BirdSoc Blog

By Fiona McAuliffe Before moving to Edinburgh to begin my PhD I worked as an ecological consultant in the southwest of Ireland. One of my main projects was to undertake winter and breeding season vantage point surveys of a windfarm. Vantage point surveys involve selecting points from which you can have a clear view over your observation area. These are stationary surveys and are usually carried out in fine weather with good visibility. I had a total of five vantage points from which I could observe the windfarm, and each survey lasted 6 hours, split into 3-hour blocks (provided the Irish weather complied!). I have a keen interest in raptor ecology and conservation, and my target species for these surveys was the Hen harrier ( Circus cyaneus ). A male hen harrier gracefully flying over a field. Footage by Fiona McAuliffe. The Hen harrier is a medium-sized ground-nesting bird of prey that breeds between April and July in upland areas. They spend winter at communal roost sites distributed...

By  T asnim Mohd Hanafiah Growing up in the suburbs of Malaysia where nature was often just an afterthought, birds to me used to be just…birds (or ‘burung’ as they are called in Malay)—a common and forgettable member of the scenery. If you asked me the bird types I knew back then, I would have said ‘chickens, pigeons, crows’ and maybe Common Mynas and Eurasian Tree Sparrows if I bothered to look up their actual species.      Common Myna (left) and Eurasian Tree Sparrows (right) are common birds you can find throughout Malaysia. Pictures from Pixabay. Images are free for commercial use and no attribution is required.   It was not until two years ago when I truly appreciated their diversity. I had an amazing opportunity to volunteer for the Langur Project Penang, a citizen science project founded by Joleen Yap, a PhD student at Universiti Sains Malaysia. The project was focused on studying an endemic langur species on Penang Island, otherwise known as the du...

By Vaishnavi Ramu When I was little, there were three things that I loved: the first was reading, the second was writing, and the third was nature. The first hobby is currently intermittent and, ironically, being a literature student hasn’t helped. The second remains a thriving passion to this day. And the third? Like many people growing up, the fascination with animals at the zoo or weird insects in the mud slowly ebbed away, as I became more engrossed in social media and Netflix at the expense of going out in the Scottish countryside. When I returned to the Scottish Borders as Britain went into lockdown, I found myself home for the longest period of time since I had moved out and surrounded by a wealth of nature that I realised I hadn’t even missed while I had been away. Leaving for university, I was just so eager to be in a city. It meant more frequent buses, nights out and, well, more people. Don’t get me wrong: for a city Edinburgh is quite green, and we are lucky in comparison to...

By Sorrel Lyall There is a lack of diversity in the UK nature community, and it is not talked about enough. “As a black birder, you have to be prepared to be the only one who looks like you when out birding.”   Sorrel Lyall (© Stephen Magee) Whilst I do not experience the same issues as black birders, as an ethnic minority birder this quote from  #BlackBirdersWeek  is all too relatable. I will always remember how different and ‘looked at’ I felt when walking into a conference room as the only young, female, non-white birder. This lack of diversity has always been clear to me, but maybe I was naïve in thinking that this was evident to everyone else too. Birding in the UK is characterised by the old, white, middle-class male. This is an intimidating image and deters many from getting involved. I decided to write about this lack of representation in a  Twitter thread , speaking from my own experiences, and hoping to start a conversation and hear the opinions of oth...

By Mark Pitt For all the hardships that the last four months have brought, there is a bittersweet feeling now that the country has started to recover. For roads are busy, bars are open and the countryside is filled with the smiling faces of tourists. The slow path to normality has finally begun, yet with it, I feel as though there is a part of me begrudgingly being pulled along with the tide. Nature has been a source of solace for many of us, and the peace it brought is slowly fading.  When the country closed in March, my university year was halted. The prospect of having almost six months off with no education, no volunteering and no fieldwork was daunting, to say the least. To keep myself busy for that long seemed like an impossible task, and, to some extent, it was. Although reading books and streaming television series have kept me busy, the real source of entertainment for me, and many others, this quarantine has come from nature and the ability to see life continue a...

After uni and society activities were put on hold back in March, the BirdSoc community continued to get out birding in their local areas wherever in the world they were. Read on for some summer birding highlights from our members. Hannah, pronouns she/her, Fife "I was living on the east coast of Scotland so I had a nice mix of coastal and well-maintained agricultural habitat. We have a healthy population of corn buntings and other farmland birds in my area (the chicks in the photo are yellowhammers!), as well as lots of eiders and two pairs of shelducks that come to our coast every spring for a few months. I also included a photo of a swallow that perched on the gutter just outside my window and sang every day.  Another highlight was several weeks ago when I went further up the east coast and saw some gems including a sea eagle, spotted redshank and marsh harrier, and seeing hundreds of manx shearwaters on the Irish Channel." Corn Bunting by Hannah Coburn Yellowhammer nest  b...