New Forest Holiday Day 2 : Bucklers Hard and the Beaulieu River : 27th June 2011 For a change of location we decided to try a boat trip so we headed off for the “historic village” of Bucklers Hard, once a naval shipbuilding dockyard where many of Nelson’s ships, including some that fought at the…
New Forest Holiday Day 2 : Acres Down and Bolderwood : 27th June 2011 Our guidebook “Where To Watch Birds in Britain” by Simon Harrap and Nigel Redman suggested that this was “probably the best site in the New Forest for Watching raptors” so we were looking forward to some exciting birding. We followed the…
New Forest Holiday Day 1 : Beaulieu Road / Shatterford Bottom : 26th June 2011 We arrived at East Boldre from Montacute by early afternoon. We were booked in at the Turfcutters Arms for three nights and this was to be our base for various outings into the New Forest. The room we had was…
Journey from Montacute (Somerset) to East Boldre (Hampshire) : 26th June 2011 We had met up with some of the guests and the hosts of the wedding we attended in Montacute on Friday again on the Saturday night and they suggested that we should take a scenic route to the New Forest rather than the…
Visit to Lodmore RSPB : 25th June 2011 Just a short drive away along the A353 is the Lodmore RSPB reserve. We hadn’t been there before but a couple of people we met at Radipole Lake told us that it is often more productive than Radipole so we decided to go there. There is parking…
Visit to Radipole Lake RSPB : 25th June 2011 Anne and I had spent the previous day attending the wedding of our friends’ daughter in Montacute in Somerset and this day we thought we should leave them all alone until meeting up again in the evening so we decided to drive down to the RSP…
Visit to Slimbridge WWT : 23rd June 2011 We were on our way to Montacute in Somerset for a wedding and we had stayed overnight at the Tudor Arms pub in Slimbridge village in order to break our journey up a bit and also to give us a chance to go to the Wildfowl and…
Visit to Arlingham and Slimbridge Village : 22nd June 2011 We were scheduled to attend a wedding on the 24th June at Montacute in Somerset so we decided to break up our journey by stopping off at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire. On our way there we took a bit of a detour to look at a…
Birding Group Visit to Rixton Clay Pits : 21st June 2011 This week’s birding group visit was to Rixton Clay Pits, a former clay extraction point now turned over to angling and parts of it are a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The general feel of the area is scrubland / woodland with a big…
“The Secret Lives of Garden Birds” by Dominic Couzens I came across a first edition hardback copy of this book at our local Oxfam shop so I only paid £3.99p for it which was quite a bargain. I mainly know of Dominic Couzens from his regular features in “Bird Watching” magazine where he specialises in…
