Growing up with blue tits on the farm is one of my earliest memories. These are feisty little birds (4.5 in/12 cm in length), noisy, sociable, inquisitive and lovable.  The moment I threw out bacon rind or hung up monkey nuts (peanuts in their shells), […]

A smallish dainty bird (7in/18cm long), called a red-necked phalarope, attracted a lot of discussion during my time at Spurn Point Bird Observatory in the early 1960s, where the species was a very infrequent visitor.  Although classified as a shorebird, it swims rather than wades, […]

For 15 years, from about 1950, my family spent a week on holiday in a rented bungalow on the cliff top at Reighton Gap, near Filey, Yorkshire. We always expected the accommodation to have been washed away by the sea by the following year because […]

Early during my birdwatching career, it was the more common species I recorded as I stayed close to home, but by the start of the 1960s, when I was 16,  I discovered Spurn Point Bird Observatory where my expectations suddenly changed. I was on the […]

It was my job as a young child in the early 1950s to scythe the stinging nettles from around our farm’s chicken coops. I used a hand scythe so I would not sting myself and I made sure there were dock leaves nearby just in […]

As a young boy in Britain during the early 1950s, I did not contribute to the well-being of merlins. These are small, fierce falcons that hunt other birds by attacking them in flight, and appear somewhat pigeon-like, which has earned them the nickname of pigeon […]

I began birdwatching and egg collecting at the start of the 1950s in Britain when I was 7 years old. Egg collecting came to an abrupt halt in 1954 when the British government made this pastime illegal but I continued to maintain my “life list”  […]