Wildlife photography enthusiasts and birders who use premium technology will no doubt be delighted to hear that leading manufacturer, Leica, have now opened their brand new Café Optik and Leica Client Care which the brand say offers a unique, personal service as part of the Leica Store Mayfair experience.

The extended retail premises encompasses three buildings in Bruton Place, Mayfair, providing Leica customers with a range of premium services, including Café Optik, a complimentary café-style area for Leica owners, and the company’s exclusive new professional photographic studio, Studio-S.

Located just off Berkeley Square in Mayfair, Leica’s Client Care team will offer expert advice tailored to your specific needs, as well as light repairs for camera and optics customers, and sensor-cleaning for Leica M- and S-System owners. Alongside this facility is Café Optik, providing a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, where you will be welcomed when visiting any part of the Leica complex.

With convenient and efficient access for professional photographers, a new rental service is also available on the ground floor: Rental-S. This service incorporates rental of Leica’s high performance S-System, as well as hire of Studio-S.

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Conservationists have embarked on an urgent mission to save one of the UK’s most threatened birds from extinction.

Operation Turtle Dove, launched by the RSPB and leading sustainable farming specialists Conservation Grade and Pensthorpe Conservation Trust in Norfolk, is a three-year project to reverse the decline of one of England’s best-loved farmland birds. 

From The Bible to the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the turtle dove is well known in literature and folklore as a symbol of love and devotion.  But numbers have fallen dramatically in recent years and there now just nine birds for every 100 there were in the 1970s.  Once widespread across much of England and Wales, the species has been lost from many areas. It has remaining strongholds in East Anglia and south-east England. 

The cause of the population crash is not fully understood. However the birds’ diet consists almost entirely of small seeds from wild plants which grow in crops and changes in farming practices mean these plants are now scarce in our countryside.

The project’s partners will work with farmers in turtle dove hotspots to establish plots of seed-rich plants on their land. Scientists from the RSPB will work alongside Conservation Grade’s sustainable farming experts and Pensthorpe’s aviculturalists to measure the impact on the birds’ diet and breeding success. 

Simon Tonkin, RSPB farmland bird advisor, said: “Turtle doves are really struggling. After many years of decline we are facing the very real possibility of losing this beautiful bird from the UK.

“This new project will build on a lot of positive work which has already been done by farmers and conservationists. As well as putting in place measures which will bring back some of wild plants which farmland birds like the turtle dove rely on, we need a better understanding of the causes of this devastating decline.”

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RSPB Scotland is to increase its efforts to help breeding waders and wildfowl following an extension to its nature reserve at Crook of Baldoon in Wigtownshire.

The charity has successfully acquired a further 39ha of grassland next to the existing reserve, taking the total reserve size to 191 ha, of which around half will be managed for species such as lapwing, snipe and redshank.

The new land will enable RSPB Scotland to develop wetlands on both sides of the main car park and the reserve entrance point, creating suitable habitat for nesting birds and providing an opportunity for visitors to enjoy local wildlife.

Every year, internationally important numbers of wintering whooper swans, pink-footed geese, as well as a variety of wading birds can all be seen at the site, with whimbrels and black-tailed godwits using it as they pass through on migration, too.

Other species recorded on the reserve have included more than 1,000 barnacle geese flying in from Svalbard who winter on the Solway Estuary. Hen harriers and owls are regularly seen in winter, and Wigtown Bay is also home to breeding ospreys, of which live CCTV pictures can be seen in Wigtown Town Hall, and peregrine falcons.

Andrew Bielinski, RSPB Scotland Area Reserves Manager  for Dumfries & Galloway, said: “Since purchasing the Crook of Baldoon in Spring 2010 we have worked hard with the help of the local community to make this a site rich in wildlife. By extending the reserve we can increase our conservation efforts to assist vulnerable species such as lapwing and redshank.

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How often, when out birding, have you ever wished you could capture that "perfect moment" forever? Well, digiscoping could be the answer to your prayers. Digiscoping is the art of attaching a digital camera to a spotting scope to create powerful telephoto pictures.

Perfect for wildlife photography, especially bird watching, digiscoping lets you use the powerful zoom of your spotting scope, coupled with the ease of use and convenience of your digital camera - enabling you to get right in to your chosen subject and capture amazing images of wildlife, without having to get to close to risk disturbing the wildlife.

However, most will say, that the real beauty of digiscoping, is enabling you to shoot DSLR-quality imagery, at a fraction of the cost using a DSLR camera with a large telephoto lens would.

Here's 10 top Digiscoping tips to get you started...

As reported by Nate Swick via his popular DC Birding blog - Birders, environmentalists and conservation groups have been concerned about the precipitous population decline in that gorgeous and quintessential Mid-Atlantic shorebird, Red Knot, for several years now.  

The rufa subspecies, which gathers in large numbers at staging areas on Delaware Bay, Delaware, to gorge on Horseshoe Crab eggs while shuttling between tundra nesting grounds and a winter range in southern South America, has plummeted from a high count of 95,000 in the 80s and 90s to fewer than 10,000 earlier this year.  Cause of the decline has been attributed primarily to commercial overharvesting of Horseshoe Crabs for fish bait, but there is concern that climate change may affect the precise time required for the bird's migration to sync up with the glut of laying crabs every spring. 

Conservationists have pushed for the Red Knot to be protected under the Endangered Species Act for some time, and the ruddy shorebird has sat in limbo as a "candidate species" for several years, but it looks like they may finally get federal protection as the US Fish and Widlife Service has stepped up and in some cases expidited, reviews of some species including, at long last, the Red Knot.

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Birders in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly have reported one of the finest years for rare bird migrations since the 1960s.

A combination of warm weather, hurricanes and wind direction caused changes to migrating patterns this year, with the Scillies' unique geographical position benefiting hugely as rare birds took advantage of a "crossroads for migration".

RSPB conservation officer Paul St Pierre said a combination of hurricanes and warm weather had brought some birds from the United States and added that high-pressure systems had caused the direction of the wind to bring in rare bird species such as the desert wheatear from central Asia and dusky warblers from south-east Asia. Asked why some birds ended up far away from usual migration spots, Mr St Pierre said: "In the autumn, we often get something called 'drift migrations'.

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Here's a question for you. Why would a smart and adaptable bird, that eats almost anything and can survive happily in even the most heavily degraded habitats, have a world range so small - it would fit comfortably inside Norfolk? 

That very question has baffled and confused scientists ever since the Ethiopian Bush-crow’s peculiarly restricted distribution was discovered way back in the 1930s.

But now, after researching the exact location of the birds and their nests in southern Ethiopia, a team of problem-solving, Sherlock Holmes-style scientists have unravelled the mystery. And the answer is elementary my dear readers. 

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RSPB Scotland have welcomed the news that a project to promote the natural heritage of Orkney has been awarded more than £300,000 of European money.

The Enjoy Wild Orkney Project will put in place measures to promote the islands as a wildlife tourism destination to the British and global marketplace, helping to benefit the local economy, generate income for local businesses and improve the tourism experience on the islands.

A grant from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) will allow locals and visitors to Orkney to take part in field teaching sessions with specialist educational staff, enjoy an annual nature festival, visit wildlife viewing hides and look at updated interpretation. 

Visitors will also benefit from new CCTV facilities that will bring local species closer than ever. 

Other features include podcasts and downloadable apps for smartphones and tablets which will interpret the local wildlife while people are on the move about the islands. All of the activities will be delivered in conjunction with local communities and existing tourism and visitor organisations.

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An unusually high number of reed buntings gathering at a nature reserve in Cambridgeshire is the direct result of conservation efforts by local farmers, experts believe.

Volunteer counters at the RSPB's reserve at Fowlmere have been reporting growing numbers of the birds and believe there are now more than 500 coming into roost each day. 

In the area around the reserve, farmers have been planting plots of seed-rich plants in an effort to boost local bird populations, and conservations say the exceptional roost at Fowlmere proves they are making a difference. Reed buntings rely on farmland but their numbers have fallen by a quarter since 1970. Richard Winspear, RSPB farmland advisor, said: 'We were really excited when we heard about this reed bunting roost - I have never seen so many in one place before. 

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Leica Camera AG has announced the all-new Leica V-Lux 3, a versatile all-round compact camera with a 24x optical zoom lens, ideally designed for creative photographers who enjoy shooting wildlife, landscapes, portraits or architecture, as well as sports and other fast-moving subjects.

Perfect for travel photography where flexibility is vital, the V-Lux 3 features a Leica DC Vario-Elmarit 4.5 - 108mm f/2.8 - 5.2 ASPH. super-telephoto zoom lens with an enormous range of focal lengths equivalent to 25–600mm in 35mm format, making it ideal for almost all photographic situations. 

A newly-developed 12.1 megapixel CMOS sensor ensures exceptional image quality, performing particularly well in low light and at high speeds. The high contrast, low noise, and rich and natural colours delivered by this sensor set new standards in a camera of this class for both still images and movies.

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Almost one year since thousands of endangered penguins’ lives were threatened by an oil spill on Nightingale Island - part of Tristan da Cunha, a UK Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic - a survey to assess the birds’ population has now taken place.
 
When the bulk carrier, MS Oliva, ran aground on 16 March last year, a huge effort to rescue the penguins was launched. The ship was travelling from Brazil to Singapore with a cargo of 65,000 tonnes of soya beans and 1,500 tonnes of bunker fuel when it ran aground. As the ship broke up in the rough seas, the soya and oil were discharged into the waters around Nightingale. In the days that followed, the oil reached Inaccessible Island, a World Heritage Site, and Tristan more than 30km away. 

With the group of islands being home to over 65% of the global population of endangered northern rockhopper penguins, residents of Tristan da Cunha, known as Tristanians and the Tristan Conservation Department, followed by staff from the RSPB and Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB), came together and moved quickly to collect and clean up the oiled birds and prevent many more from coming into contact with the oil.

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The RSPB have now confirmed that the hen harrier is the species most likely to become extinct again in England - mainly, because of human pressure.

A 2011 joint survey of the English uplands by the RSPB and Natural England found that only four nesting pairs of hen harrier successfully raised young; all on a single estate in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire.

This is believed to be the lowest population in England since they recolonised in the 1960s following extinction in the late Nineteenth Century. Historically, the hen harrier was widespread in England.

A government-backed report – the Hen Harrier Conservation Framework – published in February 2011 by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, proved that illegal persecution on driven-grouse moors is the main factor restricting the growth of the hen harrier population in the UK. The framework reported that England’s uplands could support at least 320 pairs of this bird of prey.

Hen harriers disappearing from England for a second time will see the government break its recent commitment in the revised England Biodiversity Strategy to avoid any human-induced extinctions before 2020.

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Welcome to our simple weather channel.

Because it is always useful to keep one eye on the great British weather and wind conditions as a birder, we thought you might find this simple 5-day forecast useful, made by the good people at the Met Office.

Take me to my twitch forecast...

Having made it as far north as London, it seems the Jersey Tiger moth is now heading east after sightings at the RSPB’s Northward Hill nature reserve.

The colourful moth was restricted to the Channel Isles but in recent years has turned up along the South Coast. And now, it looks like the moth is spreading its wings further afield, with what appears to be a thriving population in London, and now this sighting in North Kent.

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