Christine's walking & birds blog

Scotland is still in lockdown; so we set off on the longer of our daily walks. The newts continue to fascinate me, and several had taken over a very shallow puddle where breeding was also in progress. This puddle had almost no vegetation for egg-laying - but perhaps I have it wrong, and the females go off somewhere else to do this.


It was great to walk without a jacket and not be buffeted by the wind. The summer birds seem to be thickening up at last, with several tree pipits singing and displaying; the insects in this pic are probably hawthorn flies or St. Mark's flies. I would have added them to the Other Species Lockdown list but the novelty of keeping lockdown lists has worn off.


This is probably a tree pipit; meadow pipits are also present here, and I'm not good on separating them without hearing the song.


Thinking I was snapping another, very distant tree pipit I was surprised to find it was actually a spotted flycatcher; although I don't know why I should be surprised as I had been hoping for one here - a pretty guaranteed site for them.


I was in two minds about the third summer visitor in evidence in the same area - the cuckoo. Some of the pipits are going to lose their own offspring and bring up cuckoos instead; and yet we couldn't help but be thrilled by the fluty song echoing from plantations above and more distantly from across the river gorge on another hill-side. And then - from a dense copse of birch and alder just ahead of us came a loud sound which I suppose was the bubbling call of the female. I still think it's more of a "wik-wik-wik" sound, although the first time I ever heard it (in this same spot) it did sound like a bubbling call. Greger said it put him in mind of a quail's song. Anyway, it was great to hear it (we heard it three more times in different places) even though we never saw the bird.