A flower for tomorrow – Ciska Faulkner Today was a good day. I journeyed down to Bristol to call upon the Natural History Unit literally to show my face. As I don’t live in Bristol (aka The Green Hollywood) I have to make a concerted effort to keep my profile up with the television folk […]
I must apologise for my lack of communication over the last few days. It was largely due to not having internet access whilst I was being buffeted by the wind and rain in Paris. I travelled down by Eurostar at the ungodly hour of 5.25am on Monday morning, totally knackered from the night before. I […]
Rock Pipit – Andy Cook This morning I lay in bed debating. Should I stay or should I go now? No, I wasn’t in a strange woman’s bed – I was weighing up the pros and cons of checking out my local patch. The call of nature won the day and soon I found myself […]
The past couple of days have been particularly busy for me and it all started once I had pressed the ‘send’ button on my section of The London Bird Report. As you could probably tell, it wasn’t the most exciting thing that I achieved this week. I had a lovely email from Audrey Parry, fundraiser […]
A Mourning Dove – no relevance to anything at all really! The rain came and washed the snow away today. We returned to the normal grey and dismal hues that you would normally associate with London at this time of year. Any thoughts of hitting The Scrubs this morning was put paid by the drizzle. Instead, […]
I woke up to a nippy morning. The lure of my bed although strong, was broken by the thought of seeing some overflying wild swans or finding a bewildered Jack Snipe in the grassland at The Scrubs. On arrival, I did see a couple of odd geese flying fairly high heading east, but my instinct […]
The snow in Croydon today – Kim Dixon Thankfully, the forecasted snowfall didn’t occur last night. What a relief. I’m not mad on snow unless it’s proper snow in places where it’s supposed to snow like the Alps, the Arctic or on Aviemore. I did my usual plotting and planning today. You know, replying to […]
The view from my front window London and the south east received some of the heaviest snowfall since 1991. I remember that occasion very well, as I had to abandon my car on Tottenham Court Road and trudge home to Ladbroke Grove through the Westend underdressed (I had a suit on), trying to stay on […]
As per usual on a Saturday, I donned my ‘The Cat’ goalkeeping shirt and stood between the sticks to save many of the shower of shots that were fired at me. We won. Yesterday, the news broke that Bill Oddie was leaving Springwatch. I actually knew on Monday but was sworn to secrecy. It will […]
I can’t believe it!! For two mornings in a row, I’ve dragged my carcass out of bed and drove myself down to The Scrubs for a quick hour’s birding. It was a cold, crisp and sunny day. Perhaps that was the only thing of note to comment about this morning. Well, actually there were around […]
Mute Swan – Petria Whelan At last I made it out to a rather waterlogged Wormwood Scrubs for my first bit of birding for a couple of weeks. I originally got a text from Fiona Barclay of Birdguides, who lives in nearby Acton, alerting me to a Egyptian Goose flying towards The Scrubs. I jumped […]
Planning migrations.. After Monday night’s mega jabbering I took a day of from communicating yesterday to get over it all. But the feedback was good and anyone out there reading this blog can feel confident and book Wembley Arena because we would fill it twice over! On a serious note, the old gentleman that had […]
Mike Dilger & I in our Clacton dressing room The day has come. The day that Mike Dilger (The Dilge) and I were to descend upon the good people of Clacton in Essex to deliver our long awaited talk on our birding lives. I woke up at 8am – late for me, as I had […]
Football on Saturday morning was a bit of a triumph as we won by the ridiculous scoreline of 12-6 and the game included stint where I played in central defence for around 20 minutes. Which seriously curtailed any surreptitious birding that I do when I’m in my normal position as goalkeeper. Having said that, I […]
Haviside’s Dolphins – their relevance to this blog will become apparent (Sacha Barbato & Nathalie Gilbert) I woke up expecting to feel lower than a dolphin’s droppings, but instead I felt great – and this was despite the grey, wet weather outside of my bedroom window. It was also despite the fact that I had […]
Rain, rain, rain. It was that kind of day; dull, dingy and the sort of day that you’d normally want to spend under the duvet with a servant bringing you grub as and when you needed it. But being a bachelor means that you are forced to go out foraging for food, no matter the […]
So much for getting up early today. Well I did, but I slunk back into bed to dream of finding a wintering flock of Lapland Buntings in the grassland on The Scrubs. My dream was cruelly cut short by a phone call at 9am. Yes, I have lie ins on weird days. At 12.30pm Mike […]
A chirpy male House Sparrow (actually photographed in Los Angeles!) As like most of the planet, I watched President Obama’s inauguration and came away from it feeling enthused, positive and hopeful for the future. For me, he reinforced the notion that if you have a vision, work hard and believe, then anything is possible. I […]
Pec Sand in Buenos Aires (James Lowen) To be honest, I’ve been pretty boring recently working away on my various projects. The most pressing is the impending talk to nearly 900 people coming up on Monday week in Clacton, Essex with the venerable Mike Dilger. It’s getting late in the day now and we are […]
I didn’t have an appropriate photo. Last night I had my first official red carpet invite to the screening of Will Smith’s new film ‘Seven Pounds’ and rub shoulders with other red carpet devotees such as Tom Cruise et al. Of course, I turned it down. I had much more important things to do, such […]