Welcome
Welcome to my birding website. This started life as a birding and travel blog which I’d originally began when I set off on a 2 month expedition to Singapore, Australia and Thailand in April-June 2009.
Most of my birding is done on the Isle of Wight, which is located a few miles off the coast of Hampshire, in Southern England. The island has a variety of habitats – coastal marshes, beaches, cliffs, rivers, downland, gardens, towns, farmland and woodland and has approximately 200 recorded species of birds, plus some mammals (except deer) including the nationally-endangered Red Squirrel, and many insects and other invertebrates.
Our main Nature Reserve is the National Trust’s Newtown NR, and the RSPB has a reserve at Brading, but most of this is not open to the public (except fishermen! Why is this?) although there are footpaths around the perimiter, including Laundry Lane. There are smaller reserves at Alverstone Mead, which is close to where I live, and at Hersey, which is along the Toll Road at Seaview.
Apart from local birding, I like travelling. Not all travels are birding trips as my main interest is astronomy and I travel for star parties, etc,but I usually manage to find some to watch and photograph.
The photo above is a Rainbow Bee-eater, photographed in Cairns, Australia, in 2009.
Updates:
2nd March 2011: Added Ecuador, May 2007 trip.
27th February 2011: Added Thailand page
16th January 2011: Added Ecuador photos which are split into two pages – page 1 here and page 2 here.
21st November 2010 – Sydney and NSW page done and added.
20th November 2010 – Added a page about photography and sorted out a mini disaster with the drop-down menus which are now restored.
19th November 2010 – Cairns and tropical North Queensland Parts 1 and 2 uploaded.
18th November 2010 – Isle of Wight photos added
17th November 2010 – photos from a trip to Texas in May 2010, plus some more Australian bird photos added.
15th November 2010 – photo albums added, so far Australia and Thailand.
