A New Northern Ireland Tick and an Invitation from the British Library

Peregrine's Birding Facts: The Common Spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia) is one of 6 species and the most widespread species, which occurs in the northeast of Africa and much of Europe and Asia across to Japan.


I thought I would post a bit of home news before I continue with my trip report. Last week I had a text from Derek Charles at 8.36pm to say a Spoonbill had been found by Andrew Corry and was at Dundrum Inner Bay so mid meal I headed off to see it. As my bed time is 9.30 due to getting up at ten to two every morning I wasnt leaving much time to see it. Dundrum is about twelve miles away. I got there double quick time got out of my car and the first bird I looked at was the Spoonbill. It was in the middle of the bay and quite far away. I watched it for a while with its bill scything back and forward across the waters surface before deciding to go round to the other side of the bay to get better photographs. On my way there I stopped at a layby where Andrew and a couple of other birders were watching it from. I left them cursing the fact that I didnt bring my extender with me so was only shooting at 500mm. This photo is fairly heavily cropped.


The last Spoonbill was spotted on the Quoile about three years ago when I was in New Zealand so I dipped on that one. However I did see a Royal Spoonbill (Platalea Regia)
while I was there so I have only four species to go!

My other news is the invitation from the British Library to have my blog archived.

Dear Peregrine Craig Nash,

Peregrine's Bird Blog: http://www.peregrinesbirdblog.blogspot.com


The British Library is building a collection of blogs. This collection will form part of the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) initiative to archive websites of research interest. Please visit www.webarchive.org.uk if you wish to see the current online archive which is publicly accessible.


We would like to invite you to have your site included in this important collection for Internet research. We will be selecting some 150 key sites to form the basis of the blog’s collection until August 2007 but archiving will continue into the future. To carry out this archiving we need you to sign the Licence document.


If you are happy for your site to be included in this Web archive please complete the attached copyright licence form and return it to the address given below. If there are any other of your sites which you would like to be considered for archiving, and you are able to sign a licence document for them please make additional copies of the licence document. For more information about Copyright, the UK Web Archiving Consortium and how your archived web site will be made available please see the attached Further Information & FAQ document.


Alternatively, if you require any additional information, please do not hesitate to contact me.


Best regards,


Leila Medjkoune
Web Archiving

pp. Alison Hill
Curator, Web Archiving
Modern British Collections
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London
NW1 2DB
Tel: +44 (0)20 7412 7623

So I am pretty happy about that. As I said to my children if someone is interested enough they can read my blog a hundred years hence!!!

The only other news is that I have bought the BWP Concise Volume 1 Original Plate 158 of Black Grouse by Peter Hayman from NHBS Environment Store. The NHBS were having a sale and I bought it for seventy pounds a bargain I think.It is really nice and I am in awe of illustrators who can paint eight different illustrations on a piece of card without making mistakes.



I will be getting my sister to frame it.