fimm, many thanks - that's a great article.
We visited the Tomb of the Eagles on Orkney a few years ago and someone had thoughtfully labelled most of the (abundant) wild flowers along the access path.
Cheers
Colin
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Leisure
Wildlife highlight of the day
(7221 posts)-
Posted 4 years ago #
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Jay and hare today (good name for a pub).
Any tips for places to hear cuckoos would be appreciated. My OH (and I) was very disappointed to find the road closed to our usual spotting place. Preferably accessible by road (open), and in Mid or East Lothian.
Posted 4 years ago # -
@amir
You can call cuckoos to you if you can do the two-handed hooting thing. The males are not shy of a fight.
Posted 4 years ago # -
@iwrats I normally just take a clock
Posted 4 years ago # -
@amir pretty much anywhere when I attempt to camp :(
Posted 4 years ago # -
@jdanielp cuckoos are bad news when camping, but not as bad as oystercatchers
Posted 4 years ago # -
My brother, who lives in Lewis, had a corncrake in his garden once and was driven demented by the racket it made in the early mornings.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Oystercatchers are mental and in abundance
Corncrakes wiped out except utter Hebrides where you get a tourist grant for using a scythe
Posted 4 years ago # -
@amir: I remember being woken by a cuckoo at 4am once on Skye. The bloomin' thing seemed to be perched directly above my tent! Strangest of all, I was camped in the back garden of a cottage that some friends had rented (no room indoors) and no-one inside the house heard a thing!!
Posted 4 years ago # -
corncrakes are a sonic menace
there's no excuse for their godawful dawn din
Posted 4 years ago # -
Not sure whether this a highlight or destined to be a lowlight. Probably depends on your point of view but anyway...
Pair of blackbirds busily hunting for invertebrates in our back lawn, and disappearing in to the leylandii hedge with beakfuls of same. I found a bit of blue eggshell in the border under the hedge yesterday when I was waging war on the snowberry scourge.
However, it seems that a local magpie has spotted their comings and goings and is keeping a beady eye on them trying to work out where the nest is. Papa Turdus merula is very alert to this and has a piercing and persistent alarm call that hopefully will keep the young 'uns hunkered down and keeping schtum. Time will tell...
Interestingly, my heavings and swearings in the adjacent border didn't seem to worry the parents much at all. I certainly didn't get shouted at (except by blue tits - but then they seem to take exception to my presence as soon as I step out the back door!)
Posted 4 years ago # -
I saw crow mobbing magpie yestersday
Today though I saw a squirrel miracle. It jumped into middle space to avoid car heading east in an astonishing pirouette. Alas this brought it into the path of the car that had just overtaken me heading west. It enacted the same pirouette back into the space it had come from and by that time the east bound car had gone. It bounced, by which time the west bound car had gone and it scurried into the verge on the south side of the road. Seemingly unharmed. Ya Dancer.
Posted 4 years ago # -
@gembo I heard a corncrake in Papa Westray once. The only time I have ever heard one. I emailed the RSPB.
Jackie the Jackdaw with the broken wing turned up today and half jumped half flew about the garden, perching here and there. I tossed him some food, which he ate. He can get up on to low roofs of sheds and outhouses, but has to socially distance himself from his family who are chakking away on a chimney stack.
Posted 4 years ago # -
@rosie, my pal on North Uist earned some cash each spring/summer counting them. 165 pairs I think before he went back to Norn Irn after many years up there.
Posted 4 years ago # -
A squirrel chasing a starling across the grass at Guardwell Crescent.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Swallow on phone line outside my house 7.30am this morning Happy Gembo
Posted 4 years ago # -
Goslings on Duddingston Loch this afternoon.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Posted 4 years ago #
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That is one brazen fox.
Small passerine (blue tit) using its passerine claws to grip onto my clothes line yesterday. Very cute.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Lines penned on seeing two sparrows on our bird table this morning...
"The thoughts of a sparrow on sex
are seldom, if ever, complex,
and a sparrow in need
is a sparrow indeed,
and does just as a person expects."again...and again...and again.
I was quite impressed.
Posted 4 years ago # -
@greenroofer the brutal short life of a sparrow is summarized by the 3 Fs
1. Feeding
2. Fighting
3. F in your limerick to sparrows copulating on one’s bird tablePosted 4 years ago # -
A pair of swans on the Water of Leith in Roseburn Park.
They don't have any cygnets, and they aren't on a nest.
Seeing the kind of papparazzi attention other cygnets get in Edinburgh, eg those on the Union Canal having their own twitter account, I imagine they remain childless because they didn't want their offspring to be part of a media circus.
Posted 4 years ago # -
@Rosie: Are they definitely a pair i.e. a cob and a pen? (The differences between the sexes aren't huge but the knob on top of the base of the bill tends to be larger in the cob at this time of year, and usually the cob is a bit bigger and has a somewhat thicker neck.)
Posted 4 years ago # -
@ejstubbs - didn't check that. I assumed they were a couple.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Linnet
Not my photo, but I was there.
Mobile phone through binoculars!
Posted 4 years ago # -
Several dozen sand martins high speed acrobatics at Rosebery dam
Posted 4 years ago # -
my first kingfisher sighting since January, today at Old Manor Bridge, Manor Water.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Prompted by Twitter account @redbackedmike I had a closer look at the crows on Crow Hill yesterday.
Right enough, there is a pair of ravens. (Biggest passerines on the go, @gembo.) Got to see a crew of carrion crows and a very excited kestrel driving them off Samson's Ribs.
Posted 4 years ago # -
The gorse is a very vivid yellow at the moment
Posted 4 years ago #
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