The King
There is little doubt that the king of all Birds of Prey is the Golden Eagle. From a birdwatchers point of view no trip to Scotland is complete without a sighting of “the king”. In the highlands the diet of the Golden Eagle comprises of mainly Heres and Rabbits but in the Hebrides the Eagles […]
Nuthatches Nesting in a Nestbox
Most people when they buy a house place a nest-box in the garden. Within a year or so Blue Tits will have found it or perhaps even Great Tits or Coal Tits. It would always be a dream to have a pair of Nuthatches take up residence in your nest-box. This weeks blog is all […]
Dancing Adders
As a keen schoolboy naturalist living in Bury I once came across a sign on my local moors which read”Beware of Adders”.It fired my imagination to find that Britain’s only venomous snake could be found locally. I searched and searched over the years but failed to find any and it was decades later in Scotland […]
Dipper Success
This years dry Spring has been a big bonus for Pennine dippers with most now having fledged their first brood of young. This weeks photos are from one of those first broods and both adult birds were feather perfect. Spate flooding is always a problem for Dippers and it remains to be seen whether their […]
Wood Warbler Mystery
Wood Warblers are summer visitors to Britain and in the last twenty years their numbers have declined by up to 90%. In fact forty years ago I could have found them breeding within one mile of my home in Rochdale. Sadly not any more, only a handful return to the Pennines each year. The male […]
Drumming Snipe
One of the attractions of Islay in Spring are the vast numbers of wading birds that breed at places like Gruinart. My favourite is the Snipe and the male carries out a display flight called drumming. In the evening he takes wing high in the sky then descends at more than 50kilometers per hour. As […]
An Islay Spring
A visit to Islay in Springtime is a wonderful experience. The island is a mass of yellow from the gorse and the woods are deep blue from the bluebells.Add to all this ninety hours of sunshine in six days and I cannot think of anywhere better to visit at this time of year. Last week […]
Buntings and Redpolls
During the last two months there has been an increasing number of Reed Buntings and Redpolls coming to feed in the garden. A minimum of five male and two female Reed Buntings have been feeding together but the number of individual birds could well be into double figures. Redpolls have peaked at seven and have […]
Garden Buzzards!
Who would have thought that after nearly fifty years of filming birds that your best flight shots of buzzards would have been taken stood at the back door of your house. A couple of weeks ago I was returning from a session filming Waxwings when, as I entered the house with my camera gear, two […]
Copulation
For the female kingfisher copulation can be a dangerous event. The bill of the male is extremely pointed and could cause damage to both her feathers and her eyes. To protect her eyes a membrane closes over the eyes during copulation(as in this weeks blog photo). Whilst this works perfectly for her from the camera’s […]