Cambridgeshire Bird Club
Welcome to the club
The Cambridgeshire Bird Club promotes the study, recording and conservation of birds in Cambridgeshire and encourages a wider interest in natural history and the protection of county wildlife habitats.
We record the County's birds in our Annual Report, so we need your records. We have a stunning Gallery, so we want your photos. We have field projects, we have indoor meetings and trips, and we keep you informed with our monthly emailed and bulletins. We have links to active bird ringing groups. And have a look at our Facebook page.
You can see What's About? and we urge you to report interesting, sensitive or confidential sightings to the County Recorder.
We hope you enjoy your visit and come back soon.
Announcements
- The 2020 AGM of the Cambridgeshire Bird Club will be held at 7.45pm on 13th March at St John's Community Hall, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8RN. The AGM papers can be read here.
- Our April talk is a week earlier than usual, Friday 3rd April.
- Voting for the PHOTO OF THE YEAR is open until 9th March. See all 26 candidates here.
- Make a note in your diary of the the dates of our three summer fields trips: 22nd May, 10th July, 14th August - see Meetings
- The December Club e-Bulletin is now available to non members - records, photos, articles and event reminders . Read here.
- The Cambridgeshire Bird Report 2018 No. 92 has been published. Copies can be purchased from the Club - see here
- The Cambridgeshire Bird Report 2017 (No. 91) is now available to read online - click here for CBR 2017 or go to Bird Reports
CBC Spotted Flycatcher research 2015-19, linked to the BTO's geolocator project
Michael Holdsworth's excellent study on Spotted Flycatchers can be read at http://bit.ly/SpotFly
Cambridgeshire Winter Garden Bird Survey 2019/20
The Winter Garden Survey resumed on 6th October. It is still not too late to start recording. If you like to watch the birds in your garden, we would like to invite you to take part.
We ask that you note the bird species feeding or foraging in your garden from 6th October 2019 – 7th March 2020, or for as long a period as possible.
We will discover which species of birds make most use of gardens in the county during the winter months, find out whether new species are coming into gardens and whether the regular species are making less use of the gardens. For further details, read here.
Club meetings
- Details of our indoor meetings and summer outdoor trips can be found on our Meetings page.
13th March: Annual General Meeting followed with ‘Birding in Yunnan’ by Jeff Blincow
St John's Community Hall, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8RN. 7.30pm for 8pm start
This talk highlights the superb birds seen on a trip to south-west China in the winter. Yunnan has a varied landscape with snow-capped mountains, lakes, deep gorges and rich sub-tropical forest in the south. At first, visiting in winter would appear an unusual idea, but the lowland forests along the Burmese border hold a strong resident avifauna and the region is the wintering ground for migrants from nearly all points of the compass. Many of the miss-placed eastern rarities that reach the UK shores in the autumn were headed for the forests of Yunnan to join the laughing-thrushes and pheasants that grace the remaining forests.
Jeff Blincow has enjoyed bird-watching all of his life. He worked as a teacher of Information Technology and has been lecturing on wildlife since 1980 on such topics as Ecuador, New Zealand, Australia and bird families. He has travelled widely and his focus on South America in the 1990s led him to be one of the founder committee members of the Neotropical Bird Club. He is now interested in all aspects of wildlife and recently became a member of the conservation team at Yardley Chase in Northamptonshire.
AGM documents here
3rd April: ‘All the space in the world: how rewilding our lands can save Britain’s birds’ by Ben Macdonald
Tony Cooper Suite, Cottenham Village College, CB24 8UA. 7.30pm for 8pm start
Britain is blessed with space. Huge areas of this space produce little in the way of viable food supplies. They sustain few livelihoods, and no young people’s futures. We waste space in a way no other nation would allow. The solution is simple: the restoration of our native landscapes, our wildlife - and most of all, our rural jobs. Nature makes money, creates genuine local income, and affords the prospect of a life without subsidy for our dying rural communities.
Rebirding was written as the first book with actual solutions for how beautiful and profitable the UK’s countryside could one day look - as well as why the impending extinction of our cuckoos, turtle doves and honey-bees is entirely avoidable. Britain has all the space it needs for an epic wildlife recovery. So what’s stopping it from happening in our country – and how can we turn things around?
Ben Macdonald is a conservation writer, field director in wildlife television, and naturalist, passionate about restoring Britain's wildlife, pelicans very much included, in his lifetime. In television, he has worked on projects for the BBC, ITV, Netflix and Apple, including the Emmy-winning Our Planet series for Netflix, narrated by Sir David Attenborough. Ben's first book has been nominated for the Richard Jefferies Nature Prize.
More on club meetings here
Photo of the year: 2018
Congratulations to Neil Bramwell for winning the Photo of the Year competition with his photo of a Hawfinch. In second place was Nigel Sprowell's Spotted Flycatcher, and in third place was a Peregrine Falcon by Simon Stirrup. View here to see all three, and click here to see the photos entered.
Picture of the month: January
Short-eared Owl
© David Ball, Burwell Fen, 9th January 2020.
This month, Tony Roberts had chosen the Picture of the Month , the first for 2020.
Tony says succintly that he chose this because the composition was just right and a lovely clear view.
County peak bird counts and earliest / latest dates
Updated by Mark Hawkes - view them here