Thursday, December 03, 2020
Up on the Dirrie Mor snow had fallen to road level, but it was a thin covering and there was no problem parking in the lay-by at the dam.
A number of small birds fluttering about as I set off for my walk suggested the snow buntings I'd come here in hopes of finding - but they turned out instead to be four stonechats and a wren.
The stonechats (two male, two female) seemed to be feeding on the ground, while the wren was foraging in the damp moss on the wall itself.
It flew up onto the snow with what looks like a bug of some sort - and then disappeared.
I was the first this morning to walk right across the dam and along the track. Animal spoors in the virgin snow intrigued me; they looked a bit like a dog's paw prints, and I felt slightly uneasy at the thought of an unaccompanied dog somewhere ahead. Apparently, a fox's prints tend to go in a straight line while a dog's prints are a bit erratic and go all over the place. This makes sense; a fox is conserving energy as it goes through the necessary business of hunting for its food, while a dog is bent on enjoying every single second of being out of doors and allowed to run free before it's loaded back into a car and taken back to a warm interior where it's bored out of its mind for most of its life. Anyway, whatever it was, I never saw it.
I walked almost as far as the second gate, when a woman caught me up. She looked so carefree - she had no bins, cameras, rucksacks.....sometimes it would be nice to just go for an exercise walk and leave all the birdwatching paraphernalia at home. Is it likely I'll do that? No.
Two meadow pipits were a surprise find in the heather - thought they'd all moved south.
I got a second chance at a wren, and I can always pretend that I intended to place it at the top of the frame.
Only other birds: six whooper swans (there were at least twenty here last week), four Canada geese (there were at least sixteen here last week), a small flock of mallards, and a possible reed bunting. (The blog is still getting indented at the first paragraph - although I can change that; but I still can't get rid of the extra space at the bottom!)
