors opposite the barracks, where the tram turns off from the Via delle Milizie. Solid branches, twigs, and perches: every bit of space is taken up in this parliament of starlings! They are tightly bunched together there among the leaves; and the hundreds of thousands of starlings that perform their flying exercises against the backdrop of the evening's mass of motionless cloud will surely soon have lost their places: there are myriads of swarming punctuation marks out there, starlings flying in formation, sudden sharp turns, steep ascents, swarm on delightful swarm against a rosy cloud bank in the east. The October evening is cool. The shop windows of the Via Ottaviano are shining. And the starlings are chattering, quarreling and laughing, whispering and quietly enjoying themselves, when suddenly a blustering as of ten thousand pairs of sharp-edged scissors passes through the republic of the plains-- it is as though an alarm had sounded, heard as an echo over the muffled traffic. Soon the darkness of night will fall. But the starlings up there won't stop talking, they move together, push one another, chatter and flit. Virgil must have had them in mind when somewhere he likens the souls of the deceased to flights of birds which toward sundown abandon the mountains and gather in high trees. I seem to be standing in an Underworld in the midst of a swarm of birds. The block is Virgilian; the street is crossed by the Viale Giulio Cesare, where you lived for some time before you died. That's why I am stopping here. The souls of the dead have gathered in the trees. Their number is incredible, suddenly it seems ghastly; is this what it will be like? For a moment I am a prisoner of the poem I am writing. There must be an exit. The soldier coming up to me has noticed that I have been standing for quite some time looking up into the foliage-- into the darkness of feathers, bird's eyes, and beaks. The peasant boy inside him apprises me of the fact that starlings come in vast migrations "from Poland and Russia" to spend the winter in the south: "And things go very well for them! In the daytime they fly out to the countryside and spend the night in here," he explains with great amusement, turning his gaze up toward the swarm of birds. Their anxiety seems to have ceased; in just a moment they all seem to have fallen asleep. Only single chirps and clucks are heard from starlings talking in their sleep. What are they dreaming of? Ten thousand starlings are dreaming in the darkness about the sunlight over the fields. As for myself, I am thinking of the tranquility in certain restaurants in the countryside, in the Albano Mountains and on the Campagna-- the tranquility at noon on a sunny day in October. I am filled with the clarity of the fall day. And am touched by something immeasurable, transparent, which I cannot describe at first but must be everything we never said to each other. There are so many things I'd like to say. How shall I be able to speak? Today you are not shade, you are light. And in the poem I am writing you will be my guest. We are going to talk about Digenís Akrítas, the Byzantine heroic poem with the strangely compelling rhythm; and since the manuscript of the poem is preserved in the monastery at Grottaferrata I shall order wine from Grottaferrata, golden and shimmering in its carafe; we shall talk about the miraculously translucent autumn poem by Petronius which appears first in Ekelöf's Elective Affinities; and about Ekelöf's poems, to which you devoted such attention. Did Ekelöf ever come to Grottaferrata? I seem to detect your lively gaze. And we shall see how the starlings come flying across the fields in teeming swarms. They will come from Rome and spend the day out here where they will eat snails, worms, and seeds and suddenly they will fly up from a field as at a given signal and make us look into the sun. In Memoriam Ludovica Koch (1941-93)

autumn birding bliss...........

...... is a jack snipe sat obligingliy in the end of a scope for me to drool over for a quarter of an hour! double dribble! i went to druridge bay (a promise made by my parents in july) at the start of the half term. we were looking at the map and my dad said 'how about Cresswell Ponds?' i thought 'no there wont be anything interesting there' but oh how i was wrong; golden plover, redshank, snipe, little grebe red breasted merganser, goldcrest and pink footed goose to name but a few - and of course jack snipe. i wish i had taken my camera then i could have shown you a picture. (admittedly with more reed than snipe!)
we then carried on down to druridge pools where i added a meagre 2 species at the place i thought would be better. shows how good my judgment is! :) after that disappointment a walk on the beach produced a flock of contraversial common scooters. contraversial because my dad took some persuading that they we scooters. (i pointed out that his bins were nearly 100 years old and goosander-tinted!)
p.s. i would just like to point out that it wasnt my scope but the-nice-man-you-always-seem-to-find-in-the-hide's scope.

Walney Island

we had a day off school for inset on friday so me, my dad, my two friends and their parents went for an excursion to walney island in south cumbria. we set of from workington station an birded from the train. there were masses of oystercatchers and gull so our list soon grew. mistle thrush, shelduck and common gull were some of the highlights on the journey down. at borrow station we got a taxi to the island; the first bird we saw was little egret. then quickly after that curlew, teal and goldfinch. one of the best birds for me was greenshank as (embarrassingly) i'd never seen one before then. :] we saw lots of goosanders: mostly because my dad was looking through 95 year old, goosander-tinted binoculars!

pictures coming soon

It’s officially autumn!

Today I’ve seen a flock of between 50 and 100 redwings/fieldfares; a skein of about 40 greylag geese and many singing robins. (Also i possibly heard a chiffchaff!) So hold on to your hats - its autumn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i'm ill, but it doesn't stop me birding

Lying convalecant on the sofa, looking out the window has it's benefits (as does a large window!); I've just been looking put the window, as I have nothing else to do, when what turns up but two great spotted woodpeckers eating fruit off the tree! Something to cheer me up.

It's still summer - just

Today, i've seen a flock of  about 10 swallows, so, don't lose hope it's still summer whatever Chris Packham and everyone at AutumnWatch says! But on the other hand the autmn migration is in full swing: Spotted Sandpiper, Glossy Ibis, Wilsons Snipe and Lesser Yellowlegs are scattered about Britain, however the closest thing to me is a Long-Billed Dowitcher! I've been swatting up on Weather Watching so that I can catch more rarities this autumn and winter; I've managed to engineer a trip to Druridge Bay when I go to the dentists - every cloud has a silver lining... I'll keep you posted...

Firstly, I'll Apologise...

I must warn you, dear reader, that I may go off on a tangent occasionally and have a good rant on various subjects surrounding birdwatching (the geographical placing of Ireland catching all the North American Vagrants that otherwise would end up on my doorstep; the interference of school and homework in childhood birding; or the lack of 'good' birds that appear on my patch - so far numbering 1 and even that was probably an escapee... ... ....)

So with that out of the way I shall introduce myself: I am a 13 year old birder. I have been interested in birds since November 2009 and between then and now I have seen a grand total of 148 species. All aspects of birding interest me: conservation to counting; ticking to twitching; ringing to raising money! So join me as I document my birding adventures both the ups and downs...