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Poor old Gilbert is getting restless. Despite the fact that there is more interest in wildlife than ever before, it seems that most of the so-called conservation organisations are losing interest in species. Instead they prefer to babble on about landscape scale conservation and ecosystem services (whatever they are). Could this be because most of their staff don't have any knowledge about species if they don't have four legs?
This is my attempt to encourage an interest in good old-fashioned natural history.

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Effects of the weather

There isn't much good to be said about the weather at the moment but the flooding at Keyhaven means that there is very little habitat for most waders to feed around the lagoons and todays Wood Sandpiper was therefore forced to feed at extremely close range, enabling this photo to be taken.


It's not often that I get a photo of a bird that I'm actually proud of!

The Garganey from yesterday were still around but this time I saw all three and actually heard them call; something I don't recall hearing before. They weren't asleep all the time but none of my photo's when they were feeding are much good.


After the diversion to twitch the Wood Sand (my 200th species of bird in Hampshire this year), I headed into the New Forest to change the frass traps and sticky traps that I put out last Sunday. In the event, there was no point changing any of the frass traps as none of them contained any frass at all. The sticky traps were also enlightening, the photo below shows a typical example.


So that is all that has been attracted in a whole week in quality deciduous woodland. What on earth are the insectivorous birds eating at the moment?
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