CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
Turned out the Tawny Owl was bigger than I thought as it was an Eurasian Eagle Owl, beatiful big amber eyes 270 degree rotation. Back again today at the street food shacks in the archway off the Royal Mile across from the Moray House Archway
A beautiful creature. Fed on chunks of pheasant
Forty million pheasants released each year in the Untied Kingdom. That's a lot of chunks.
When my sister was in uni halls in her first year there was an escaped/stray Bengali eagle owl roosting in the trees nearby, which would occasionally buzz students walking across the grass.
not Untied yet as a kingdom but must be on the cards?
Not cycling related, but; dragonflies at 1000m on the Ben Avon summit plateau; several hares; ptarmigan; and a bird with a weird squeaky call that might have been a Golden Plover (I have a very bad photo which isn't much help).
Extra fun on the commute this morning dodging the many slugs and snails on the bike path
A buzzard calling while soaring over the north of Heriot-Watt Campus this morning. I spotted one over the south of the campus on Friday. I've not spotted much buzzard action on campus this year compared to some previous years though.
Buzzard are the harbringer of death in old English and French Mythology. Did you see who's soul it was calling for?
Hopefully not USS Pensions (the dispute is still rumbling on).
Spotted the Raven cull at Strathbraan has been suspended pending a more robust scientific case.
Supposedly to protect waders (lapwing and curlew) but our friends in the Raptor Group suggest merely a front for the keepers of red grouse moors.
A flock of sparrows along the Long Dalmahoy Road this morning - must have been 50 - 60 of them - wonderful
He’s no artist.
His taste in clothes is more
dowdy that gaudy.
And his nest – that blackbird, writing
pretty scrolls on the air with the gold nib of his beak,
would call it a slum.
To stalk solitary on lawns,
to sing solitary in midnight trees,
to glide solitary over gray Atlantics –
not for him: he’s rather
a punch-up in a gutter.
He carries what learning he has
lightly – it is, in fact, based only
on the usefulness whose result
is survival. A proletarian bird.
No scholar.
But when winter soft-shoes in
and these other birds –
ballet dancers, musicians, architects –
die in the snow
And freeze to branches,
watch him happily flying
on the O-levels and A-levels
of the air.
Norman MacCaig
Norman knew his sparras.
I was discussing with a huge Geordie botanist only the other day, various birds, despite his living mostly in America he is saying the snowy owl on north Uist is separate from the one on st kilda which makes sense given the thirty or so miles of ocean between the two. Anyway we both agreed on the pluckiness of the sparrow.
Maybe 500 starling murmuring over Brighton sea front and down in the esplanade gardens the big Brighton rat and the wee Brighton rat.
Classic Brighton up the street with a rather wimpy mother and daughter (their description) and an injured seagull in a box; they were taking it to the vets.
they were taking it to the vets
They should take it to Nick Cook.
A fox trotting along the fence just inside George Heriot's grounds as I was wandering along the fence just outside, in opposing directions. We both stopped to survey one another, although the fox quickly carried on about its business. I carried on about mine once it disappeared into the shadows.
After the wheat had been harvested there seem to loads of birds lounging on the fields. Are they geese? Seems loads of them.
Geese? by Bill Harriman, on Flickr
Loads_of_geese? by Bill Harriman, on Flickr
They sure is geese. Increasing numbers of greylags are breeding in Scotland, some quasi-feral.
@iwarts Thanks! Greylags do look like the ones I saw.
i saw a pristine looking mackerel at the side of Joppa Rd this morning. It wasn't swimming or moving much - probably asleep.
Top that !
Just one mackerel?
Asleep, or perhaps electrocuted? I hear that's a big risk for fish these days.
A second hand sighting, as told by very excited man in the office this morning.
Not 1
Not 2
but 3 kingfishers on the stretch between ex-Earthy and the Warriston Rd bridge.
2 interacting in some way and a 3rd did a fly-by.
@Iain McR nice. I spotted two interacting from the canal towpath last year but there was no additional flyby.
Dolphins below Tantallon Castle yesterday afternoon.
Seal off Seafield beach this morning.
@urchaidh wow!
Ok clichė, but everyone knows I like herons.
Only 3 min cycle from my house!
Saw dead weasel today being eaten by crows. Nice big heron in the sea too. Seagulls terrify the tourists in Brighton, worse than Ayr, even.
Deer in Dalkeith Country Park today.
Last week some emus tried to steal my box of screws.
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