Birdwatching is the one hobby that has persisted throughout most of my life. As a small child I think that even my own parents didn’t understand my string of obsessions; astronomy, fungi, mosses and liverworts (as a 5 year-old! what was I thinking of?), butterflies and birds, all the way through to my current crop of interests (a much healthier word than obsession, don’t you think?); cetaceans, moths, bonsai, haiku, photography, lichens, natural history in general and, of course, birdwatching. Northumberland is where I live and (mainly) where I work, birdwatching in all of my ‘spare’ time (and most of my work time as well), and the area allows me to indulge all of these passions, and more.<\/p>\n
Within my birdwatching one thing has remained constant as well. As a young child I was obsessed with taking long cycle rides to find new areas to explore, but one of the real delights was watching the feeding station in our garden. Now I’m older and I have a, some might say unhealthy, obsession with seawatching and raptors. Those two activities have taught me the value of patience (and the equally important value of thermal underwear…) and they get me out of the house and to some wild and remote places. But, as entrancing as when I was only just tall enough to peer over the windowsill of our dining room, the feeding station is still a source of great pleasure. Yesterday I decided to try and count the Coal Tits that were visiting the feeders. I lost count round about the 15 mark. They were like a swarm around the apple tree, each one trying to displace another who had gained a space on one of the precious perches, allowing access to the food. There’s something in the seed mix that they don’t like though, and they often seem to concentrate on removing that from the feeder and throwing it to the ground. With half a dozen Great Tits, a few Chaffinches and four Bullfinches joining in we’re having to replenish supplies on a daily basis. What’s it going to be like once we get some real winter weather?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Birdwatching is the one hobby that has persisted throughout most of my life. As a small child I think that even my own parents didn’t understand my string of obsessions; astronomy, fungi, mosses and liverworts (as a 5 year-old! what was I thinking of?), butterflies and birds, all the way through to my current crop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}