I’ve been finding and observing wildlife for well over 40 years, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt it’s that other wildlife will (almost) always be better at it than I am…
Day four for Clare and Peter was an Otter Safari, and we collected Chris and Mel, and David and Mike, from Church Point before starting our search of Druridge Bay and southeast Northumberland. I planned to follow our usual strategy at our first site, which is to move on if we haven’t found an Otter within the first hour. 55 minutes in and it wasn’t looking good; everybody else was watching an assortment of waders and wildfowl, and I was staring intently at an almost birdless stretch of water. Then some movement; a flock of Tufted Duck drifted away from the bankside vegetation where they’d been dozing. They turned, stared towards where they’d been disturbed from and then drifted back. Another minute and they left again, this time in a tight flotilla. By now I was confident that we were going to find our quarry in the first 90 minutes of the trip. Sure enough, an Otter soon surfaced a few metres away from the ducks and we watched it feeding for 45 minutes before we lost it from view behind bankside vegetation 🙂
The rest of the afternoon was a tableaux of angry birds. First a Greenshank took a vigorously intolerant approach towards a juvenile Ruff in a ‘scope filling squabble. As daylight faded into the magical light of dusk and a Common Snipe, glorious in low golden sunlight, gave uncharacteristically obliging views close to male and female Ruff and a healthy sprinkling of Little Grebe, the Grey Heron took centre stage. Gangly, scruffy, ungainly juvenile Herons, tussling over the best feeding spots, ventured from the reed edge as light levels rendered them elegant; stalking the shallows, squawking and croaking in flight, each maintaining their own individual feeding territory as detail faded to silhouette and a flock of Curlew, heralding their arrival with piercing cries, circled before thinking better of it and vanishing into the gloom.
Comments
One response to “Interpreting; Otter Safari 16/09/2015”
It was incredibly rewarding seeing an otter, and we really benefited from Martin’s ‘reading’ of the river (ducks flushing etc) to lead us to it. The bird spottings were equally a delight, especially the little snipe hiding in the vegetation, and the behaviour of the herons.