Shetland

Have been birding Unst for the last few days in very difficult conditions as we are continually buffeted by gale force westerlies and rain! Not much to show for our efforts so far other than the expected finds of YBWs and Common Rosefinches.

Still, we shall continue our birding efforts and hope the wind abates. No sign of any easterlies, but we shall remain focused! We twitched a cracking OBP this evening that has given more hope that there are more birds to be found.

View from the office on Wednesday

Working in Scotland during the winter can have its good days!

Spring is here!

Working in Scotland again. Vantage Point Counts in the snow! 6 hours, a few red grouse, golden plover and snow buntings. That's your lot.

Belated news for Tuesday 8th March

Never mind Rachel, not long until you can eat these again!

Challenging Identification features?

Above: Tricky identification of boots. Easily confused with much better quality boots.

QUESTION: what is the simplest identification? Confidently identifying an Oriental Turtle Dove or identifying your own footwear?

ANSWER: clearly it should be the latter, but it seems that some people have problems with the most elementary of tasks, as highlighted by my trip to Chipping Norton today.

Two words, COMPLETE MUPPET!!!

Returned to Chipping Norton today and successfully twitched the ORIENTAL TURTLE DOVE thanks to the great hospitality of a local resident allowing access to his house. Here the bird showed very well feeding in the garden. Understandably, the house owner requested that all visitors leave their footwear outside the house.

Having watched the bird for an hour, I left the house to find that some complete muppet had walked off in my "brown" gore-tex walking boots and kindly left me their crappy "grey" walking boots (a size smaller) in return. How considerate, thank you so much!

I left messages on the bird information services for birders to make contact with me, but needless to say, I am still waiting.

The real Lynx Effect!

A truly memorable day with 4 different sightings of at least 3 different individual IBERIAN LYNX and some cracking and prolonged views! A single individual at dawn and then a wait until a brief view of a female at around 3pm. Then from around 3.30 to 5pm the show really started! We had two excellent encounters with different males giving excellent scope views right in front of the viewpoint. All sorts of interesting behaviour with stalking, scent marking, scratching and sleeping!

Some record shots and video to come!

Mammal watching is hard work!

More tomorrow, as exhausted from scanning! Two more IBERIAN LYNX sightings this evening!

10,000 rocks, 8 legs and 2 beards

Well, the PFT (Pre Feline Tension) has eased today with our first full day of IBERIAN LYNX searching over. Two animals (a big male and youngster) seen sat on a rock at about 700m distance this gave good scope views in good light this evening. Poor video footage obtained in very windy conditions. Helen exhausted herself with scanning and needs sleep!

Birds performed well today with fantastic roller coasting displays by GOLDEN EAGLES and plenty of SPANISH IMPERIAL EAGLES too.

Hopefully there is more LYNX action to come!

Chipping (Dipping) Norton

Well, it has been a while since my last blog post and so thought I'd return with a good old fashioned DIP! Yep, that's right I found myself participating in some dirty twitching antics yesterday and was drawn to the town of Chipping Norton with a few hundred other waifs and strays, in the vain hope of seeing an ORIENTAL TURTLE DOVE. It was far from my favoured type of twitch, as we all loitered around a residential street hoping the bird would return to its favourite seeded garden patch. Needless to say, it did not re-appear after its early morning feed; despite the house owner's great hospitality as he allowed people into his house as more people queued outside his front door, hoping it might just return. The usual suspects were there, including "George Michael" and "Twitch Manager"  one guy even had a step-ladder to peer into gardens - oh dear!

On the positive, I caught up with old twitching friends Hamish and Wids and chatted about "the old days".

Never mind, I am sure we shall back again!

Now suffering with PFT, but that's another blog post! Toodle pip.