We set off from Manchester at 9am and took our planned route avoiding motorways which turned out to be a good decision because it was a lovely day, the route was straightforward and the traffic wasn’t too bad. We drove straight through to Wyndhampton Windmill near Rutland Water for about 12 which was perfect. We…
Our, nearly two-week, holiday around Sussex and Norfolk in May 2026 involved us mixing a bit of birding with visiting friends. Over the period we stayed at “The Old Pheasant” at Oakham, near Rutland Water, The Woodcutters Lodge in Lynford Arboretum in Norfolk followed by a night with friends at Bury St Edmunds and two…
Another January, another visit to Lanzarote but this time it was a very different island to the one we have seen for the last ten or eleven years we have been visiting in winter. As a result of a rare, very wet winter that had already seen two Atlantic storms by the 15th of January, the whole island was transformed and was carpeted in green with yellow and blue flowers adorning what looked like huge meadows.
On our return from Montacute to Manchester we did our usual stopover at the Tudor Lodge pub in Slimbridge which was as reliable as it usually is with a nice, ground floor, room at the back of the resident’s block. We were quite early getting to Slimbridge so we headed straight for the WWT nature…
We drove down to Bristol on the 3rd April and stayed there for a night before moving on to Montacute in Somerset. On our way down we saw lots of Buzzards, a Kestrel and we also got two Red Kites, seen whilst having a cup of tea at Gloucester Services South. On the trip we…
As is often the case, January saw us taking a break in order to get some winter sun and, whilst birding wasn’t our main purpose, we still managed to fit some casual birding in. The coastal and desert envirnments gave us good opportunities to find some interesting birds.
We decided to have a few days in North Wales taking in RSPB Conwy, Llanferfechan, Holyhead Fish Docks, Cemlyn Bay, RSPB South Stack, Bodnant Gardens and Gronant Dunes. As luck would have it, we managed to get three days of really sunny, wind-free weather – a rarity for north Wales. We managed to get forty-seven species and eight year ticks over the three days.
Our Lanzarote holiday this year saw us break with tradition by basing ourselves at Puerto Del Carmen instead of Playa Blanca. The hotel was not as full of Spanish Sparrows as the Princessa Yaiza in Playa Blanca but there were still fair numbers and also frequent flybys by Monk Parakeets of which there seems to…
After a short visit to Bristol, to catch up with friends, we moved on to Montacute to see our friends who live there. The weather looked a bit uncertain on the day we had planned to go there but we gave it a shot and managed to both avoid any bad weather and get a…
On a trip to the south of England to visit friends, we managed to get a couple of days with some birding. We drove down on the 1st April but we got stuck on the motorway almost as soon as we started. With the car parked and the engine off for three hours, we didn’t…
