There are a few things which have come to symbolise winter for me in recent years. The Daily Express forecasting deep freezes and unsurpassed levels of snowfall, muttered comments bemoaning the never ending creep of Christmas decorations into months where they have no rightly remit, shared emails of people trying Read more…
Back to our Aberystwyth trip for this one after a couple of weeks enforced break away from blogging. The culprit? A massive model of the Millennium Falcon which has prevented me from accessing my desk let alone the computer which used to reside upon it. The upshot though is that Read more…
Last week finally saw our first snow of the winter. Not enough to deliver that all important day off work but certainly sufficient to coat the nearby hills and deliver an occasional five minute blizzard down at lower altitudes. Just the conditions I hear you say for an evening drive Read more…
Last Saturday was my first opportunity of 2017 for a proper days birding and, in keeping with my new year resolutions, that meant Patchwork Challenge time. As mentioned previously I’ve abandoned the two patch plan from last year and instead returned to the area that started it all, Cefn Drum Read more…
Tramping around Ilkley Moor photographing Red Grouse wasn’t all we got up to during our few days away in Leeds. On New Year’s eve we paid a rather splendid visit to Fountains Abbey near Rippon in North Yorkshire, one of the largest and best preserved ruined Cistercian monasteries in the Read more…
First of all let me start by saying Happy New Year, particularly to those birders amongst us for whom January 1st is probably one of the most exciting dates in the calendar. It’s the day on which new notebooks are cracked open, year lists begun and when even the humble Read more…
As we enter those magic few days before 2016 throws in the towel, where no one really knows the day let alone the date, Christmas already feels like a lifetime ago. I hope dear reader that yours was an enjoyable one, surrounded by those you love in a celebration that Read more…
Goldeneye and Ogmore. Two words which go hand in hand at this time of year and with my parents down weekend before last we had the perfect excuse to go and see how numbers were building. The plan was to do a circular walk along the coast from Ogmore to Read more…
When I look back on 2016 in a few months from now one thing will become abundantly clear – I was way too ambitious in what I planned to take on. There simply hasn’t been the time or quantity of free weekends available, particularly over the summer, to do everything Read more…
I had a real yearning for some ‘proper’ birding weekend before last. Not a walk with some birds thrown in for good measure but a full on, telescope out, find as much as we possibly can expedition. Ideally that would have involved a trip to my favourite reserve on the Read more…