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.
ejstubbs
Golden Eagles in The Borders are having their limited numbers boosted by introducing juveniles from The Highlands. Rick Taylor is the Community Outreach Worker for the South of Scotland Golden Eagle Project. He can be contacted on rick@sup.org.uk if you’d like a presentation for a club or group. Highly recommended.
Cheers
Colin
@IWRATS: That's what I imagined would be the case - and as you say, for very understandable reasons.
@Colin I've never seen a golden eagle in the Borders. I'm not sure where I'd look tbh. Not much to see at Abbotsford a couple of weeks ago. But it's hard to beat M'burgh. This week on the commutes I've seen curlew, log-tailed tits, a dipper, a buzzard, oyster-catchers and many waders I cannot identify.
I was briefly joined by a buzzard yesterday as I rode down from Clovenfords to Caddonfoot - 3 feet off the ground flying just in front of me with an entire pheasant in its talons.
Pheasant, oooft. Though maybe was carrion. They do be grabbers those buzzards.
Saw a hedgehog on the way back from the pub. Lovely to see one that wasn't squashed.
The only word I know in Swedish is igelkott.
A specimen of Mus musculus in the jaws of a Corson snap trap. Not a highlight for the mouse, but a small victory in the rodent wars for me.
Blue tit is going radge against one of the living room windows again. It is going to die if I don't reduce the reflection somehow.
Non cycling related but, wild goats. Big shaggy things. In Kintail.
Almost cycleless NEPN. Why did the squirrel cross the path just as I was approaching? It scared me - surely it must have scared it more.
The local sparrowhawk flew past at head height this morning. Nipped in between two houses, into the back garden and a load of pigeons appeared very shortly afterwards above the houses.
Also a couple of what I think were oystercatchers in Drum Park. Oddly one of the dogs was rather interested in them - they don't normally notice birds, and weren't at all fussed about all the seagulls also in the park.
achtung, frenchy !
ausgang verboten
Geese, curlews, larks, oystercatchers, buzzard, kestrel, jackdaws, sparrows, crows all in west Lothian or south Lanark’s
46 empty American bud bottles twixt dog trust Ned boulting’s parents road on to polkelly turn
2 more at same lines of longitude but a little further south on a70 return
Co-op Carnwath sold the box before xmas. The box still there too. I might go and pick them all up if anyone fancies tagging along
what I think were oystercatchers in Drum Park
Nae ither birdie his sic a muckle orange neb.
9 llamas spotted from WoL path, Elvis and his hareem
@IWRATS - Neen at aa? Guid tae cain. Definitely oystercatchers en.
Mr fimm saw otters in East Lothian.
Watched a male peregrine circling Gullane Point. Waders bolted out to sea, gulls and crows tried to keep above it. Properly menacing birds when they're on the prowl.
Eider ducks seemed unbothered, guess they dive if it has a go at them.
Hah, we were on the beach at Gullane this morning, but went the other way! Or perhaps more accurately, we were blown the other way - although of course we then had to fight against the same wind on the way back. The only birds we saw were gulls, crows and oystercatchers (plus three unidentified LBJs, possibly rock pipits).
Lots of beach exposed as the tide went out. Anyone know what species the large bivalve shells that turn up in the sand below the high tide line are? They're roundish (i.e. not elongated), fairly deep (not flattened like a scallop) and a mite smaller than the palm of your (well, my) hand. The outer surface of the shell is basically smooth, not ribbed like a cockle. Some kind of clam, maybe? There were lots of them about - though not as many as the ubiquitous razor clam shells.
Picked about a sainsbury's bag for life and half's worth of plastic litter, including some fragments of discarded net and plastic bottle/jar top rings, before starting to lose the will to live. (Wrangling a carrier bag full of plastic rubbish in winds gusting 30mph+ without losing any of the stuff you've bent your back to pick up turned out to be harder work than I expected.)
Two little grebe on the lower pond at Penicuik House this morning. I hesitate to refer to them as a "pair" because they weren't obviously remaining in particularly close proximity, unlike the two definitely paired-up tufties. Also two swans, again not staying particularly close but clearly a cob and a pen, and I don't think swans do tend to be that cosy with each other even when a pair.
Also up to five buzzards at one time soaring above. We nearly collected another buzzard as a hood ornament on the way home as it threw itself across the back road up to the A702 without doing its green cross code:
Quite a few redwing still fossicking around in the field in front of the big house. I would have expected them to be off back to the continent by now but maybe they're worried they won't be let back in...
Plus all the usual robins, tits, song thrushes, blackbirds etc etc, and a dipper just downstream from the Roman Bridge.
I keep meaning to say that when I was out on the John Muir way at the weekend, something fell out of the air and smashed onto the road beside me, where it split open and spread across the road. It seemed to be vegetable rather than animal (so large conker, rather than an egg, for example, although the contents were orange, so it might have been an egg).
Anyway, it was clear that the culprit was a large corvid flying overhead, who appeared to have dropped it on purpose.
@Greenroofer
Crows have learned to drop walnuts on tarmac for cars to break open. Also shellfish on rocks.
Crows are amazing. See this new blog post for instance:
https://corvidresearch.blog/2020/03/17/what-are-crows-thinking-when-they-see-death
In fact, look at more of her stuff, or follow her on Twitter @corvidresearch or check out her Ologies podcast episode
House sparrow perched on the rhone with a white down feather in its beak. So they're nest building somewhere, just not in my sparrow tenement!
@ejstubbs
There's a colonial nest under the roof of a house down the road. I don't think the house owners know that. It must be, errrrr....considerable by now. Been years.
Pair of bullfinches have realised they can fit through the squirrel bars on the seed feeder & hung about for ages this morning.
A wren in the windowbox, hopping around a metre from my seat.
Small tortoiseshell flitting about on the sunny side of the back garden just now :)
The recently arrived frogs in our garden pond are definitely not practising social distancing!
@IWRATS: I suspect someone local to me has something similar. I often notice an unholy racket coming from the garden hedges adjacent to us - house sparrows do make quite a row when they get together!
Long-tailed tit on the washing line with a big downy feather in its gob. Hope they set up home in eyeshot of my perch.
A massive bee (possibly out of hibernation?) and tons of wee flies. In my garden
Took the mother on a social distanced walk towards Black Springs. Glorious low afternoon sun, curlews on the fields, bullfinches in the pines & some robins singing their guts out.
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