Saturday, September 30, 2023


The promise of a dry, bright day called us out for a drive and a walk. Our arrival at the dam car park disturbed a party of long-tailed tits (10+), which flew out calling from the plantation and circled high above the moorland - an incongruous sight in those vast, open spaces - before settling back in the conifers.

Greger spotted two birds flying away from us which he thought were black grouse, but I missed them.  Two whooper swans and a couple of mallards were on the loch, and a bird hovering above a distant ridge turned out to be a male kestrel. Greger kept saying there was a larger bird above it, but I failed to get onto it and he wasn't sure if it was the golden eagle that I spotted next. At some point, he also called out a bird flying below the skyline with, he thought, a white rump - but again, I failed to see it.  


The eagle was a juvenile, the white on the wings and the tail being very conspicuous; it quartered the hillside for a while and then landed on a jutting rock near the summit (at least a kilometre away from us).


Another raptor was flying around, sometimes near the eagle, sometimes above it - and now and then slipping back behind the shoulder of the hill; it was too far away to identify through the bins but the one picture I managed suggests hen harrier. Can't be sure, though.


We kept looking back on the return walk to see the eagle still sitting on the rock. From the dam wall I took a last look through my bins and saw a smaller raptor still flying around near it; I took a picture despite Greger's incredulous protestations that it was much too far away - but in fact, when zoomed in as much as possible, the image obtained showed that it was a red kite! All in all, quite a raptorish day.  

// posted by Christine @ 11:42 AM
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