I’ve just got back from a walk around Milton Country Park, on the northern edge of Cambridge, which was enjoyable and cold in equal measure. Of which more subsequently. And now I’m sitting watching our resident robin chase a dunnock around a bush in my back garden whilst pondering the diversity of birdlife in our area.
Avian diversity in East Anglia was the subject of a slideshow I saw last week organised by the local Cambridge RSPB group entitled ‘Birds of East Anglia’. The speaker was Bill Baston who is a highly accomplished bird photographer living in Suffolk, and has probably photographed nearly all the birds we see in this region. Bill has a very good website, www.billbaston.com, where he’s posted many excellent images from his travels to many parts of the world. For the photographers amongst you he uses Canon hardware with a 500mm telephoto lens.
East Anglia is an excellent place to see birds due to it’s proximity to mainland Europe and the North Sea. Many rare and sometimes exotic visitors can arrive here by mistake or due to being blown off course whilst heading south on the winter migration. The European bee-eater (Merops apiaster), the northern subspecies of long tailed tit (Aegithalos caudatus caudatus) which is immediately distinguishable from our regular British long tailed tit (A. c. rosaceus) by its completely white head, and the unmistakeable hoopoe (Upupa epops) can all occasionally be seen by the vigilant spotter.
Aswell as such visiting rarities it’s usually not necessary to travel too far to see our normal indigenous species, amongst which I include regular migrants. There is a large diversity of habitat in East Anglia, from the tidal mudflats of The Wash in the north of the region, famous for it’s enormous flocks of overwintering waders and geese, the Brecks on the Norfolk/Suffolk border where nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus – the generic name from the Latin for ‘goatsucker’ as a result of the archaic, and mistaken, notion they suck milk from goats!) can be seen and heard ‘churring‘ on summer evenings, to the Blackwater estuary in Essex at the southern end of East Anglia which is also a great place to see large numbers of waders and other sea birds. In between these extremities lie the Norfolk Broads, the UK’s largest protected wetland and National Park, Wicken Fen near Ely and Grafham Water near Huntingdon.
This is a small sample of all of the lovely places to see wildlife in this region. But if you don’t find yourself anywhere near these, parks, gardens, hedgerows and fields are all worth a glance – you never know what you might find.
The Naturephile 