A very confiding dipper singing at crammond. I didn't know they sang at all.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Leisure
Wildlife highlight of the day
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Posted 9 years ago #
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@amir - hope other trees are accepting even if they're confyewsed...
@chdot - possibly deliberately is very possible as at the time they showed up in a number of places at once. Word on the single-track street was that someone thought stoats would keep greylag numbers down by eating their eggs. (Someone who had never met an irate goose, I assume...)
As I'm in Kirkwall for work this week I skived off at lunchtime to swim round the wreck at Inganess Bay (by the airport), in glorious November sunshine with an accompanying cormorant, teenage gannets fishing further out, and a long-tailed duck.
Posted 9 years ago # -
IWRATS - Oh yes, look them up in your bird book and they should be in with the big song belter-ooters like Wrens and Robins. They don't seem to do it very often though.
Posted 9 years ago # -
"swim"
Sea?
Orkney!
November!!
Posted 9 years ago # -
The water is only cooling down after the summer now! My swimming companion (human, not avian) said he'd checked the temp last week and it was still up at 12 degrees. It only gets up to 14 in "high" summer here...
Posted 9 years ago # -
@Min
It was absurdly loud, presumably to be heard over the river. Why was it singing in November?
Posted 9 years ago # -
That I don't know but quite a few of the songbirds do (or at least can) sing most of the year round. Maybe when you have a voice like that, you just enjoy it?
Posted 9 years ago # -
A bit of googling suggests that robins sing in winter to defend feeding territories (and that female robins also sing in winter for this reason) so possibly that's what your dipper was up to? A more melodic "get orf my laaaaaand[river]"!
Posted 9 years ago # -
We could ask little frankie lymon and the teenagers ?
Posted 9 years ago # -
A big noisy skein of geese heading north over Newington. I nearly wobbled off the road looking at them (could have put this in the crap cycling thread). Heading north though, in November?
Posted 9 years ago # -
They fly about a bit between feeding grounds so it is possible to see them flying in the "wrong" direction.
Posted 9 years ago # -
@cc
Great honking squadron of them came North to roost at Crammond last night. Mixed greylags and pink-footed.
I always expect to hear gunfire when I see geese over the Grange.
Posted 9 years ago # -
"so it is possible to see them flying in the "wrong" direction"
On Sunday I heard the calls above Morningside/Grange and looked up.
There they were practicing forming and re-forming a rough V.
For the next few minutes they were actually circling rather than (apparently) heading for a destination!
Posted 9 years ago # -
Pretty sure a massive squirrel offered me outside on my way home last night. Well we were already outside, but he definitely looked at me in a "did you spill my pint?" sort of a way.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Aha, thanks everyone!
TBH this wasn't so much a V as a sort of boomerang shape, but close enoughPosted 9 years ago # -
@The Boy
Mushroom season already?
Posted 9 years ago # -
@cc @chdot
if you go to aberlady bay as the sun sets you see these huge straggling V's coming in, reforming as they go. often collecting up smaller groups, and sometimes dropping some off.
we thought it rather resembled a peloton with breakaways being caught up and dropped...
Posted 9 years ago # -
@iwrats, it might just be because I'm usually walking with a lurcher in tow that I'm in a constant state of vigilance of squirrels, and due to said lurcher the default setting for such creatures is "get the hell out of Dodge".
But it *was* an unusually large squirrel. Not fat, just very tall.
Posted 9 years ago # -
@The Boy
Oddly, the squirrels round our way have got noticeably smaller of late. I think they're struggling to feed as much as before due to the presence of buzzards and our enormous orange cat who is sometimes to be seen dragging their limp corpses about like a leopard with a gazelle.
I can't wait until pine martens come to Edinburgh.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Listening to an owl outside the window just now
Posted 9 years ago # -
A pleasant Pheasant sighting two lunchtimes in a row now.
Posted 9 years ago # -
OK, it's not wildlife - far from it - but I was very pleased to see some cows in the field between the innocent path and the Duddingston Low Road this morning. (Mainly because it confirmed that I hadn't actually imagined them from afar yesterday!).
Does anyone know who owns that patch of ground?
Posted 9 years ago # -
I saw them there a couple of weeks back and also over the summer maybe in retrospect, I saw them making the field secure. Not the cows themselves but the friends of the cows of duddingston loch fields
Posted 9 years ago # -
Scottish Wildlife Trust has recently (15 October) put three Shetland Cattle into a field called Murder Acre by Duddingston Loch (which I assume is the one you refer to). They are leasing the field from Historic Scotland. The cows are there to improve the habitat, which is/will be/could be an important bit of grassland.
I know this because a charity I'm involved with recently gave them £5,000 to make the field secure.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Thanks @Greenroofer - love that the field is called Murder Acre! Thanks for the heads up on the charity too - looks great.
Posted 9 years ago # -
This fascinating article about the possible development of a new species from coyote-wolf-(dog) hybridisation is sort of cycling related for several reasons (bear with me):
I saw several coyotes from the bike on my Canadian travels, and was surprised how obviously "coyote-like" they appeared (...does that make sense? I mean there was no mistaking them for a wolf or a dog or a big fox). Didn't expect to see any wolves, but in western Ontario I woke up about 3am in a parks campground in the Whiteshell, on a clear still night with a setting moon, to the sound of howling. Which was absolutely amazing. Then a bit later as I headed east from Thunder Bay I read this news article over breakfast: Bicyclist chased by wolf on highway - which was of geat interest as I was going to ride that section a couple of days later. Now I'm wondering, based on the Economist article, if there's a chance the wolf that the cyclist met was possibly a coywolf. (My other suspicion was that it might have been a wolf-dog hybrid some eedjit had let go, as I understand they're much less afraid of humans than normal wolves...)
Anyway, coywolves sound pretty cool, if somewhat disconcerting (as they may have been what killed a girl hiking in the Maritimes in 2009).
Posted 9 years ago # -
Posted 9 years ago #
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Nice rodent stalking technique!
Posted 9 years ago # -
A kingfisher! I was just thinking this morning that the cutback of vegetation which occurred on the towpath on Monday and Tuesday this week (strange days to choose to do it given the awful weather) along with the general reduction in leaves would help with spottings (assuming that kingfishers were still in the area following the removal of a lot of low-hanging branches on the far side of the canal earlier in the year) before proceeding to spot a kingfisher just beyond Gogar Station Road bridge.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Glad to hear the kf is back on the canal, I shall have to look out for it
Posted 9 years ago #
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