One of the very few positives to come out of lockdown has been working from home and watching the seasons pass by. At the start of 2020 I bought a nice pair of ED 8x42 Hawke binoculars, and even though I live in central London, I’ve been surprised just how many bird species have visited our garden throughout the year. Among the more surprising ones (at least for London) have been:
Lesser redpoll, great spotted woodpecker, blackcap, mistle thrush, dunnock, jay, grey heron (briefly), and a pied wagtail.
And hundreds of ring necked parakeets! One of the bizarre things about London is that the population of these largish green, invasive parakeets has exploded in recent years - they are everywhere, making a terrible racket. And now they are spreading across the rest of the country. There are many theories about how they came to be here. One is that two pet parakeets were freed by Jimi Hendrix when he lives in London during the 1960s. Another is that they escaped from the set of the African Queen, filmed at Ealing Studios in 1951. It remains a complete
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