author and lifelong birder
For 10 years, starting in the early 1950s, my family spent a summer week’s holiday in a rented bungalow on the coastal hillside at Reighton Gap near Filey, Yorkshire. The bungalow has since been demolished. Nearby, to the south-east, stood the hard chalk outcrops forming …
Long-billed dowitcher Early during my bird watching career, I recorded mainly everyday species around my home near York, but at the start of the 1960s, at the age of 16, I took my first journey to Spurn Point. Here my ornithological expectations quickly changed. I …
Male whitethroat The whitethroat is a bird I became acquainted without knowing its name. I must have been eight years old, and riding a two-wheeler bicycle when I fell into a bed of stinging …
Falcons have long, pointed wings and fly with strong, rapid wing-strokes. Hawks have rounded wings and in flight alternate between several rapid wing-beats and a short glide. As a result, even before I left primary school in the UK, I could recognize a kestrel from …
My Bird Blog is a series of “then and now” stories that combine my experiences as a juvenile birdwatcher in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s with my knowledge of the same species in California today. Each month I publish the details of a bird …
