NEW SEASON, NEW LIFE

Have you finished all your Easter eggs yet? I know that this celebration of new life was only a couple of weeks ago so some of you might still have a chocolaty treat or two lying around but I bet most of you have snarfed them up long ago. There are certainly none left in my house.

Easter may now be a full calendar page behind us but most birds in the natural world are yet to move on to the business…

WHITE, FEATHERY AND OVERLOOKED

If you've ever seen me at RSPB Old Moor's Welcome Shed then you'll know that I'm rarely seen there without a big, wide-brimmed Tilley on my head. In fact I've only accidentally left it at home once. I felt naked without it, and that's not good for anybody. I do like a good hat. Some might say it's a bad hat or even a ridiculous one. It's certainly an expensive one. But one thing that I could…

VIENETTA ON STILTS

If you've read any of these blogs before then you'll know that I love the unusual names, both ancient and modern, that people give to birds. I find it wonderful that there are so many different ways to name any particular bird and that someone, somewhere in the country will know precisely to what you are referring. And all these names are just as valid as each other so long as the other party understands…

ICE, ICE, BABY

...or “What I Did On My Holidays by Volunteer Shaun, aged 57 and 3/4”

At the time of writing I'm waiting for a flight home from Iceland. My holiday has been absolutely wonderful although I could have lived without the ridiculous 65mph winds. Even the local people, who are used to high winds coming straight down from the Arctic, admitted that this was a little blustery. I struggled to walk forwards…

VIEW FROM THE ARCHIVIST

Hi everyone. If you were expecting one of Shaun's blogs then you are probably disappointed. He's unavailable at the moment so has asked me to step in as Guest Blogger for the week. My name's Alvin and I regularly inhabit the very same "Welcome Shed" as Shaun, but that is about where the similarities between us end. As far as birds are concerned we would be placed at the opposite ends of the knowledge…

WHERE IS CASPIA, ANYWAY?

I've written about gulls before. It's safe to say that I'm not a fan of them. I know that nature exists outside of the laws, rules and emotions that we place upon each other so there's no way that any creature can be seen as good or bad, virtuous or evil. They all exist simply to exist and to propagate their species. But if I were to anthropomorphise gulls then I'd have to give them some of…

OUT OF THE SUN

Being an RSPB Welcome Desk volunteer means that I'm actually at my local reserve (in my case that's Old Moor in the Dearne Valley) more frequently than I might otherwise be. I've committed to standing at the entrance to the reserve and talking to our visitors for a set number of days per week, and I love it. As a friend of mine once said, “You get to pretend that you're presenting 'Springwatch', talking…

SCHRODINGER'S OTTER

I'm in danger of going all philosophical this week. Let's start with a simple question and take it from there...

If there's an otter (or more) on the RSPB Old Moor reserve but nobody ever sees it, does it really exist? This theoretical query became reality for me at the Old Moor Welcome Shed this week.

We've known that Otters have been visiting the reserve for well over a year now…

WHERE HAVE ALL THE WADERS GONE?

The RSPB handbook is a free gift given to all members when they join the organisation. The book tells you details of each RSPB site around the country and what birds you might see when you visit. Really old copies said, under the section about Old Moor and the Dearne Valley, that one of our regular highlights was up to 10,000 Golden Plover that would visit each year.

That was then. This…

GOING A BIT OFF PISTE

Normally my basic ideas for one of these blogs starts with some oblique reference to a bird that has been seen in my local Dearne Valley patch this week. Then my thoughts meander wherever they will for a bit and I finally sit down to the work of bashing that mess of ideas into something that I hope is vaguely entertaining, informative and somewhere under a thousand words.

This week is different.…

OLD MOOR'S BOOM BOX

It was certainly a date for my diary. February the second, a momentous date if only for one reason: this was the earliest day of the year that I've ever heard a BITTERN booming at the RSPB Dearne Valley area.

It was about two weeks earlier than expected and it was actually a bit rubbish. Technically it wasn't a full-blown 'boom', the kind that says, 'Hey ladies, I'm here, I'm available and…

BEYOND OLD MOOR

Things have been fairly static here at RSPB Old Moor recently. Unless some mega-rare birds have turned up between the time of writing and you reading this, the number of species on the reserve hasn't really changed much since we unwrapped our Christmas presents. There's still plenty to see and do here but some people who visit several times each week could possibly have seen all the birds that are to be…

THE NAME'S EYE...

I'd like to thank regular readers for sticking with me over the last couple of weeks. The previous two-part View From The Shed was incredibly science heavy and possibly a little hard going. Next week's is going to be a serious one as well so I thought that this time around I might get a little frivolous, if that's OK? I do like a good frivol from time to time.

You have remembered that…

SENSES WORKING OVERTIME (Part Two)

Last week I started looking at how the average birds' senses compared to a humans'. I covered sight, hearing and touch in the last View From the Shed (available to read here if you somehow missed it – where were you?) so it makes sense that this week I examine a bird's other senses and how we can relate them to our own. Sensibly. If you're ready, let's get straight into it,…

SENSES WORKING OVERTIME (Part One)

Most humans have five senses. You know them all. Sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste.

Most birds have the same five, and possibly a bit more too but we'll get to that later. But how do their senses compare to ours? While sight is probably our most used sense, which is most important to them? And how important is each sense to each individual species?

Let's look at some birdy…

IT'S GROUNDHOG DAY... AGAIN

There are some times of the year when Old Moor's lake and the skies above it are filled with birds. Spring and Autumn are the best examples, when we see migrants coming and going in all direction, stopping off for their proverbial motorway service station break and resting up before The Big Push. And there are other months where there seems to be nothing at all on our main mere for weeks…

RING OUT THE OLD

Well there goes 2022. Whoosh. Bye then, don't let the door hit you on the way out. See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya. It was, continuing the tradition of several recent years, a pretty awful one, wasn't it? Wars in the East, financial instability leading to a massive cost of living crisis, the continued threat and lingering after-effects of COVID, crippling strikes in every job sector and a revolving door…

MY ROBIN IS BACK

Readers should take note. In this blog I'm going to dispel a deeply and widely-held belief about Christmas. Those of a timid disposition should beware.

No, I'm not talking about the existence of Father Christmas. That's been proven beyond doubt. Navigate to www.NoradSanta.org if you don't believe me. There you can track his whereabouts as he delivers gifts around the world on Christmas Eve…

RISE TO THE CHALLENGE

I've written at length in these blogs about how we birders are collectors at heart, how we love to say, “I found a new one” when we spot a bird that we've never seen before. It's the camouflage jacket equivalent of stamp collecting with – for most of us – the added benefit of doing something good for the environment. And there's usually the added “mine's bigger than yours” nature of lists. “I've…

Pathways to the future for RSPB Old Moor 

We are delighted to be able to share that Old Moor is benefiting from improvements to infrastructure thanks to a £50,000 grant from FCC Communities Foundation. 

The money will be used to resurface pathways along the Green Lane part of the reserve to make it fully accessible, and to create a new wildlife viewing bridge for visitors to enjoy the sights and species at RSPB Old…

GET UP AND GO

Last week I wrote about seeing my first ever Shorelarks in Norfolk. They were stunning little birds with their yellow heads, black facemasks and Devilish little feather-tuft horns. It was a delight and a privilege to see them, made all the better by the fact that I had pretty much zero chance of seeing one at my local patch in South Yorkshire.

Those of you who have met me outside the Welcome Hut at RSPB…

WHAT LARKS!

Regular readers will know that I like owls of all kinds. I've written about them several times in these blogs, mostly about their hunting patterns and their symbolism in folklore. They're fascinating, deadly and beautiful, all at the same time, and they're famous (even if the reputation isn't 100% accurate) for being birds of the night.

Personally though I'm much more of a Lark myself. I'm…

THE COMPLETE COLLECTION

I've written before in these weekly blogs about how many people who take pleasure in watching birds do it with the attitude of a collector. That is, they see each bird species as something to be added to their personal collection. Thankfully these days we don't do this by killing birds and keeping their stuffed remains in drawers and glass-fronted cases. We do it by adding them to lists whenever…

PERFECT BALANCE

It's a strange quirk of the human psyche that we tend to go all gooey eyed at the sight of a wild mammal in a way that we would never do over an insect or reptile. You're much more likely to hear the adjective 'cute' applied to a mammal than, say a grass snake or a stag beetle. We're just hardwired that way. We love to see mammals, especially in the wild.

The mammal that you're probably…

UP ABOVE THE STREETS AND HOUSES

Anyone above a certain age (like me) will no doubt be singing along to the title of this week's blog. It's the next line that is the main thrust of this piece - “Rainbow flying high”. If this means nothing to you then you should ask someone from an older generation. Find me at RSPB Old Moor's Welcome Shed and I might even sing it to you. Maybe. It's the theme tune to an old children's TV…