H OOPOES, black redstarts, spotted redshank, great white egret, cattle egrets, waxwing and glossy ibis are about.

The waxwing was seen at Bradiford along Halls Mill Lane and the black redstart at the Leaderflush Shapland yard area. The glossy ibis was in the marshy fields near Velator at Braunton and the egret species at Isley Marsh on the Taw, south side. A great white egret, maybe the same one from Isley Marsh was also observed with little egrets on the saltings between the Longbridge and the new downstream bridge at Barnstaple.

Exciting stuff for those interested in wildlife with North Devon as ever a good area for bird watching, and testing those binoculars and telescopes. Migrants and vagrants of the avian kind make for an interesting winter and one never knows what may be about on rivers, streams and marshes. Often it has a luck element. Being there at the right time is part of the excitement. Sometimes ten minutes either way and you can miss the sighting of a lifetime. That's the challenge of Nature Watching, you just never know.

My first glossy ibis was at Braunton Marshes. Travelling home after a day of quiet pleasure I looked out of the car window and there was the virtually black silhouette of the bird, unmistakable and if I'd glanced the other way for a few seconds I'd have missed it.

Basically a vagrant in ornithological terms is a migratory bird who has a defective sense of direction or has been blown far off its normal course, arriving in an area where it is rarely seen. This is, of course, also applicable to winged insects. Migration is the regular movements of animals twixt breeding places and wintering quarters and occurs annually or cyclically throughout the animal's life such as with swallows or cuckoos, for example, moving between the British breeding sites and the wintering quarters in Africa. Salmon and sea trout migrate between fresh water and the sea whilst eels perform such a journey just the once, from the Sargasso Sea, to mature in our rivers and lakes and returning to the ocean to spawn, usually, and then die.

This year's painted lady butterfly "invasion" had these beautiful insects arriving in vast numbers from the Mediterranean and it appeared many attempted to return in the autumn but it is unlikely many, if any, made it. The one off dispersal movements of some insects such as aphids is not considered to be migration.

Other migrant butterflies include the well known red admiral, many of which hibernate here, often in sheds and other buildings, particularly churches, I find. When I did a series based on the wildlife of church carvings it happened to be early spring and in almost all the churches we visited there were red admirals awaking from hibernation as the suns warming rays had them becoming active once again. Very beautiful.

● Trevor Beer will answer your nature and countryside queries. Drop him a line at 38 Park Avenue, Barnstaple, EX31 2ES. He prefers snail mail.