Northern Experience Wildlife Tours

Saturday evening saw me in the far southwest of Northumberland, with a potentially tricky assignment…’in 2 hours, show a visiting journalist, and her husband, the best birdwatching in the North Pennines‘.

So, we stealthily approached four of our favourite Black Grouse sites, enjoying unbelievably close views of 9 Blackcocks,  travelled across bleak, exposed, moorland roads, marvelling at the luminosity of the red eyebrows of an almost endless succession of Red Grouse, watched Curlew, Oystercatcher  and Lapwing displaying and gazed, awestruck, at the incredible beauty of breeding-plumaged Golden Plover.  The 2 grouse species were so close that Jo-anne was able to practice her wildlife photography using a small compact camera with a quite limited zoom.  The big open landscapes, and birds perched on tussocks in the heather, lend themselves well to an ‘un-British’ style of wildlife photography; one that I’m planning to work on whenever the time, and opportunity, arises this year.

I’d planned the route to take in a Short-eared Owl breeding site at sunset.  They’ve been a bit thin on the ground (and in the air) at some of their traditional Northumberland wintering sites so it was a long-shot, and meant going beyond the 2 hour time limit although, unsurprisingly, this went down quite well with our guests   Fortune favours the brave and, after 2 hours of guided birdwatching that, I’m assured, delivered what I’d been asked to, the ghostly shape crossing the moors in the twilight, and the cryptic plumage and staring yellow eyes as the bird perched obligingly on a fence post just metres away from us, was rightly described as  “the icing on the cake”.