Riding Mountain

Last month, we went to Churchill, Manitoba to find polar bears. We succeeded, seeing six in our four days in town. And it was really finding five in our last day in the Churchill Wildlife Management Area, which was exactly the place we were supposed to find white bears.

Our trip to Churchill was a group tour. We've taken these from time to time over the last 13 or so years when it really seems there are advantages to have someone else take care of the logistics of getting from Point A to Point B. This tour was a nine day tour, with the Churchill part of the tour occupying all or parts of days five through eight. Before we went to Churchill, we met our group in Winnipeg. After that, we spent two nights in a place called Riding Mountain National Park, a Parks Canada property about two or so hours north of Winnipeg by bus.

The theme of the tour that we took was Canada's Big Five, a play on Africa's Big Five wildlife designation, which we've searched for a number of times since we started traveling to sub-Saharan Africa in 2015. There of course is no universally acknowledged Canadian Big Five; it's something our tour operator made up and assigned as the polar bear, the beluga whale, the moose, the black bear and the bison. Churchill was supposed to cover the first two of those animals. Riding Mountain was supposed to cover the last three. Although in reverse, so to speak.

Time to report on our time in Riding Mountain.

How gorgeous is the picture above, by the way? There was lots of this in Riding Mountain. Early morning with mist coming off the water. It's absolutely spectacular. If you've ever seen a moose in the wild, it looks like a perfect place to find moose, right? 

We'll come back to that.

Welcome to Riding Mountain National Park.

Our time in Riding Mountain got off to an historic start, and by that I mean we entered through the historic, 1930s East Gate. At one time, most gates at Parks Canada National Parks looked something like the picture above. They are now all gone. Except for the East Gate at Riding Mountain. It's the last one in existence and it looks terrific. This was a special way to enter this Park.

Our two nights in Riding Mountain were completely immersive. And by that, I mean that once we got into the Park, we remained in the Park. Our hotel (in the town of Wasagaming) was in the Park. We ate in the Park. And we did everything else for about 36 hours that we could have done in the Park. We entered and we didn't leave. We even had lunch served to us in the bandstand in the main park by the lake in Wasagaming and we ate a catered, three-course meal by the side of a (different) lake in the Park proper.

So about that wildlife...

Our wildlife watching in the Park began with our initial drive from the East Gate to the town of Wasagaming (pronouced WA-sa-GA-ming in Hopwood phonetics) followed by four hours-long evening and morning drives (that's two evening drive and two morning drives) to specific locations within the Park. The sun comes up early in central Manitoba in early August and it goes down late, so drives starting at 6 a.m. and ending at 9 p.m. are still daylight drives.

Our safari vehicle for our two days is shown in the picture above. Small and nimble I guess but photographing wildlife from the vehicle is done by opening the tiny windows at the top of the glazing on each side. Inconvenient? Sure! Until I figured out how to position my body, I got a bunch of shaky photographs. But small windows admit fewer mosquitoes. And I don't think I have seen as many mosquitoes in any one spot in recent memory as I saw in Riding Mountain. Thank God we didn't encounter blackflies, which our guides swore were around in profusion as recently as the prior week (deet repels mosquitos but not blackflies). Suffice it to say there was much mosquito swatting going on in that van or bus or whatever it is really classified as.

So we are about 20 minutes in to our first wildlife drive on the first evening we are in the Park and lo and behold by the side of the road is a black bear eating some berries. Like right by the side of the road and 20 minutes might be actually further into our actual drive than when we found this bear. It might have been 10 minutes. How great is this? And legitmately, like our entire busful of tourists is making a ton of excited noises when we pull over for a better look.

Bus stops, everyone stands up, tiny windows get opened and some shaky picture taking ensues. And it's not just one black bear. It's a mother and cub. How amazing is this? We are on a Canada's Big Five (made up, I realize still) tour and like 10 minutes (yes, I'm officially revising the number...) into our first search for the black bear / moose / bison portion of the Big Five and we see two black bears. Damn! How great is this?

And yes, I realize the pictures above just show one bear. Blame it on the rushed, shaky picture taking.

Of course...they took off. I'm not saying it was all the noise coming from the bus loaded with 18-20 or so wildlife tourists, but it might have been. I mean, it's difficult to really assess how loud you are being outside of the bus when you are inside of the bus, especially when you are super excited and actually one of the sources of the noise. But it might have been the noise coming from the bus.

Still, we are between 10 and 15 minutes into the first of four wildlife drives and we spot two bears. Go us!!!

We didn't see another black bear the entire tour.

One of our guides demonstrating how a bear might have made the claw marks on the Stop sign pole; this does not count as a bear sighting.

Before we get to some things that we DID see in Riding Mountain, what is the deal with Canada and black bears and our vacations? This is the second summer in a row that we've explored some Parks Canada National Parks where bears allegedly live in at least reasonable numbers and we have seen fewer bears combined than we can count on one hand. Last summer...one black bear. This summer...two. And it's not like we spent an hour or two total or something roaming around looking for wildlife. We spent at least (and I'm guessing here) 25 hours each summer looking for bears. At least.

Admittedly, the one look we got last summer was spectacular.

So yes, we saw bison. And yes, that's exciting. It's not every day that we get to see bison. By the same token, we've seen bison in a number of places over the last decade or so, including Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota and North Dakota. We've seen way more bison in most of each of our days bison-watching than we've seen black bears in our lives.

Is it difficult to find bison in Riding Mountain National Park? The answer to that is yes and no. We went looking for bison twice on this trip. We found one and only one on our first drive and way too many to reflect any sort of accurate count the second time. I'd love to report that we got lucky the first time and super lucky the second time but the bison in RMNP are in an enclosure that's fenced and cattle-guarded to prevent the bison from leaving the enclosure.

Granted, it's a big enclosure but these are some large mammals. I'd say we got lucky on the second drive and somewhat unlucky on the first.

But these were also some particularly good looks. Rare are the times I've been super close to a bison. On this trip, there were a number of these animals right alongside the road next to our van. Like less than three feet away. We also saw some nursing going on and let me say that the force with which a baby bison slams his or head into their mother's udder is concerning in its viciousness. These are some powerful strikes to coax a little milk out of mom. I can't imagine that it's comfortable in any way for the mother. Still...when you have kids, sometimes it's not easy, I guess.

The calving was cool. I still feel bad for the moms, though.

We also managed to find a good number of active or abandoned beaver lodges in our time driving around the Park and we actually managed a look at an actual live beaver. My best picture is immediately above. The beaver is the small thing (it's just its head) in the water right above the grass at the bottom of the picture. The shiny ripple on the right side of the photograph is the beaver's wake as it's moving across the pond.

And yes, we also found birds. I mean why wouldn't we find birds? My best five bird pictures from the Park are below and feature the best photographs I've ever taken of a yellow-bellied sapsucker (first pic); some barn swallows (second pic); and a black and white warbler (third pic). The other two (spotted sandpiper and merlin) are new species for me. Cool stuff. But we did go out on drives four times for multiple hours.

I'm not complaining exactly about the birdlife and to be fair, we weren't just birdwatching, but I can find more birds up close in a park near our home in Northern Virginia in a couple of hours than we found in four multiple hours-long wildlife drives in Riding Mountain. Maybe it sounds like that's an actual complaint and maybe it is. I need to hold on to the "best picture ever" of three individual bird species. That admittedly, I didn't need to go all the way to Canada to see.

So lots of bison, two black bears, a beaver and a few (admittedly excellent) looks at birds. What about the moose? 

No moose. We got nothing. Zero. Nada. The squadoosh. Not a one. Unless you count the two at the bottom of this post.

Ultimately and because of the moose and two black bears, Riding Mountain will go down as a bit of a disappointment for me. Do I sound spoiled? I think I do. There are only so many people on this planet that get to go explore other countries (like EVERY year) looking for all sorts of amazing wildlife and I am for sure one of them. And I'm complaining because I only saw two bears and didn't find a moose in a couple of days in a Park? Yeah, I am. Just a bit.

We understand what the expectation is for wildlife sightings on a wildlife tour and that number starts and ends with none. Seeing animals in the wild is at their pleasure, not ours. But in so many ways, this side trip was supposed to be a warm up for the main event in Churchill where we (hopefully, please hopefully) would find polar bears in the wild. But it didn't really warm us up. If anything, it made us more nervous about seeing nothing in and around Churchill.

Overall, this trip was a success for us. We wanted to see polar bears and we saw them. We also got some other unique experiences out of this trip that were supremely valuable and special that will be extolled in blog posts not yet written. Sometimes, emotions get in the way. They did here because Riding Mountain I think was advertised to us as a wildlife experience and I forgot about the wildlife guarantee discussed in the prior paragraph in this post. I need to hold on to the bison calving, the amazing bird pictures and the beaver.

The two almost moose we saw in Riding Mountain are below. So I guess we saw three black bears after all.

Tundra Wildlife

On the first day of August of this year, we headed north into Manitoba, Canada all the way up to Churchill on the Hudson Bay with a stop or two along the way. It was the furthest north we had been on our planet (other than a stop in Iceland's Keflavik Airport) since December of 2013 (which coincidentally was ALSO Iceland but for a real vacation there). Our most important priority for this trip was pretty simple: see some polar bears in the wild in the last stop on the trip in Churchill. 

We succeeded. Four days in Churchill, six polar bears. Mission accomplished. 

We've been on enough nature trips in our lives to know that when it comes to truly wild wildlife, there are no guarantees. But I have to say if we hadn't seen any white bears on this trip, I think we would have considered the whole excursion a failure. That attitude may have been a little unfair to our tour operator of choice and even ourselves and that's because there were other experiences that were worthwhile other than seeing polar bears, including finding other mammals and birds in the Great White North that were thrilling in their own way. 

Those other species are blog-worthy but I still would have declared the trip a failure (again...harsh...I know) if we hadn't found polar bears. So in the spirit of blog-worthiness, I thought it would be worthwhile spotlighting what other wildlife we saw on our Canada 2026 trip. I'm going to do that through three posts and, truth be told, the first two will be mostly a photo dump at some point (and yes, that means the last one will be different). 

I'm going to start those three posts on our last full day of the trip in Churchill.

Three Hudsonian godwits. Churchill Wildlife Management Area.

The last day of our four days in Churchill was spent inside the Churchill Wildlife Management Area, a slice of tundra adjacent to Wapusk National Park, a Parks Canada property. This is the spot to find polar bears in August and it worked. We found five in our six hours that day looking out the windows of a Tundra Buggy, a sort of giant, jacked-up school bus designed to off-road within the Management Area to maximize wildlife viewing. Most of our day while we were driving was spent looking through two giant front windows shown in the cover photo of this post.

And yes, we were driving over tundra. Maybe this is the time to talk about life on tundra.

Here's the thing: nothing much really lives on the tundra, the top layer of soil and vegetation that supports life up north. The tundra (apparently it's a Russian word and it's for sure cold in Russia) sit on top of the permafrost, a strata of the Earth that is perpetually frozen, although these days (and in the future) the reality of permafrost will cease to exist more and more. 

There is vegetation on the tundra, but think small. Moss. Lichens. Grasses. Shrubs. The odd flowers like the purple-pink fireweed. Maybe some single trees or small stands of trees together but again, think small. Like really small. Like low to the ground. Sure there are trees there but if there's a single tree anywhere around, it's a flag tree, a tree subject to maximum wind effect, which usually causes all the branches on a tree to grow on one side in the direction of the prevailing wind. Our tundra buggy driver joked that in Churchill you need a minimum of two trees to make a Christmas tree during the holiday season.

Considering all that, and pretty well knowing that we had a shot at polar bear or two (or five!), our sights for other animals were set low. I mean if there's no vegetation, then there's no life. African safari this was not.

Churchill tundra. Not in the Wildlife Management Area (can't get this close to the ground in there).

Species spotting proved to be hard work on the tundra. There's just not a lot out there, a reflection of just how inhospitable this environment really is. Need to grow to a pretty good size? You really need some pretty good sized food or a whole lot of it and generally speaking there's just not a lot to eat unless you are a polar bear (which eat seals when they are on the frozen ice) and caribou, which eat...get this...caribou lichen. And lichen there is aplenty on the tundra. 

We did manage to find some new birds for our life list, including some godwits, snow geese and golden-plovers, and we got a good look at some red foxes with mother and kits at play and sometimes trying in vain to hunt the nearby golden-plovers and in one case successfully catching a vole. I can see foxes (or find fox poop) in our driveway at certain times of the year so I'm not going to be super excited about any species of fox I can find in Churchill. 

Well, except maybe an arctic fox. We did not see an arctic fox.

Red foxes and American golden-plovers.

But in our six or so hours roaming around the Management Area in our Tundra Buggy, we did find a couple of signature wildlife experiences worth remembering and sharing. And sure enough, and again reflecting the scarcity of mammals out on the tundra, most of our non-polar bear excitement came while finding things with wings. Things with wings can migrate easier than things without wings.

Here's what we found that I will remember.

Willow Ptarmigan

If you had asked me which bird I wanted to see most of all before we set off on our Tundra Buggy journey, it would have been a ptarmigan. We'd seen a singular ptarmigan once before in Denali National Park in Alaska but I wanted more on this trip. These birds are a sort of dirty brown in the summer but turn completely white in winter to camouflage against the snow. We knew we'd be getting the dirty version of the bird at this time of year and that was going to have to be OK.

The flock of ptarmigans below (of which the one above was one) was the first wildlife we saw in the Management Area. 30 minutes in and we saw nothing but a few ptarmigans. No polar bears (yet) so even though I really wanted to see ptarmigans, seeing these birds without a giant white bear nearby was frustrating. Do we stop and look at these or just keep going? We stopped. 

This was, after all, part of what I wanted. To look at some birds that with the right light and imagination in non-winter, look pretty much like chickens.

Here's the astonishing thing about these birds, and I know this is not the first time I've written something like this on this blog...these things in summer are about impossible to see against the tundra floor. Seriously. Take a look at the photograph above. There are six ptarmigans in the picture above but it's not a sure thing. There may be more here and there or it may just be dead vegetation on the ground. On a mostly green floor, it's amazing that there's really much doubt about the number of brown birds there are in the view above.

Would these birds have been cooler in winter, all white on all white? Sure they would. But it was August and this encounter was pretty exciting, particularly because of the quantity all in one spot. I am not likely to come back this far north in the willow ptarmigan's range for a long, long while (although my travel habits sometimes surprise me) so it's likely this spotting will need to last me for a good amount of time.

Caribou

While it appears to be a matter of some online debate, caribou are often credited with the longest annual terrestrial migration. The numbers? About 1,500 miles annually and some herds number over 200,000 individuals. That's a lot of caribou.

Caribou migrations start as early as August and includes a range which covers part of Manitoba. We were in Manitoba in August and caribou live on the tundra. Cool! 

We saw one caribou.

Wrong place, wrong time. I don't really think that there are ever hundreds of thousands of caribou migrating through the Churchill Wildlife Management Area at any time of the year, let alone August. If there was a mammal species that I was hoping to see in the CWMA other than the polar bear, it was the caribou. We did it! One counts, right?

In many ways, caribou for us are the mammal equivalent of the ptarmigan. We'd only seen them once before and, like the ptarmigan, it was in Alaska's Denali National Park. They also blend in remarkably well with an environment which on the surface of things seems totally dissimilar in color from a caribou's coat. Nonetheless, the colors do blend into the tundra colors. 

Not much more to say on this one. There was only one and we saw it for probably less than five minutes. Exciting...but we need to move on.

Sandhill Crane

I don't have a lot of cranes on my bird life list. In fact, after visiting Churchill, I have just two on my list: some type of crowned crane (I'm not totally sure if I saw a grey or black crowned crane before) and the sandhill crane. Truth be told here, there are only 15 species of crane in the entire world.

We've flirted with seeing sandhill cranes in the past while also coming nowhere close to these birds. There is a large gathering (like a million) of these birds annually in Nebraska which we looked into when we sneaked into the northwest corner of Nebraska a few years ago. And there is another large population that winters in New Mexico just south of Albuquerque (I feel we will get here eventually). These birds migrate very south (like Florida and Mexico) in the winter so it's possible to see them in a lot of different places. But until Churchill...no sandhill cranes in person.

Our sandhill cranes in the Wildlife Management Area were at a pretty good distance but we did see a few seconds of their famous dance. This is like the star activity of these birds. And by a few seconds and a pretty good distance, I really do mean that. We managed to see a couple of different groups of cranes but very fleeting. Still, pretty thrilling. Hopefully we'll see many more on a specific sandhill crane trek some other time. Maybe.

Arctic Tern

Who was impressed by that 1,500 mile annual caribou migration? It's OK if you were. It's a long distance. It's OK to be impressed.

But the caribou's got nothing on the Arctic tern. 1,500 miles? Child's play. For some reason, the Arctic tern has decided it has to breed in the north of the globe in the summer and spend the northern hemisphere winter all the way down on the other side of the planet in the Antarctic. How far do some Arctic terns travel in a year? Maybe as much as about 56,000 miles. Take that, caribou!

We've seen terns in the wild before. They are plentiful all over the planet including in the Forster's tern variety as near as the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland about an hour or so away from our house. But we'd never seen Arctic terns before. 

Like a lot of other species of tern out there, I'd wager that most people see terns and think gulls and then are surprised by how well put together terns are on a second look and decide they are not gulls at all. Whether this is true or not for anyone else besides me, I have no idea. But I am not interested in gulls and I am particularly interested in terns. Where gulls are ungainly and brash (not in a good way), terns are smooth and suave and are gorgeous flyers, able to hover on the wind without flapping and suddenly dive for food. Maybe it's just me but I like terns.

I spent a lot of time on our tundra day watching and photographing terns in flight after our lunch in the Tundra Buggy. Most efforts were fairly disappointing but I'm OK with the picture above. These birds really are some of the best to photograph on the wing with a camera like ours. I tried.

We also managed to see a very young Arctic tern in a nest. And by "in a nest", I really mean sort of loosely located in or around a pile of rocks, rarely standing still but with no boundaries to confine him or her, how can you blame it? It seemed to be getting fed. Our guide mentioned that this one was quite late in the season to be this size. It's got some serious flying to do in the very near future. Hopefully it made it.

Bald Eagle (although really short-eared owls)

I can be at a bald eagle nest in about 30 minutes if I leave my house at the right time of the day and week and I can pretty reliably find one or both eagles that live in the nest at most times of the year. If I'm at my parents' house, I can cut the time to a bald eagle nest in about half.

So given that introduction, it might be surprising that a bald eagle viewing would be in this post, right? Although to be honest, the picture above is about as good a picture of a bald eagle as I've ever taken. But it's also not the reason why I'm remembering our bald eagle encounter at the Churchill WMA.

We saw (I believe) one bald eagle in our time in the Management Area. We actually had two encounters with eagles that day but I'm fairly sure it was the same eagle both times. The second time we saw it, I got the photograph above. 

The first time we saw this same eagle, it was perched on a similar lone tree that also looked too light to support the eagle's weight (check out the bend in the tree on all these pics). But it had company. And the company was not friendly.

We see small birds chasing larger birds all the time when we are birdwatching. In the US, these larger birds are usually crows or hawks, although we've also seen blue jays making a ton of noise around owls. That Sunday out on the tundra, it was a pair of short-eared owls chasing this massive bald eagle, likely too close to the owls' nest which would have been somewhere nearby on the ground.

This whole thing lasted maybe a minute but these tiny little owls were aggressive and drove off the eagle in pretty short order. But considering I'd never seen a short-eared owl in my life before and that I'd never really been able to photograph a cool small bird chasing away a cool large bird (meaning NOT sparrows chasing crows or something like that), this brief look at a conflict on the tundra, which was literally the only drama we saw in six hours, is etched into my memory as an important part of our last day.

Once we left the tundra, our remaining time in Churchill was counted in hours. 4 p.m. dinner (not joking) reservation and then straight to the airport. The Wildlife Management Area was the highlight of this trip. For sure. Maybe. Probably. It's debatable. But polar bears and then a mix of other birds and mammals? Pretty hard to beat on this trip.

Snow goose. Another first-time bird species for me. Churchill Wildlife Management Area. 

Blackbird Singing In The Dead Of Night

Photo post time!

Before our late May trip to the United Kingdom, we'd taken just two very short trips in 2026: a long weekend in northern Arizona and a work-from-hotel most-of-a-week in New Orleans. For each of those trips, I pre-blogged an introduction to what I planned to be two incredible, multi-site birdwatching experiences. I was thinking roadrunners, condors and evening grosbeaks in Arizona and painted buntings, roseate spoonbills and pelicans in New Orleans. I even started one of those two posts with a question if every trip from now on needed a birdwatching post.

They didn't happen. Don't get me wrong, we birdwatched on both trips. But for whatever reason (and truth be told one of the reasons was that the main trail in Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge in New Orleans was closed), we didn't have an incredible birding experience in either spot. So no birdwatching post in Arizona and no birdwatching post in New Orleans. Nature doesn't always cooperate.

That had to change in England and Wales. No way was i going birdwatching away from home on three straight trips without having a treasure trove of bird pictures that I could no way, no how get at home. So I adopted a strategy that I thought could not fail: go birdwatching a lot. Like seven birdwatching excursions in a 16 night trip. It worked!!!

Rose-ringed parakeet, near Wormwood Scrubs, London.

Taking time out of a trip to go birdwatching seven times in a single vacation may seem like a lot, but most of these were either early morning walks or nice-to-haves on our agenda. Meaning we would squeeze them in if we could on an already packed day's schedule. Clearly we did some squeezing, although we had to swap out a couple of spots that were more local to our hotel and likely less productive overall. You can't always get what you want, right? 

Having said that, among the days "climbing" mountains, exploring castles, walking sheep and navigating canals in Wales, we did plan one full day dedicated to birdwatching on Skomer Island. This was our intentional birdwatching splurge on this trip requiring a two hour drive each way (including a "required" 30 minute early arrival time) and a boat trip from the mainland to the island itself. 

Let's start our birdwatching narrative with Skomer.

So what's so great about Skomer? Puffins are what's so great about Skomer. Like 52,000 plus puffins. And yes, I know we've been puffin watching in both Maine (not great) and Scotland (awesome!) in 2021 and 2022 but we can't resist a day seeing puffins. There's no way you can take a bad picture of a puffin. It's just not possible. These birds are so tame. They have no fear whatsoever of humans so it's not unusual to have a puffin land inches from where you are standing and head to their burrows. Or even just stand around right next to you. It is a super, super intimate experience. It took us walking like more than half of Skomer island (the perimeter loop on the island is about 6 kilometers) to find the right spots, but once you get there, it's completely worth it.

Skomer, by the way, is a commitment. You get dropped off in the morning and your return boat is five hours later. So don't get bored after about an hour because you are not coming back to the mainland for a while. There's also no food and limited water and bathrooms on the island. Be prepared with Tesco meal deals or whatever else you need to keep yourself going.

Puffins. No bad pictures. It's not possible. I'm telling you. 

Puffin-wise, I'd put Skomer below Lunga Island in Scotland that we visited in 2022. The puffin population on Lunga, while smaller by far, was more concentrated in a single spot which meant you never missed an awesome opportunity. On Skomer, things were a lot more spread out. More puffins total but over a much bigger area. We were also about three or four weeks later on in the year at Lunga when there was far more puffling-feeding going on and meant puffins flying back from the sea with mouthfuls of sea eels. Not so much of that at Skomer. Still, by the few pictures above, clearly we found some good looks at puffins. 

Where there are puffins on an island, there are inevitablly guillemots (what in the United States we call common murre) and razorbills and for sure there were plenty of those on Skomer as there were on Lunga four years ago. But Skomer's much bigger size and geographical diversity separated itself from our time on Lunga in one significant way: more total bird species. We found a treasure trove of other birds on the island, including sedge warblers, northern wheatears, meadow pipits and a white wagtail, along with a pile of various gull species. 

There are also about 350,000 breeding pairs (not a typo) of manx shearwaters on ths island. That's more than half the worldwide population of manx shearwaters on a single island off the coast of Wales. So did we see a ton of these birds? No, we did not. In fact, we didn't a see a single live manx shearwater during our time on the island because they are nocturnal and live underground. The island is riddled with burrows requiring a strict stay-on-the-path rule on the island, lest we end up crushing a manx shearwater burrow so we felt their presence because it governed where we could go. No winging it and walking wherever we wanted on Skomer. And unfortunately, we did see a number of dead shearwaters on the island.

Trips like the one we took to Skomer may seem like a slam dunk in terms of birdwatching but we actually got super lucky here. We were told on the boat that this was the only day that whole week that passage to Skomer was even possible. 

Skomer birds (top to bottom): razorbills, sedge warbler, meadow pipit, northern wheatear and white wagtail.

OK, so that takes care of Skomer. What else stood out? I'd say Teifi Marshes Nature Reserve about 25 minutes south of Aberaeron (a good there-and-back early morning trip before breakfast was over at our hotel) in Wales and Hyde Park smack dab in the middle of London. We had not great (meaning Welsh on-and-off rain) weather at Teifi Marshes but the place is set up for success, with a number of excellently placed bird blinds and a good mix between wetlands and non-wetlands environments. We were also effectively alone, seeing (if I'm remembering correctly), just two other people in our time there. Hyde Park was totally different. We had awesome weather on that London morning but we also had a lot of company in tourists and joggers everywhere. Hyde Park, though, is stocked full of interesting birds.

I will say that a lot of the value we got out of both places (and other spots we visited) was in birds that are foreign to us but possibly very common to people who live in England and Wales. At both places we geeked out over blue tits, a bird I know as not in any way rare from my time growing up in England in the 1970s. But we don't have them in the United States and they are gorgeous little blue and yellow birds which are a treat to see. We spent a lot of time tracking them in Teifi Marshes and went way off the beaten path in Hyde Park when we sleuthed out a nest in a cavity of a tree. 

I have a feeling that if I lived in central Wales, I could go back to Teifi Marshes a lot. I feel we just scratched the surface of that spot. We saw some birds (like coots and mallards) that we can see locally here in the United States but I think spending some time in those blinds might reveal more than what we saw before breakfast on the day we visited. There were also a lot of trails that we left unexplored and we were there for over an hour.

Teifi Marshes birds (top to bottom): moorhen, grey heron and bullfinch.

I used to be amazed at the kinds of birds you can find in the centers of cities but not any more. We went birdwatching a few years ago in New York's Central Park and found a surprising amount of birdlife. London's Hyde Park was a similar experience. I guess birds have to live somewhere and while most cities have trees sprinkled all over street corners and small squares and parks dotted all over the urban landscape, really large city parks have a tendency to attract multiple species of birds, especially when there are water features. 

Hyde Park was maybe a 10 minute walk from our London hotel to the edge of the Park and entering the Park didn't immediately get us a lot of birds. But our experience definitely improved when we got to the water. Our walk from the north side to the main portion of The Serpentine (which is the largest body of water by far in the Park) in the south made us start to question our decision to visit the Park. But as soon as we hit the water, we saw ducks, swans, plenty of coots and some great crested grebes, a gorgeous waterbird that we haven't really seen many of up close before. It's a treat to find these in an urban environment on vacation (we also found some later in the week in Cardiff's also urban Bute Park).

But Hyde Park kept going and kept revealing more and more birds, including rose-ringed parakeets that are not native but are now definitely resident all over London parks these days. We saw a few elsewhere in London on this trip (picture above) and spent some time looking at them in St. James's Park on our trip to England in 2024.

Hyde Park birds (top to bottom): marsh warbler, grey wagtail, great crested grebe and blue tit.

If these three spots were the stars of our trip, there was a great supporting cast. Wormwood Scrubs in London. Cardiff Bay Wetlands Reserve. Bute Park in Cardiff. RSPB Conwy. We visited all with camera, binoculars and the Merlin app in hand. The quality and quantity of bird sightings at each place varied significantly. We definitely visited at least one at the wrong time of the day but if I know anything about visiting any place wild to see wildlife, it's that a place that seems empty on one day can be the best place you have ever been the next. 

If there was a disappointment in our birdwatching in England and Wales, it was the almost complete lack of birds of prey in our birdwatching trips and the lack of kingfishers, particularly considering how much time we spent next to water. On the raptor side of things, we did manage a look at an eastern buzzard while walking our sheep and we saw plenty of red kites in the skies all over Wales but only when we were driving around the various back roads from one place to the next. On the kingfisher sightings (or lack thereof), Merlin heard one at Teifi Marshes and we may have seen a flash of common kingfisher orange and blue in Cardiff. But those common kingfishers were certainly not common for us.

I won't blow-by-blow the complete bird list we came home with from the UK. But bear with me for three small stories that meant something. 

There are species of birds in the United States and elsewhere in the world that share the same name but which look significantly different than they do in the United States. I guess these three quick stories have that issue in common. 

If there's a signature English backyard bird for me, it's the European robin. It's a small sparrow-ish sized bird with an orange-red patch extending from its face to halfway down its breast. Here in the U.S. our American robins are larger with the orange-red color extending over its entire breast but not up to the face. Robins in England are cuter. They just are. But despite my childhood memories of them, they were not super common in the spots we visited.

But we found one in our time at RSPB Conwy that was utterly unconcerned with our presence and decided to hang out on some branches which were about mid-thigh height for me. We got to within less than six feet of this bird and it would not leave where it was sitting which allowed us to get a signature look at the bird I associate most with England (although admittedly, we were in Wales). These five minute or so looks like this that you get every so very rarely are always super intimate experiences. This one was no exception. It was like watching a puffin.

Next bird named similarly on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean? The goldfinch. We have goldfinches in the United States. They are very, very yellow with black on their wings and head. They are without question gold. European goldfinches look like the picture above. We'd never seen one before this trip. We were a bit astonished at the lack of gold.

For our last intentional birdwatching outing of this trip, we visited Cardiff Bay Wetland Reserve. The weather was terrible. It started out OK but it ended up pouring rain for about 20 minutes and we got soaked. The birdwatching was difficult. The wind before the rain clearly was making birds take cover for the coming rains and at one point I told Sophia that I'd be happy just getting a good picture of a goldfinch out of this trip. Nothing else. Just a goldfinch. And Boom! One landed in a tree right in front of us during a break in the weather when it was sort of sunny. Perfect picture pretty much. So fortunate but so much of photographing wildlife is being in the right place at the exact right time. We were.

I still don't get the gold thing. This is an attractive, interesting bird. I love the deep, deep red on the face and I love the flash of gold on the wing. But goldfinch? I don't know. Not what I would have named it. I assume it was named that before people who named all the birds of the world found the American goldfinch.

Birdwatching often comes with a soundtrack. If there was one bird which was sort of the universal background music for all our time in Wales and England (and not just when we were birding) it was the blackbird. Like robins and goldfinches, we also have blackbirds in the United States but ours locally are either red-winged backbirds (tons in the wetlands and swamps) or rusty blackbirds (which are just not that common). They do not live near our house.

If we heard tweeting in the United Kingdom, almost guaranteed (with a bit of an apology to the wrens in London) it was a blackbird. I just heard a bird! Blackbird. What was that song? Blackbird. That birdsong was really loud and clear! Blackbird.

Because they were so common, I didn't really focus on taking pictures of them until the very last day when I thought that I should have something to remember all the serenading they had done for us for the two weeks we were in country. The above picture is the best I got on our very, very last birdwatching excursion in Cardiff's Bute Park. I'm sure I could have done better if I had tried harder earlier in the week. Blackbirds made part of our experience in England and Wales. Including a picture is super appropriate in this post.

That wraps our England and Wales birdwatching story. I'm not sure we are going to get much in the way of blogworthy birding experiences in our last two significant trips of 2026 and the weather in the D.C. area for at least the next month or two is going to make it rough getting out to see birds for the rest of the summer. But rest assured we will keep going. As I finish writing this post I can hear one of the pair of catbirds that have nested in one of our trees in the back yard just furiously cheeping away. I never knew catbirds were such whistlers until we had a pair living right next to our house. Wildlife continues to reveal surprises which is why we will likely continue to chase it until we are no longer able. That day is hopefully a long, long way away.