Happy Christmas

Wildlife News: 1st December 2011

The big wildlife news this week is the Government's Autumn budget statement... where, tucked in amongst the headline-making stuff about the continuing decline of the economy, was the statement that ��we will make sure that gold plating of EU rules on things like Habitats aren�t placing ridiculous costs on British businesses.� Hidden behind the use of the kind of language that implies the hoisting of extra red tape by 'those pesky Europeans' is the fact that the Treasury would like to see the protection for Britain's wildlife reduced, to clear the way for development, development, development...

Remember, this is the Government that said it aimed to be "the greenest administration ever".

The conservation community is, predictably, alarmed...

Reaction from The Wildlife Trust, The Wildlife Trust for Beds, Cambs & Northants; RSPB.

(updated: an opinion piece from BirdGuides)

The Impossible Hamster from new economics foundation on Vimeo.

Earth Music Bristol Festival

More from the Earth Music Bristol festival, via Radio 3.

Radio 3: The Essay: Bird Song

Behaviour expert Professor Tim Birkhead explores how birds learn to sing (probably only available 7 days...)

Wildlife News (ish): 7th November 2011

Two Parid-related links:

Some amazingly friendly Siberian Tits and the work of Matt Sewell on film. (Speaking of whom: this is wonderful!)

Occurence Of Birds from R & A Collaborations on Vimeo.

Ghosts continued

More from the pen of Ralph Steadman, including Labrador Duck, Colombian Grebe and North Island Takahe.

Some of the coverage of the Ghosts of Gone Birds exhibition: it's not only me who thinks it's great!

BBC website
BBC London: go to 1 hr 36 minutes in.
Today Programme, Radio 4: go to 1 hr 43 minutes in.
Midweek on Radio 4
Culture24

(I'm a bit of a fan of this project: can you tell?)

Ghosts: Shoreditch, 2nd November 2011

Waved Albatross, by Gail Dooley

As I may have mentioned before, the Ghosts of Gone Birds exhibition has finally arrived in London, at the Rochelle School in Shoreditch, a three minute walk north from Shoreditch High Street station.

A beautiful, thought provoking and in places genuinely moving collection, much more (oh so much more!) that 'just' bird paintings, this is really good art with a story to tell. If you get the chance, do make an effort to go and see the exhibition: it's free entry, and is also a selling gallery, so if you like what you see, spend your money and raise money to help prevent any more bird extinctions.

(And if anyone has a spare �7K, Darren Rees's spectacular canvas of a flock of Carolina Parakeets would look great on my wall!)

Carolina Parakeets, by Darren Rees

King Island Emu, by Harriet Mead

Jamaican Red Macaw, just one of the entire room full of paintings from the prolific (and somewhat bonkers!) mind of Ralph Steadman

'Ula-'ai-Hawane, one of the beautiful Hawaiian Honeycreepers by Michael Warren

Gone, by Brigitte Williams.

Simple, beautiful, moving

Double-banded Argus, by Angie Lewin

Auckland Island Merganser, by Matt Underwood

Moa, by Katrina Van Grouw

St Helena Hoopoe, by Jonathan Edwards

Ghosts of Gone Birds: coming soon!

Dodo by Ralph Steadman, part of the forthcoming Ghosts of Gone Birds exhibition.

A little late for Halloween, but hopefully with a lot more treats in store, the Ghosts of Gone Birds extravaganza arrives in London on 2nd November. Admission is free, and the exhibition is on for three weeks, so if you're around in November, get yourself along to the Rochelle School in Shoreditch and enjoy, amongst other things, Margaret Atwood's knitted Great Auk...

Wildlife News: 28th September 2011

• Exciting news from Dartmoor, where Red-backed Shrikes have bred for two years in a row!
  

• Control of introduced predators paying dividends in the Hebrides and New Caledonia.

• Another tragic migration period in the eastern Mediterranean... sign the petition, and make your feelings known to the Cypriot government.

• 50 years on, and the last rhododendron bush on Brownsea Island has been removed. Good news for, amongst others, the island's famous Red Squirrel population.
  

Isles of Scilly, September 2011

A lovely week on Scilly. In between some spectacularly esoteric plants (Suffocated Clover, Beaked Tassel-weed and all 3mm of Ophioglossum lusitanicum anyone?), 8 Pectoral Sandpipers and an exhausted juvenile Blue-winged Teal, superb sea views, singing seals and interesting archaeology, I also found the time to catch up with Northern Waterthrush, Solitary Sandpiper, Baltimore Oriole, Red-eyed Vireo, Woodchat Shrike and Bee-eater. Not bad for a gentle week! Although those pesky Buff-breasted Sandpipers still managed to hide from me...

Scott's Forgotten Surgeon: a quick plug

For those tempted by polar travel, a quick plug for a book written by one of our travellers.

For more information, visit Whittles Publishing.

Norfolk: September 2011

A week spent on the North Norfolk coast, away from the office and out of mobile phone reception!

Seven days that saw the last days of summer, with blue skies and hot sun, swiftly followed by the arrival of autumn (think 60mph winds and heavy rain, unfortunately coming in from the west, so putting paid to any chances of more good migrants...).

A Wryneck in the bushes on Holme Dunes was very flighty, perched up on the tree tops before disappearing inland. A fantastic high tide roost of thousands of Knot and Bar-tailed Godwits was harried by a Peregrine and a Hobby. At Titchwell, an evening visit revealed a roost of 40 Little Egrets, two Spoonbills and a couple of fly-past Bitterns. At Cley, a wader-array included some wonderful peach-flushed juvenile Curlew Sandpipers, together with Little Stint, Spotted Redshank and Greenshank. The pinging of Bearded Tits and chuntering Cetti's Warblers. Butterflies enjoying the last days of summer: Red Admirals on windfall pears; Small Heath, Speckled Wood and Small White among the dunes. And plenty of blackberries to snack on along the way.

Ectopistes, in memoriam

On 1st September 1914, the world's most numerous bird ever slipped away. An inglorious anniversary...

Wildlife News: 26th August 2011

• Recent research puts the total number of species on the planet at around 8.7 million, give or take a million. With 'only' around 1.2 million described thus far, that leaves a whole lot of species out there still to be found...

• Well, there's one of them... yet another titi monkey hiding away in the Amazon.

• Oh, and another... the world's smallest shearwater, hiding somewhere in the Pacific.
  

• Meanwhile, many of those species are apparently heading rapidly towards the poles and climbing the mountains... which obviously doesn't leave a lot of wriggle-room for those species already at the poles/mountain tops.

• November sees Ghosts of Gone Birds setting up shop in Shoreditch, with Margaret Atwood's knitted Great Auk among the ghosts... see you there?
  

• Rather more imminently, this weekend is the 15th annual European Bat Night. Our local Wildlife Trust has plenty of batty events to get involved in. I'm sure yours will too!

Oh, and the picture above is a Waved Albatross on Espanola, Galapagos for no reason at all really, other than the fact that, along with 188 other bird species,, this is one of those Critically Endangered birds that the Ghosts of Gone Birds project is trying to help. And co-incidentally, we'll be visiting Espanola in January: just two spaces left, if you want to join us!

Wildlife News: 10th August 2011

Our 2012 holiday brochure has now been printed and should be winging its way out to those of you on our mailing list very soon. If you would like a copy, get in touch, of perhaps come along and see us at BirdFair next weekend! We'll be in our usual place in Marquee 3, next to The Wildlife Trusts.

Meanwhile, it's been a summer of hatching news...

• A pair of Whooper Swans have bred in the East Anglian fens, the first recorded occurence in Norfolk since 1928.

• Tree sparrows have nested on the Western Isles for the first time in 25 years.

• A Short-tailed Albatross chick has fledged from the first recorded nest outside Japan, having survived the Pacific tsunami in March.

• Spoon-billed Sandpiper news over the summer includes the first chicks to hatch in captivity and a significant new breeding population discovered in Chukotka.

Spitsbergen, June/July 2011

Some last bird photos from Spitsbergen. Unfortunately I missed the pair of Long-tailed Skuas and nearby Ptarmigan that put on a wonderful show for all comers (I was too busy kayaking around icebergs, I'm afraid) and didn't have the right lens with me for the wonderfully approachable pair of Grey Phalaropes (Red Phalarope really would be so much more appropriate for these birds up here!) at Ny Alesund. I also missed the two photograph-able Ivory Gulls. And next time, I will be sure to pay more attention to the Snow Buntings around Longyearbyen, as they're not so easy to approach elsewhere.

But all in all, yep, a pretty spectacular trip and I'm definitely looking forward to returning in 2012. Fancy joining me?

Spitsbergen, June/July 2011: Land of the Ice Bear

All in all, we saw 9 individual Polar Bears. Of these, one (our first) was rather distant (so much so that even through the telescope, many people were less than convinced by me that this was actually a Polar Bear stalking a couple of seals on the ice edge, rather than yellow snow...) and another was watched again at some distance swimming across the far side of a fjord.

But our time spent with the other seven was utterly, spectacularly memorable. Spectacular being the word of the trip, obviously.

One young female was watched for upwards of 5 hours as she ambled along the coast, swimming out to some low rocky islands to 'graze' on the eider colony there. She enabled amazingly close approach, and really didn't seem bothered by her admirers. Slightly more of a bother to her were the pair of Great Skuas who were very forceful in pushing her off 'their' island, frequently making contact.

Later the same day we came across a mother with two cubs, making their way across an incredibly scenic sheet of sea ice, backed by glaciers and snowy mountains. One of her cubs was having a hard job of keeping up, having managed to get itself onto softer ice and he fell in a couple of times. Meanwhile, a second large adult was rapidly moving towards the family from further down the ice... a VERY exciting encounter, as the mother clearly wanted to put as much space as possible between her family and this interloping adult, who equally obviously wanted to catch them up! And in the middle of it all, the one floundering cub who just couldn't keep up... Sitting in the zodiacs, a good few hundred metres away from the action, we could hear his cries coming across the ice. In the end, he managed to get back to firmer ice, the mother came back to get him, and the family made its way determinedly off towards the mountains, leaving the lone adult mooching about on the ice edge, looking for a different afternoon snack.

Our last two, a big adult male and a second, smaller individual were up on the pack ice, at almost 81 degrees north. Big white beasts in an expanse of white, snow flurries swirling around, Harp Seals porpoising through the water and groups of Little Auks and Brunnich's Guillemots flying past. Arctic magic!

Spitsbergen, June/July 2011: some marvellous mammals

OK, I admit it, I'm teasing just a little by holding back the photos of the big white beast, the world's largest land predator and reason we were accompanied at all times by a rifle or two (even when kayaking!)
But meanwhile...

The variety of land mammal life on Spitsbergen may be pretty low, with just four species (three if you count Polar Bear as a marine mammal, and one of those is an introduced population of the Sibling Vole), but the marine mammals are pretty great, as are the lovely, stumpy Svalbard Caribou (currently thought of as an endemic subspecies, but such a different creature from the leggy beasts of Canada!).

I suspect we were a little unlucky in 'only' finding a couple of Minke Whales and a possible, maybe, distant Sei Whale amongst the cetaceans (in particular, Beluga are out there in good numbers, while Orca, Fin Whale, Humpback Whale and some of the northern dolphins might be expected too). But when you've got Walruses bobbing about in the surf inspecting the zodiacs at close range, little parties of porpoising Harp Seals around the pack ice, the occasional 'massive sausage' Bearded Seal floating past on a floe and an oh-so-friendly Ringed Seal playing with our kayaks... who needs Arctic Fox after all that, anyway? It's always good to have something to come back for...

Spitsbergen, June/July 2011: Little Auks of Fugelsongen

For most of us (well, for me anyway), Little Auks are a very infrequent sighting, either as a stream of tiny black and white whirring dots over the stormy seas off Flamborough Head, struggling north again after being blown south by a winter storm or else a cute (but probably doomed) bird on a random duck pond or coastal ditch...

So it was a pretty impressive experience to find myself sat half way up a scree slope, amongst the rocks and boulders of a Little Auk colony. Pretty unconcerned about our presence (birds were sat on the rocks next to us), their main concern was the occasional passing Glaucous Gull. On an island with no raptors, these brutes are the top aerial predator and more than capable of catching a Little Auk in flight (I watched them do it!). With every pass of the gull, the whole colony would take off, whirring around together across the slope: interestingly, every time they did it, they flew in the same direction, following a clockwise loop over the sea...

Fugelsongen, the island where this accessible colony is located, means 'bird song', named after the cute burblings of the birds in the burrows.