Nigel's Nature

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Piltanton Burn estuary – 3.xii.24

It was my first visit to this site for quite a while and well worth braving the bitterly cold breeze. The best bird appeared before I even reached the beach, perched on a fence-post along the entrance track. A female-type Merlin. I just had time to make out the brown upperparts and faint moustache before it took off, revealing a boldly barred tail and relatively short narrow wings. It shot low across the field causing panic among the grazing curlew and wigeon, even though they are much larger than the little falcon’s usual songbird prey. Maybe the raptor profile triggers an instinctive response regardless of size. The tide was not long past full, which explains the number of water-birds utilizing the adjacent pasture when I arrived. As water levels sank, waders began dropping in to feed on freshly exposed mud. Redshank were the most numerous with plenty of Curlew and Oystercatcher too. There were also a few Bar-tailed Godwits and some Dunlin. To the east where the shore is stoni...

Woodland Wellbeing – 1.v.24

It was Mayday and the warmest day of the year so far, in my neck of the woods at least. On this occasion, the woods were a classic Atlantic oak woodland that cloaks a west-facing slope above the river Cree. Hence its name: the Wood of Cree! An RSPB reserve, it is famed for a suite of migrant songbirds that favour this habitat. I headed up the track from the main car-park and found myself among the trees in magical afternoon light. Swathes of bluebells were in flower, although not quite at their peak. Clumps of Stitchwort, Wood Anemone and Lesser Celandine added splashes of white and yellow. A verdant shag-pile of moss carpeted much of the ground, turning stumps, boulders, and fallen logs into amorphous hummocks. It takes plenty of rain to support such fecundity but this day was dry and sunny. The vivid green of freshly unfurled leaves highlighted the understorey of hazel and hawthorn with deeper pools of evergreen where thickets of holly grew. Above, the oaks were still bare, risi...

When I lived in Bedfordshire, an occasional challenge was picking out the Scaup among a flock of Tufted Ducks. At Loch Ryan in Wigtownshire, I had the opposite challenge: picking out the Tufties among the Scaup! This was back in February when several hundred of the latter were wintering at this site and one day a couple of female Tufties appeared. The Scaup are mostly gone now in mid-April.

Loch Ryan 12.iii.24

A calm day at last gave reasonable viewing conditions here. Winds with an easterly component had persisted for more than a week, producing choppy water across the loch and a bitter chill. Today the tide was high mid-afternoon, so my focus was on waterfowl and seabirds rather than waders. Goldeneye were notable off Balyett/Innermessan, in the south-east corner, with a minimum estimate of 30. Other duck included the usual suspects of Wigeon, Scaup, Red-breasted Merganser, Common Scoter and Eider. Numbers of the former two species have dwindled recently from several hundred earlier in the year. A loose group of seven Red-throated Divers were quite distant, but their pale necks stood out in the overcast light. Amongst them, a single Great Northern revealed itself by the typical horizontal cast of its heavy bill, compared to the more slender appendage of its congener held at an upward tilt. A few Slavonian Grebe were about, still in winter plumage, unlike the Great Crested who...

White-fronts at West Freugh - 4.iii.24

Despite tricky conditions, I finally caught up with some of the Greenland White-fronted Geese that winter around the airfield, after several failed attempts in recent weeks. It was mercifully dry with sunny spells but a very strong and bitterly cold south-easterly wind made things decidedly uncomfortable outside the car. My afternoon visit began as usual at the flooded fields north-east of the runways. A pair of Shelduck and a small flock of Golden Plover were present. Nearby I found a flock of Pink-footed Geese, the first of many. These latter birds were very flighty, disturbed no doubt by all the muck-spreading that was going on. Tractors pulling trailers of slurry buzzed about constantly as they spread their toxic sludge over the fields. At times the air was full of skeins making their distinctive ang-ank calls. A rough estimate came to 5,000, but no sign of White-fronts among them. Local experts say the two species tend not to flock together, in this area at least. I checked ...

Piltanton Burn - 9.xi.23

Sunny spells, light westerly, low tide 3.09pm Disturbance was the unwelcome theme of this visit. Upheavals to the beach were immediately obvious when I arrived. Judging by the wide deep tracks, someone had brought heavy machinery to take away a lot of the accumulated heaps of seaweed from the tideline. And in the process, they also uprooted pioneer plants, such as Sea Rocket and Common Orache that were beginning to colonize the sand, and disturbed the naturally stratified deposits beneath, doing untold damage to the whole foreshore ecosystem. While it may be laudable in principle to make use of fertilizer that is not derived from fossil fuels, any net gain is rather undermined if you trash the environment while you do it. To add insult to injury, some narrower tracks suggested that more joy-riding had also happened, although by motorbike this time instead of the 4x4 that is still stranded mid-channel like a metal hippo. Indeed the new tracks passed by that flooded wreck and cont...

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