It’s a brand new year and as with the previous countless years, many vows are made ranging from trying to be a better person through to making more effort to go birding more frequently.

I’m not one for resolutions, but I am about to make one now. A very public one.

I vow to update this blog more frequently than what I did last year.

There. I’ve laid down the gauntlet for myself.

We’ll see what transpires.

Merry New Year

The last embers of 2013 are flickering, drawing to conclusion a year of contrasts for my beloved local patch, Wormwood Scrubs.

We have thus far had the joint best year for the most amount of species seen on and over the site – 98. All year we have been aiming for the magical 100 but it seems that we have a glass ceiling. Our efforts have been blighted by a fairly poor autumn despite finding a mega in the shape of a juvenile Common Rosefinch, London’s first twitchable example for some three years. Add to that the disappearance of two of our best Scrubbers; one claimed by New Zealand and the other had a baby and emigrated to Suffolk. We are about to loose another to Sweden in January. Our team of birders is about to be severely depleted. We have had birders leave before in previous years and like when Eric Cantona left Manchester United, we still went on to find great birds and good year totals.

Perhaps the biggest threat to the fragile tranquility at The Scrubs has been the announcement this year that the area has come to the notice of a host of entities keen to turn the land immediately to the north  into a cityscape that according to the blurb, will resemble Manhattan meeting Canary Wharf. There will be of course, serious implications for The Scrubs and once they start the building things will never be the same again.

I went out today in the vain hope of seeing two more species to add to the site list. I failed miserably. Found a corking and shy male Bullfinch that did its best to hide behind a branch the whole time it was in the open. They are now a bit of a rarity here with only a handful of sightings per year.  

I also found record numbers of Reed Buntings near the embankment area. I counted at least 10 birds. Our previous best was around six birds.

In desperation I examined the sparrow roost at dawn in the hope of discovering a Tree Sparrow – a national scarcity – that has yet to be recorded at The Scrubs although, I was pretty ceratin that I had one fly over one October several years ago. I counted 50 House Sparrows, which is around half of what I would have normally expected. However, amongst them was a weirdly plumaged female.

It looks like the last couple days of the year are going to be rain filled which will kill off any further opportunities for me to hunt down any new species. Looks like I’m going to have to give up my quest for 100 this year, but given my impending schedule for next year and the general lack of Scrubbers, I have a feeling that we have reached the upper limit of the birds to be expected at The Scrubs.

2014 will be an interesting year.

But it was the owls that everyone came to see. I’ve seen it several times now and I’m still blown away everytime.

Come let me take you to Serbia next year……

 Being based in the UK means that I don’t come into contact with too many of these gorgeous creatures in my normal birding life. Of course, they do turn up on our shores in tiny numbers of a small variety of species that are much loved by the rarity hunters amongst us. Perhaps the most famous Wood Warbler, to give them the name that I knew them best as, was the Kent Golden-winged Warbler of the late 90’s that I failed to connect with on the then biggest twitch of all time. Of course, these birds are not true Warblers as we in the Old World would know, but indeed thin-billed buntings that have filled the niche that the Sedge Warblers, Chiffchaffs and all our other warblers would have taken. In fact, I think that the official term for the American family is New World Warblers.

The Warbler Guide does not dwell on such trivial matters as to what the family name should be but just steams straight into how to identify the 56 species of New World Warblers to be encountered in Canada and the US. The text is straight to the point; straight down to the business of identification.

 During the breeding season many of the species are pretty distinctive with the males of most species looking like feathered jewels. The book takes you though a tour of the topography of the birds before fleshing out the statement: what to notice on a warbler. This covers everything from hoods to wingbars to crown patterns, facial patterns, general colorations, size, habits, habitats – the list goes on. Plus there are photographs of everything.

 There is a thorough section of the book devoted to listening to warbler songs. Elements of the songs are broken down through sonograms covering every concievable variation of call/song known. Reading this alone should make you an overnight expert in the vocalisations, that much I know. Before the species accounts, conveniently ordered alphabetically and not taxonomically, are a series of useful plates providing at a glance of practically all the species clocked at different angles as you would see them in the wild. Most useful, I thought, was the underview spread that dipicted images of individual species as if viewed from below.

The species accounts included many pictures of each species in a variety of poses, plumages and zoomed in detail. The text covers brief notes on the main identifying features alongside a distribution map. Additionally, there are also pictures of comparision species with text explaining why those species differed from the one being discussed.

Rarites are dealt with at the end of the species accounts and are each given a double page spread that follows the same format as the main species accounts. Helpfully, there is another section of the book that discusses similar non-warbler species like tits (or Chickadees, if you are North American!) a couple sparrow species and Kinglets. Interestingly, Yellow-breasted Chat and Olive Warbler, two species that I thought of as warblers, are included in this section. Clearly, I have some reading up to do.

As if this was not enough, the vexed subject of hybrids is tackled. Fortunately, according to the author, hybrid warblers are rare. Even so, a few are featured to help the unwary. And there’s a quiz right at the end. I love quizzes!

This book is certainly worthy of a place on anyone’s heaving book shelf. It is refreshing, stunningly illustrated and importantly, educational. If you want to get to grips with North America’s Warblers, you will need to tightly grip The Warbler Guide!

I’m back home after a superb 10 days exploring the Rio Grande Valley in southeastern Texas. I have come back to a grey, cold London with the prospect of snow high on the cards. Down at Wormwood Scrubs we are still struggling to see our target of 100 species and are currently stuck on 98 having been so since late September.

One bird that we eagerly await every year to add to the year list is the occurance of Ring Ouzels – my favourite bird. Every year for the past 10 we have received visits from this most mysterious of our British thrushes. Quite why they chose to visit my urban patch with such regularity has always been a puzzle for me. They are normally birds of wild mountainous regions yet I associate them amongst urbanity standing in trees with the cityscape spread out behind them as a backdrop. A totally incongruous sight, I’ll tell you.

When my migrants come they often don’t announce their presence. We just know to keep a sharp lookout from mid to late April, our spring window and from late September into early November for autumn birds. This year we didn’t manage to catch sight of any birds in the spring. This has occasionally happened before as birds may literally pass through at a blink of an eye; pausing to catch breath for a couple minutes before heading on north. If you are not in the right place at the right time then you your chance to see them has gone. This autumn we were fretting. Time was running out and although a few were being seen in the London area crucially, we were not seeing any on the patch.

One Saturday morning in late October whilst I was playing football, I got the phonecall that a male had been finally sighted on the patch. It hung around for five minutes before disappearing. I was elated. Our yearly record of sightings had continued. But I was also deeply disappointed because I had not seen my favourite bird this year. I consoled myself later by staring at the Ring Ouzel plate in Richard Crossley’s ID Guide to Birds of Britain & Ireland. It was like looking at a beautiful compilation of the Ring Ouzels I have seen in the past.

For more on the Crossley Guide check out http://blog.press.princeton.edu/crossley-uk-blog-tour-schedule/

There will be a live video call with Richard Crossley and writer Dominic Couzens on November 21 at (http://shindig.com/)

They introduced me to this wonderful place – rammed with birdlife!

The day has finally come and I’m on my way to southeast Texas where it meets the Mexican border to attend and speak at the Rio Grande Valley Bird Festival – the largest in the US I’m led to believe. I will be out here for the next 10 days.

Trouble is my American curse has struck again. I’m sick with quite a heavy head cold. Now I know it’s only a cold and I know that it hasn’t developed into fully formed man flu but when you chuck in a 11 hour flight it’s a recipe for disaster. Landed safely in Houston at 5pm local time. First recognised bird was a flushed Killdeer, watched from my seat in the plane. Got the connecting flight a couple hours later to McAllen, a small city just north of the Mexican border.

Tomorrow I’m co-leading an urban birding walk for some of the delegates at the Diversity Conference there, which ends tomorrow. It’s a gathering aimed at encouraging birders to get urban people and especially ethnic people, to get out birding.

More tomorrow. Repair time. Sleep.