Friday, February 28, 2025
Having spotted a sparrowhawk from the bedroom window this morning, I grabbed the camera and rushed outside. There was no sign now of the hawk, but scanning the ridge of Ullapool Hill I saw a distant golden eagle, flying south - and took a record shot of that instead.
Later at Ardmair, things looked quiet at low tide and as it was also quite windy I got back in the car. Something caught my eye - something brown moving swiftly along below the lay-by, on the grassy bank leading down to the beach. It was a red-legged partridge, running past my car about a metre away. It flew across to the sheep fields where it was joined by a second individual - both looking perilously conspicuous (at least through bins - with the naked eye, they could hardly be seen).
Like pheasants, red-legged partridges disappeared from my lists a long time ago as both are non-native species, introduced into the UK for the purpose of "sport". In fact, the Keanchulish Estate isn't far away, and on their website they offer "fast Partridges...driven off cliffs to the guns below on the beach....". Well, how jolly sporting.
Back home, I decided to do some "gardening" - i.e. slashing at a huge buddleia so that the oil delivery man can get to the tank next week! Given the sparrowhawk and the eagle of the morning, I hung my camera on the handle of our old lawnmower that's waiting to go to the tip - just in case something else turned up.
The clamour of gulls was distant at first - probably from the harbour - but it grew louder, and looking in that direction I had a glimpse through branches of something big. Grabbing the camera I walked out into the open to see two white-tailed eagles making their way unhurriedly towards me. Unlike the sparrowhawk, they didn't quite go over the bungalow or even the garden - but they were pretty close.
Some might consider the white-tailed eagle to be as "untickable" as the partridges - but at least they were once native to this country; and they've been reintroduced by people who care about wild birds, as opposed to those whose only wish where birds are concerned is to blast them to smithereens. Again, some argue against the reintroduction of raptors when the numbers of many passerines for example are in severe decline - and perhaps they have a point. Meanwhile, today, still in the middle of birding doldrums, I enjoyed seeing both the runaway partridges and the two eagles, the latter magnificently oblivious to the shrieking protests of gulls and corvids as they circled over the village and then flew slowly off to the north.
// posted by Christine @ 10:57 AM 
