Wildfowl, waxwings and whereabouts
There's not much to report really on Nethy's whereabouts & activities. She is still in the area of Lac de Guiers, as she has been now for over two weeks or so. She must be loving it there. The data is only current up to 10pm on Halloween, so how and where Nethy spent her warm weekend, we can't be sure.
The weekend here however, was frosty, crisp and sunny - beautiful in fact. The Goose roost-watch event at Loch Garten went very well. It was an absolutely perfect late afternoon/evening and over thirty people joined Alice and I on the shore of Loch Garten on Sunday between 4pm and 5.30pm to witness the spectacle of a variety of birds flying in to the loch to seek a quiet, undisturbed refuge for the night.
On arrival, we saw the sun set at the end of what had been a gorgeous day, and the period between then and dusk was just magical. About 100 greylag geese were already there when we arrived along with 150 wigeon, 60 teal, three whooper swans, goldeneye, goosander and mallard. They were then joined by an arriving flock of assorted gulls including, common, herring, black-headed and greater black-backed gulls too, all alighting on a glassy calm loch surface against the backdrop afterglow. Then the main attraction arrived by way of a finale at 5.15pm with the arrival of between 400-500 greylags flighting in, under a clear starry night sky, whiffling down on to the water in a clamour of honking calls. In total, there must have been in excess of a thousand birds. But birds apart, it was just a perfect evening for the event, added to which we saw four planets - Jupiter, Venus, the moon, and of course the earth beneath our feet.
Several of you osprey tracking blog readers came along to the event and it was nice that you did and it was good to meet you.
Arguably one of our most stunning winter visiting birds arrived in the Strath at the weekend too - waxwings, an eagerly awaited bird by birdwatchers. A small flock of 10 were seen in Tulloch on Sunday afternoon. They are simply stunning birds that have everything, a real mix of features. This starling-sized bird has an pinky-grey plumage but with a black face mask and bib, a crest, yellow tail-tip, chestnut under-tail and then the red, yellow and white wax-like blobs on the wing that give the bird it's name. Their call is unusual too, sounding like a 1970's trim-phone - if you're old enough to remember those! They are principally berry-eaters, coming here from Scandinavia and Russia once food there is depleted, to feed on cotoneaster, juniper and other fruits, meaning that they can appear in people's gardens and can be quite confiding, so it is worth watching for them.
Interestingly, I have a contact who works on the Armada oil & gas installation out in the North Sea, located half way between Scotland and Norway and he e-mailed me to say that he saw waxwings on the rig recently, possibly the same ones, who knows? They had stopped there for a breather mid-way across the North Sea, a bit like the osprey that was there recently too.
Richard