Caroline Quinn
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luoqing.bsky.social
Caroline Quinn
@luoqing.bsky.social
🇬🇧, previously living in 🇺🇸🇸🇱 and 🇨🇳. Almost certainly using this for 99% bird and bug-related content with a light dusting of foreign policy and feminism. She/her.
The general sense of everything going to hell in a hand-basket isn’t the best thing to layer on top of my usual January blues but this weekend I got to watch a beautiful Barn Owl emerge from its nest box and start hunting at dusk, floating silently over the fields like a ghost. #birds
January 26, 2025 at 10:56 PM
Eurasian Wrens are just such wonderfully round bois, proper little tennis ball-shaped dudes. #birds
December 28, 2024 at 10:21 PM
Happy Christmas to those who celebrate from me and this gorgeous leucistic Common Pheasant I came across at the allotments on my walk first thing this morning. ☺️ #birds
December 25, 2024 at 1:47 PM
Obviously this Magpie and its pals were actually doing their level best to annoy the hell out of this Common Buzzard this afternoon, but I like how this photo accidentally looks like they're teaming up to take on crime on the mean streets of Gotham. #birds
December 22, 2024 at 9:10 PM
If the Mao was the hardest endemic to find on my trips to Samoa this year, the Samoan Myzomela was the easiest - this gorgeous little honeyeater is Samoa's smallest bird and there always seemed to be one zipping around wherever there were plants in bloom ❤️🖤 #birds
December 18, 2024 at 9:57 PM
Day 5 at home with norovirus 😩 - cheering myself up with the memory of a very special encounter with a Mao while hiking in the forest on my day off during a work trip to Samoa in October. This chunky endemic honeyeater is endangered with a total estimated population of no more than 500 #birds
December 18, 2024 at 9:40 PM
Dark morph Pacific Reef Heron (matu'u in Samoan) hunting for its breakfast, blending in with Samoa's volcanic sand and lava rocks (the white morph Reef Heron is apparently very rarely seen in Samoa). #birds @everyheron.bsky.social
December 17, 2024 at 6:57 PM
Day 4 stuck in the house post-norovirus 😩 so cheering myself up by thinking about all the excellent #birds I was privileged to meet in Aotearoa New Zealand last month, including the moment I crossed paths with this splendidly chonky Takahē on Tiritiri Matangi Island.
December 17, 2024 at 6:26 PM
Stumbled on this handsome chap taking his afternoon nap in a south London park this afternoon. He gave me a good Paddington Bear hard stare for a minute but decided I wasn't a threat and went back to snoozing in the spring sunshine. Always lovely to see an urban fox looking healthy and content. 😍
April 14, 2024 at 9:21 PM
Spring was in the air at Walthamstow Wetlands in London yesterday, even if it did start hailing right after I saw these Great Crested Grebes canoodling. 🪶
February 25, 2024 at 10:01 AM
The Common Kingfisher has to be one of the UK's most beautiful birds: it looks like it belongs in the tropics rather than fishing along a stream in a wee London park next to a children's playground, but that's where I found this handsome chap this morning in Colliers Wood. 🪶
February 4, 2024 at 10:50 PM
What is the absolute cutest British bird and why is it Long-tailed Tit (aka flying teaspoons, mumruffin, poke puddings and, most delightfully, bumbarrels)? 🪶
January 11, 2024 at 8:19 AM
So exciting to see a Grey Seal swimming up the Thames this afternoon as I biked home from the London Wetland Centre! The tidal Thames is home to around 3000 of these gorgeous animals and they occasionally fish surprisingly far upstream - such a great sign of the river's ecological recovery. 🦭
January 7, 2024 at 5:18 PM
Dead chuffed the Bohemian Waxwings stuck around in Balham until I got back to London! It's turning out to be a great "waxwing winter" in the UK - so happy to have had the chance to see these gorgeous Scandinavian irruptive visitors feasting on berries just a 15 minute bike ride from home. 🪶
December 30, 2023 at 6:22 PM
Happy Christmas if you celebrate it, Bluesky - I'm feeling very pleased with my Christmas book haul 💅
December 25, 2023 at 5:00 PM
Eurasian Jay not happy that I caught it in the middle of stashing its acorns this morning 👀. A single jay can cache an estimated 3000 acorns in a month. 🪶
December 22, 2023 at 9:27 PM
Feral Mandarin Duck male eyeing up the lady Mandarin Ducks in Battersea Park this afternoon. 🔥💅🪶

#UrbanBirding #BirdNerd #LondonBirds
December 10, 2023 at 11:39 PM
🎵I like big bills and I cannot lie / You other birders can't deny / When a bird walks in with an itty-bitty crest and a big sharp beaky face... 🎶 🪶

#UrbanBirding #BirdNerd #GreyHeron
December 4, 2023 at 10:05 PM
It was unrelentingly grey, rainy and bitterly cold here all weekend but I was glad to have ventured out to Beddington Farmlands in south London when this handsome little Eurasian Kestrel landed in a tree about ten metres from me and decided to hang out. 🪶

#UrbanBirding #Birds #BritishBirds
December 4, 2023 at 7:57 AM
Ivy flowers may not look like much but they're vital late autumn food sources for pollinators like this hoverfly (Helophilus pendulus, aka the Footballer, the Sunfly or the Tiger Hoverfly). Watching bees, wasps, flies and butterflies coming and going on sunlit ivy earlier this week was mesmerising!
October 19, 2023 at 5:21 PM
Apple photo search ☺️: all fish are sharks.

Me: nooo, not quite...

Apple photo search 😤: ALL FISH ARE SHARKS!
October 17, 2023 at 7:50 AM
I'm kinda impressed Apple photo search was able to pull up so many of my diving photos that actually had sharks in them (although it also thinks mantas are sharks apparently). Lovely nurse shark checking me out to see if I was going to spear any lionfish during a dive in Belize in 2021 🦈
October 17, 2023 at 7:44 AM
This Stilt Sandpiper, seen foraging in an ephemeral pond at Kenilworth Park in Washington DC last week, would like to let you know that the theme of this year's World Migratory Bird Day is "Water: Sustaining Bird Life". These lovely birds breed in the subarctic tundra and winter in South America. 🪶
October 14, 2023 at 8:02 PM
Crystal Brain Fungus, I think? Saw these little pinkish beauties on a fallen log this morning in a scrap of woodland beside a busy A-road. There's beauty everywhere if you keep your eyes peeled. 🍄
October 14, 2023 at 6:10 PM
October 9, 2023 at 1:10 PM