Ingham’s W RLD
FEW places look less promising for birdwatching than my daily 10-minute trek from London Bridge to Express Towers. Heavy traffic pounds between concrete canyons, and the greenery is confined to half-hearted attempts to prettify corporate HQs with low-maintenance gardens. Yet if proof were needed that you can birdwatch anywhere, this half-mile walk would form exhibit one.
Over the past two years I’ve clocked up 27 species on my stroll through the city. Throw in the migrating snipe that was run over by a bus outside our offices, a peregrine falcon hunting pigeons and an oystercatcher near the Tower of London and the total edges to 30.
Many regulars such as feral pigeons are confirmed townies but London’s iconic bird, the Cockney sparrow, sticks close to the Tower.
The Thames pulls in blackheaded, common, lesser blackbacked, great black-backed and herring gulls. Cormorants like to sit in the middle of the river, facing upstream as the tide races out, no doubt sweeping fish into their gullets when they dive.
On New Year’s Day I even saw a shag (no, don’t titter), a smaller relative of the cormorant normally seen on Britain’s rockier coasts.
Coots, mute swans and Egyptian geese also pop up from time to time.
More surprising though are birds for which this concrete wilderness seems to offer nothing. This week I heard a blackbird singing, staking a claim to a territory you would have thought few rivals would want.
A couple of years ago in the sparse shrubbery a pair of dunnocks nested, and spring brings goldfinches to town.
Starlings sing me across the bridge most mornings, soon to nest in the manmade cliff face of an office block, raising their young inside the concrete rose decorations high above the riverbank.
Though trees and feeders are in short supply blue and great tits flit in and out.
During the autumn migration we’ve even had a warbler, a chiffchaff, fattening up in the undergrowth.
But best of all was a kestrel which had strayed far from its comfort zone of mouse-rich fields.
I send all these records via my phone to the British Trust for Ornithology’s Birdtrack, helping build up a picture of where our birds can be found.
It is the perfect antidote to the daily ordeal of late, overcrowded trains made more hellish by the dawn chorus of commuters braying “I’m on the train” into their phones. No wonder I welcome a starling’s scratchy song after that tedium. FOOTBALL League new boys Forest Green Rovers this week beat moneybags Manchester City to become football’s greenest club. They won sport’s first ever Green Heart Hero Award from the Climate Coalition. Food sold at Rovers is vegan, the pitch is organic and the grass is mown by a solar-powered robot. Then again, they are owned by Dale Vince – boss of renewable energy company Ecotricity. THE first “bird” flew like a pheasant, scientists report to Nature Communications. The 150millionyear-old bones of archaeopteryx show that long-distance flight was beyond it. But this magpie-sized dinosaur made short bursts of limited low-level flight to escape danger – just like pheasants dodging the guns. GREEN TIP: Use peat-free compost when gardening. Peat bogs are vital habitats for wildlife. OUR feathered friends are far from birdbrains. Some have high levels of neurotransmitters linked to intelligence in humans. Wild Barbados bullfinches soon worked out how to lift a lid off a food jar, says Science Advances. They have far more of the neurotransmitters than their dimmer relatives, grassquits. ONE of my favourite places, Orkney, is rich in renewable energy potential with fierce tides and an almost constant breeze. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks want to unlock this by building a subsea cable to the National Grid. This green gold could transmit 220 megawatts – enough to power Oxford, Middlesbrough or Blackpool.