Leaving the Great Skuas and Storm Petrels behind, we left the island and
moved onto the mainland. It was great to appreciate the little things in life:
Running water, toilets and shops! Passing through the little village of Tongue, we passed many lochs catching
good views of summer plumaged Black Throated Divers, Twite and 'real' Rock
Doves!
We came to a plantation and had some great views of the slightly dodgy race
of Common Redpolls that exist up here!
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| Common Redpoll |
On our travels, we had super views of Osprey on the River Findhorn and
summer plumaged Slavonian Grebe on Loch Ruthven.
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| Cracking male Osprey scanning the river - taken by Stephen Menzie |
The Findhorn valley was stunning and stood for miles, picking up a
possibility of a Golden Eagle seemed an impossible task, but we didn't hold a
grudge against this truly spectacular place.
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| Findhorn Valley - What a place! |
Finally making it to Aviemore, we were ‘guaranteed’ super views of
Capercaillie by Chris Bridge. Chris ‘knew’ every square metre of Aviemore and
promised I would get this most wanted lifer on this trip. We started out the
following morning on a mission at 4am. By 7am, we were still on the case
without a sighting. What had gone wrong? Well, the birds simply weren’t there,
or at least they were keeping well hidden. So thinking back, 72 Capers on your
last visit was maybe a slight hallucination don’t you think Chris?
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| No Caper this time, view was good though! |
Luckily, I hadn’t built my hopes up and we enjoyed views of Red Squirrel,
Crested Tit, Common Crossbill and what we found out later through sonogram, a
Scottish Crossbill – more on that another time!
Later on that morning, we decided to head up to the Cairngorms National
Park. Dodging the showers, we started on our upwards climb to the top in search
of Ptarmigan. Stephen thought he’d beaten the system when he found a small
group of grouse type birds half way up but with a closer inspection, revealed themselves
as a family of Red Grouse. The views were super as you can see:
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| View from the Cairngorms |
Once reaching the top, we finally caught up with a family of Ptarmigan. Both
the male and female grave brilliant views!
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| Female Ptarmigan |
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| Male Ptarmigan |
I also luckily locked on to a male and female Snow Bunting near to the Cafe
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| Female Snow Bunting - Taken by Stephen Menzie |
Feeling shattered, there was only on way down, and for us, that was the
fastest: the cable car! 11 minutes and back down to the bottom...
...followed by an 8 hour drive home!
