It's almost like being there. You can nearly smell the Caledonian pines, hear the squirrels scampering among the branches and feel the cold air on your face...We've been entranced by our new live, streaming video webcam. It's on our reserve at Abernethy Forest in the Scottish Highlands and the stars of the show are red squirrels, coal tits, great spotted woodpeckers and even the occasional crested tit. Before, you needed to visit the forests of northern Scotland to watch crested tits in this country, but now all you have to do is turn on your computer and head for our website! You could also see the squirrels chasing each other up and down, swarms of coal tits in a feeding frenzy and perhaps even a pine marten - their droppings have been found at the foot of the tree!We hope you'll enjoy watching the webcam - don't forget to tell us what you've seen... Be warned: it is quite addictive.
‘Had a good weekend?' is the usual question when you get into work on a Monday morning. However, no sooner was this uttered today when it was interrupted as I peered out the window and caught a glimpse of a black, white and red bird swooping onto our feeder.
We’re pretty lucky here that we get some interesting birds out there, like Mark’s grey wagtail, but today’s visitor was equally beautiful and stayed around for much longer!
You possibly guessed that we were visited by a male great spotted woodpecker, one of my favourite birds with it’s flash of red and bold black and white markings. I caught him swooping down, disturbing the chaffinch’s and blue tit’s breakfast (don’t worry for they have returned!).
‘Our’ woodpecker is a fairly infrequent visitor to the feeder, but he didn’t feed for long, before moving off with his distinctive bouncing flight to a nearby tree.
Here he stayed for a few minutes, thankfully with winter now upon us, and the leaves having dropped off the trees, we got a good view of him as he moved up the tree, doing his best to hide from us. He disappeared shortly after into the woodland, possibly off to visit one of the other feeders at a house nearby. I don’t expect we’ll see him again before Christmas, so I hope he’ll return in the new year.
Oh, and by the way, I did have a good weekend!
Staring bleary-eyed out of the window this morning, something caught my attention. There was a bird on the garden fence. A closer look revealed it was a sparrowhawk, a young male (brown like an adult female, but smaller).There was something very odd about him. He appeared to be wearing slippers like one of my next-door neighbours used to wear in the '80s (you perhaps know the kind: black, fluffy and trimmed with feathers). Around each foot was a tangled mass of dark, downy feathers, and some bits of grass.Of course, everyone knows that birds don't wear slippers, and the feathers revealed what the sparrowhawk had been up to this morning, what sparrowhawks are good at - catching and eating birds. The feathers had got stuck round his toes as he plucked and ate his victim in the dull light of an overcast dawn. A sparrowhawk is a noble, graceful bird, but this one was dancing about on the fence in a very strange, ungainly fashion.
Sparrowhawks have long, yellow toes and sharp talons which are ideal for catching and holding onto prey. They have long, thin legs so they can reach into vegetation to grab hiding birds. Their broad wings allow for amazing agility in the air and they can fly through startlingly small spaces after their prey (there's a fantastic sequence in David Attenborough's Life of Birds illustrating this).An unwanted side-effect of the toes and talons seems to be that it's hard to disentangle unwanted feathers from them. The bird's frustration was plain to see as he shuffled from foot to foot, trying to pull the down off with his beak, then wiping it on the fence. By the time he flew off into my neighbour's garden (not the one who wore the slippers, incidentally), some of the feathers had gone but it looked like it might take a while to sort out...
We're lucky enough to have a bird feeder outside our window here (check out the webcam during daylight hours). It gets a good range of visitors - nuthatches are often seen to-ing-and-fro-ing between the source of sunflower hearts and the nearby trees, along with robins, blue, great and coal tits, and the occasional chaffinch. This week, we've had a bigger, bolder visitor. It's black and white with a long tail. Yes, you've guessed it, it's a magpie. Seeing it less than 10 feet from our window has provided an excellent opportunity to scrutinise what's often a very shy, wary bird. Magpies are much maligned by some people, but take a closer look. This a beautiful bird. Lots of people think that brightly-coloured species are restricted to rainforests and other foreign climes, but in the right light, a magpie can look magnificent. It's not just black and white. That long tail shows iridescent emerald green, azure blue and magenta at the right angle. The wings might look dark when the bird is at rest, but wait 'til it flies and bright white feathers are revealed. The magpie is yet another of our common UK birds that is underrated, if you ask me. It has eyecatching looks, intelligence and that hard-to-explain je ne sais quoi that lift it above the norm. Why else would there be hundreds of years of folklore layered around it? Next time you see one, whether it's in the park raiding a litter bin, or chattering away, high up in a tree, take a closer look and see what you think.