Bog Myrtle & Peat

I’ve had a couple of good “question” comments on my blog recently, and it’s a good opportunity to respond to them both by email and on the blog itself – I’m not sure how the “comment” section works on WordPress and have often fudged replies, so perhaps this is a good way of responding so… Continue reading

It looks like the curlews are making progress with their nests. I watched a cock rise up and mob a red kite yesterday afternoon, and a different bird spent the last few minutes of daylight circling noisily around his patch last week, giving me hope that territories are being carefully maintained. Some of the birds are definitely… Continue reading

It was a gloomy discovery the other day when I found a crow-sucked egg out on the moss. I’ve been working extremely hard to catch up with the black offenders, and I had thought that I was making progress. I’ve had a good number of crows through the traps over the past fortnight, and I’m now… Continue reading

Without having meant to litter the place with short little articles, it is worth mentioning the snipe’s seasonally courageous habit of standing up on the stob tops during May. It is so rare to see a snipe before it sees you at any other time of the year, but they seem to throw caution to the wind in Spring when their… Continue reading

Amidst all the stress and excitement of covering the ground to protect the birds on the Chayne, I may have stumbled upon a population of black grouse much closer to home. I broke some fantastic new ground yesterday, and having been asked at short notice to provide a talk next week at the Newtonrigg Uplands Conference 2015, I can… Continue reading

With the remaining curlews very clearly down on their eggs, now is a key moment to drive on the fox and crow control programme. There was a very quiet wailing from the rushes last night where one of the pairs is well set, and a second pair is  underway two hundred yards further over the… Continue reading

The cows came back ten days ago, but I hardly noticed them in the good weather. Through some barometric intelligence, they spend their days on the very highest ground during periods of clear, warm sunshine, and they are as effective as a German weather house when it comes to getting an accurate forecast. Up on the high tops,… Continue reading

Despite the tide being wrong and the wind lying in the South yesterday afternoon, I went down to the coast to spend an hour looking for migrating skuas as they come rolling up the Solway. Skuas are essentially just large and extremely aggressive seagulls, and they ply their summer trade on the Northern coasts by… Continue reading

Worth posting this picture of a golden plover I came across in Perthshire last week. I see plovers quite frequently throughout the year, but this was one of a few occasions when I had time to enjoy these little birds as I ate my piece on a hilltop looking towards Beinn a’ Ghlò. His flat-bottomed scuttle reminded… Continue reading

This particular bird (above) has been providing me with some very useful information about his movements and wanderings over the past five weeks, and I’ve been able to keep track of him on account of the fact that he has a single pure white secondary feather on his right wing. The occasional white secondary is not uncommon,… Continue reading