Thursday, December 20, 2007

Dec 19th, Suffolk, UK

Here's the finished painting of the Greenfinch I mentioned yesterday, and in addition, a sketch of a Goldcrest seen this afternoon in the local churchyard.



Tuesday, December 18, 2007

December 17th, England

Time to blow the dust off this blog and see if it still starts!

I haven't done a great deal of proper birding over the last month or so, since this has mainly been a time to catch up on old friends and spend time with the family.

I have enjoyed getting reacquainted with the common English birdlife, and it's been especially good to see ducks, gulls, thrushes and the like, as those families are poorly represented in Malaysia.

Quite a bit of my birding has been from the kitchen window - watching stuff coming into the bird table.
























Here are a couple of sketches of a male Greenfinch that found a sunny spot in the hedge and was soaking up a bit of December sun. I'm in the process of turning one of these into a painting.






















This is one of a small flock of House Sparrows that regularly hangs around the feeder.

Another short project was redoing the house sign.



I took part in the BTO Atlas project, and did a 2 hour 'Timed Tetrad Visit' for the square around our house. We've managed to record 49 species in our square, which isn't bad for an 'agricultural desert' miles from any decent waterbody.

In the past month Peter Kennerley and I have published an article detailing our observations of some interesting plovers which once appeared on this blog as 'Malaysian Plovers'. The full article is here, with an link to a forum that gives opportunity to comment on or discuss the article. If you want a potted summary of the article, you could try looking at this link.

And if you haven't got time to even look at that, here's what all the fuss is about!