MOUNTAINS AND BIRDS

09th March 2026

Paul’s life has revolved around hills, mountains and rock climbing. He became aware of the wildlife and birds he was seeing while out in the mountains, which were different from those he saw at home.

Listen to an expert on a subject, you always learn something, even if it is unexpected. Paul shared that mountaineering and birding are similar! Both hobbies are something you are always doing subconsciously. Passing a hill, you mentally size it up for climbing routes and if you see or hear birds, you try to identify them.

Paul lives in Derbyshire and prefers the Dark Peak for the rare birds he sees. He showed long eared owls, pied flycatcher and ring ouzel. Showing an amusing shot of a red grouse’s eye glimpsed between the coping stones of a dry-stone wall, he described watching it, determined not to be the first to move and the following shot of the whole grouse proved he succeeded.

Paul is well travelled and his talk covered many places. At Bempton Cliffs it is easy to get good shots of gannets and the other birds which nest there. Working in the Cairngorms, Paul was happy to see red squirrels, roe deer and osprey totally in the wild.

The second half of the talk took us all round the world from The Hebrides to Saudi Arabia, Iceland and Spitzbergen to Gran Canaria, South Africa, Patagonia, the Antarctic and the Falklands. While we create rules about keeping our distance from wildlife, it is interesting that they have other ideas. Ivory gulls, which you are not allowed to approach, like to wander up to tourists and take cheese titbits from their hands and penguins are fascinated by ‘very big visiting penguins’ and come up in droves to investigate given any opportunity.

Full details of the club and programme are on the club web site: http://www.retford-photographic.co.uk/ Meetings are weekly on Mondays at 7.30pm in St Joseph’s Hall, Babworth Road.