http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/badger-triplet-cubs-recovering-sspca-5644978
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Leisure
Wildlife highlight of the day
(7221 posts)-
Posted 9 years ago #
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I heard a woodpecker near Innerwick. Couldn't see it.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Yesterday I watched a man watching the canal cormorant taking off. Not the most elegant of take offs was my opinion. The bird skims the surface for a long time before getting any lift. The watcher made no remark.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Aw, fox cubs! So cute - but so NOISY. They used to yip and screech away under my old flat window. Nice to see them when they were briefly visible in security lights, but sometimes I did wish they had a volume control...
Posted 9 years ago # -
I spotted a pair of buzzards alighting on to the upper branches of one of the trees on the Heriot-Watt campus as I was leaving work on Boundary Road North yesterday.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Roe deer in Dalkeith country park, masses of garlic in flower along the Esk, I do like this time of year
Posted 9 years ago # -
I saw the cormorant on canal yesterday (also taking off) and today, the heron. Also a duck with 9 ducklings!!
Posted 9 years ago # -
Finally saw my first swift on the morning of the 8th. How come I don't see them before the 4th? Maybe I just don't look?
Posted 9 years ago # -
@IWRATS perhaps confirmation bias won't let you see them?
Posted 9 years ago # -
Bazillions of swallows and martins (house and sand) whizzing about over the Esk at Musselburgh. A couple of hours later as I came back there were hardly any.
Posted 9 years ago # -
@jdanielp
It may be so. But that doesn't explain that damn'd allusive kingfisher.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Is it true that when a swift leaves the nest it does not land for another eighteen months, sleeping, fornicating etc on the wing? If so and they are up high in the air, if you don't look for them before 4th of May, you won't see them, even if wearing kingfisher blue tinted lenses. However, if they land, come round your house, scrounging bread etc then they might impinge on your retina before then?
Posted 9 years ago # -
@gembo
If they come round my land scrounging bread I shall stop their mouths with flies.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Goslings and cootlets in Pondend Loch. Also 2 >= n <= 6 herons. Almost definitely at least three, but never inarguably simultaneously visible.
Posted 9 years ago # -
@IWRATS, in the darkly comic series Black Books (available on the channel 4 I player or in a box set from HMV if you have no telly) Manny played by Bill Bailey gets locked in the book shop after they instal a new security system with no food and only a bottle of absinthe. After the burglars come back and steal the security system Bernard Black played by Dylan Moran can get back into the shop whereupon Manny confesses that he survived by barbecuing Bernard's bees, the ones that were dead in the window. Legend. The best episode is in series 1 it is episode 3 and is called The Grapes of Wrath.
A man walks into a pet shop, he says - can I have a pet bee please. The pet shop owner says - don't be daft we don't sell bees, you can't keep a bee as a pet. The customer says - Well you've got one in the window
Posted 9 years ago # -
@winpig, I can confirm that there is at least 2 heron. I saw them both just North of Peterborough on Friday. Although perhaps English and Scottish heron are different.
Posted 9 years ago # -
English heron Tory
Scottish heron SNP?
Posted 9 years ago # -
My bird guide (Collins Britain and Europe) lists eleven different herons, several vagrants or accidentals.
Only British one is the Grey Heron.
Goliath Heron is a very big heron.
See also bitterns, storks, egrets, ibises and spoonbills.
On the other hand eight types of Swift
Posted 9 years ago # -
But only one type of swift in Scotland (I think)?
Trundled (it was a trundle, we were slow) up to Ladybank today, and saw a pair of yellowhammer. Never seen a male before - brilliant yellow head, I was very taken!
Quite a few skylarks up in full song, which is always lovely, and a lone curlew near the Vintage Bus Museum
Posted 9 years ago # -
Yes we only have the (common) swift and the barn swallow. We have house and sand martins. So proportionally we should perhaps support the Martins more. Vote Martin
Posted 9 years ago # -
"
House sparrows - the brown, boisterous opportunists that were Britain’s best-known urban birds - have virtually disappeared. Scientists say their numbers have plummeted by up to 90 per cent since the 1970s.
No-one is exactly sure why, though the loss of hedges, trees, insects and flowers have all been blamed. Predation by domestic cats and other animals may also be implicated, as well as possibly pollution.
But now conservationists, communities and schools have launched campaigns to try and bring back house sparrows. One of the pioneering projects is in Glasgow, where the birds have suffered a very steep decline."
Posted 9 years ago # -
Sparrows in Glasgow - a wee cock sparra, sat on a marra? Duncan Macrae 1948
We have 20-30 sparrows in our garden/neighbours garden. I hope they just live under his slates.
They are most boisterous, though do not have the copulation skills of the swift despite much practice.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Posted 9 years ago #
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That takes me back.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Posted 9 years ago # -
"
Richard Lochhead (@RichardLochhead)
11/05/2015 15:57
Lots of support in EU Council of Agri Ministers for #Slovenia idea to to designate 20th May as #WorldBeeDay @the_ecologist @ScotWildlife"
Posted 9 years ago # -
Just seen my first Swift of the year.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Big gull eating a very fresh pigeon in the Missoni taxi rank this evening as I rode past.
Not sure that counts as a highlight, particularly for the pigeon, but it was definitely wildlife.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Helps stop us finding ourselves hip-deep in dead pigeons - the circle of life etc.!(I rather like herring/black back gulls - I think it's the way they clearly don't think all that much of humans and are happy to give you the baleful look to prove it.)
Posted 9 years ago #
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