2010 - Review January - June

2010 has been an awfully quick year - here are a few of my highlights...

Above - African Penguins at Simonstown, South Africa during out New Year holiday to the Western Cape
Below - A UK tick - black-throated thrush, Newholm, North Yorkshire, January

February saw a visit to Cleveland for a very obliging ring-necked duck ~ the best and most close views I've had of the species in the UK. A great bacon sandwich was has had courtesy of CB afterwards!

March saw the arrival of a common crane at Eshott ~  a vocal bird and not popular with the territorial lapwing!

April was a month of wagtails - the possible black-headed at Cresswell was a stunner... even in the rain!

May was a busy month - the first week was spent abroad, with visits to Dubai and Mauritius.

The red-wattled lapwing was in Safa Park, Dubai - a park that had playing fields covered in hoopoe!

Mauritius was limited species-wise, we saw some really great birds ~ echo parakeet, Mauritius olive white-eye, white-tailed tropicbird.... but the enigmatic pink pigeon will never be forgotten...

May also saw the first of 10 planned annual birding weekends with the birders of my youth - Mark, John and Rob. 2010 saw us on Mull and Iona where corncrake was bird of the trip!

May produced another UK tick for me - oriental pratincole at Frampton Marsh. I saw this delightful bird with Phil on a sunny day-trip.

June was quieter than hoped-for, but a singing marsh warbler was nice...

The rest of 2010 will feature in the next post!

Black-throated Thrush

It was an early start today as there was the important business of securing a uk-tick ~ a black-throated thrush has conveniently been feeding in a small garden in Newholm, a village just west of Whitby, North Yorkshire. The pager service confirmed that the bird was there as we passed Scaling Dam, and it was with some relief that the bird was feeding in the well stocked garden upon our arrival.

Pity the weather was so bad - it was very overcast and raining heavily. This mean't that light was very poor for photography, so high ISO had to be utilised (1250!) as flash was not really an option.

The results were pleasing, perhaps enhanced by the confiding nature of the bird. Having fed at the "house end" of the garden (approx 12 meters away, the image with the thrush facing left on top of feed and snow depicts this position), the thrush suprised us all (the massive <20 crowd...!) by flying down to "our" end of the garden and proceeded to feed on suet / apples kindly placed out by the home owner.

Fantastic!

I managed a couple of images at ISO640, which helped reduce noise, but all in all the camera, albeit wet, performed really well.

One of the residents came out and offered us all cups of tea, which was very kind. Hopefully birders present will continue to behave and make the correct impression to this community.

If you are heading up/down to see this bird, please give generously to the RNLI collection!