Birding
Where I've been/What I've seen
Hello! Been quite a while since I did my last post (2 months wow, thanks school), and I recently got back from a casual trip to London, so here goes nothing. Despite this trip being mostly for leisure, I still managed to get some birding in, bringing in somewhere around fifty lifers, well above my target species list. Most of my birding around the city was casual and included birds that I mainly saw when doing touristy things.
The next day (Christmas), I woke up to go on an early morning walk (which happened to be 8am) to Kensington Gardens. This was my first time “birding” per say, and the number of birds which I saw was likely reduced due to rain. Here is where I found my lifers Common Pochard and Tufted Duck, probably my two favorites at this location. Also new to me were Egyptian Geese, Eurasian Coot and Moorhen, Rose-ringed Parakeet, and Eurasian Wren, among others. I didn’t really see anything new until the 28th, the day my family had set aside for me to go birding in one of the neighboring counties (which happened to be Hertfordshire) in the Lea Valley. I went out with a local, one of the owners of Birding London, a nice birding tour company that operates in the counties around London. My targets for the day were the few shorebirds around, as well as many of the harder to get passerine birds around the city.
At this next stop we did not pick up very much that was new for the day, however I’ll go over the highlights. We made a few stops at the blinds along a trail where we picked up a Chiffchaff, White (Pied) Wagtail, dipped on Common Kingfisher, but also heard a few Water Rails over in the section of the preserve with reeds.
Unfortunately, I had to go to the airport at this point, concluding a very fun trip, I ended the trip getting around 50 lifers, and several more European subspecies that I would probably not see back in the states.
1 Comment
2/9/2018 07:18:53 am
Nice finds! Sounds like a fun trip! I can relate as when I went to Europe I also got many lifers although around 25 less than you since I only did one hour long birding trip at a local lake. Some of my interesting birds where species like Alpine Accentor, Alpine Cough, and interestingly a (introduced or escapee) Bar-headed Goose.
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