Author Archives: Gordon Yates

After last weeks Wader disaster it is good to highlight one species that is going from strength to strength. The Nuthatches of this weeks blog were filmed in my local woodland and now their young are calling from all over the wood. Another pair are taking food from our garden and feeding young in a neighbours nearby. Apart from global warming no one is quite sure why Nuthatches are spreading north so fast with one possible sighting on Islay last week. Long may it continue! click here

While we were all confined to our gardens enjoying almost unbroken sunshine our moorlands were drying out and providing little food for the young waders emerging from their eggs. Curlew numbers are already down 50% in the last ten years so this years weather will have added to their decline. Dunlin are the Pennines latest breeding wader and the only one that will benefit from the present rains. See some of the Waders encountered last week click here

Each year at this time we would normally be on Islay filming Hen Harriers.It is no consolation that we are at home in exceptional weather! However, the only bonus is that we are now able to watch and film the local garden birds as they fledge their young, something that we normally miss. So this weeks blog and Gallery includes Blue Tits and Starlings filmed recently.Click here

For no obvious reason the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker and Willow Tit are the two most threatened woodland bird species in Britain. In the last fifty years I have only photographed breeding Willow Tits once – 20 years ago! It was a delight therefore, last weekend, to return to within a couple of hundred yards of that first nest and obtain my first still photos of what has always been a very illusive species. Both birds were very tame and as an extra bonus a male from a second nest appeared and enabled some extra photos to be taken. See Gallery of both males and nest-site. Click here

The blog of the 4th April featured Long Tailed Tits using Woodcock feathers for their nests. More recently have had Wrens in the garden gathering moss to start a nest. The male builds several nests and the female choses one which she then lines with feathers before laying her clutch of eggs. So the bird in this week’s gallery in photos is the female but to our eyes they look alike !!! click here

Todays blog and photos have been taken in the garden during the last seven weeks. The irony has been the unprecedented sunny weather and as a result the  wildlife part of the  garden at the back was in deep shade – all day! We have never had seven weeks like it at this time of year!
There have been plenty of birds in the garden with twenty four different species seen on one day. One of the photos is of a male Reed Bunting which has adapted to feeding on the fat-ball feeders, something we have never seen before. click here