Sunday, March 31, 2024

My first chiffchaff of the year!  It was a short way up the quarry road, its singing heard from the car as I drove to the walkers' car park.


Yesterday: a walk at Silverbridge brought no crested tits, but it was pleasant to be walking among pine trees once again. Birds seen: great spotted woodpecker, goldcrest (at last!), siskin, coal tit, great tit, blue tit, wren, robin, grey wagtail, red kite, chaffinch, and crossbill. One mystery: a sharp, unfamiliar call made me look up - to see two birds flying across heading north-east before lost to sight behind the tree-tops. The shape of the birds made me think of plovers; but their flight seemed too unhurried and anyway, the call might have come from a different source.

On the drive home, a pair of black-throated divers gave me a new species for Loch Glascarnoch, although they're known to frequent nearby Loch Droma.


I also stopped at Loch Droma for a brisk walk along the dam - and thought I'd found another frog-spawning site. Then I realised, from the warty skin and the relatively short hind legs, that these were toads.



The scientific name for the common toad is Bufo bufo. Looking this up in my Latin dictionary (yeah, Boris Johnson and your odious father, you don't have to be public schoolboys to study it) I find that bufo-bufonis
(m) is simply Latin for toad. But, given that "bufo" is sometimes a childish word for "beautiful", it seems to me a bit of a misnomer, as the only beauty the toad possesses is its black-and-golden eye.

// posted by Christine @ 3:05 PM
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