-
Summer days; Cheviot Valleys Bespoke birdwatching 18/06/17
An early start on Sunday saw me collecting Jill and Steve for their 4th day out with NEWT (and Steve’s 5th trip with us as he was on this memorable pelagic!)… Our destination was the Cheviot valleys, but we headed to Bothal first to search for the Ruddy Duck that had been there the day…
-
Making the most of the weather; Bespoke Cheviots Safari 08/06/17
I have a bit of an obsession with the weather. It can have a real influence on the outcome of our trips and we always try to be as flexible as we possibly can. If the forecast is really poor we always offer clients the option of rescheduling; either for a different time on the…
-
Bird of the Day; Lindisfarne Safari 10/05/16
I can’t think of a species of bird that I don’t enjoy watching. Every last one of them has something special, but some just have more than others… I collected Steve and Carrie from the Bamburgh Castle Inn and we headed north towards Lindisfarne. Starting with a walk along the Crooked Lonnen we’d soon found…
-
A hailstorm of quality; Cheviots Prestige Tour 19/05/2015
As I arrived at Spindrift to collect David and Margaret for their second trip with NEWT, following a day in the North Pennines in 2013, I was thinking about how to structure the rest of the day. The weather forecast suggested that there would be heavy showers by early afternoon, so I thought it would…
-
Spring arrivals; Druridge Bay Safari 30/04/2015
It’s been a cold windy spring, and a few of our summer visitors seemed a bit tardy; we found our first Sand Martin and Chiffchaff later than we would have expected, but the day has been coming when things would start to happen… I collected Jan and Peter from Church Point and we set out…
-
Moorland magic; Bespoke birdwatching 16/06/2014
Heading up the coast to Embleton to collect Pete and Janet for their fourth day out with NEWT (plus a couple of days with their local natural history society on a Northumberland visit in 2009), I had a mixture of anticipation and trepidation. It’s always a pleasure to have them on a tour, but this…
-
Head for the hills
Away to the northwest of our base in southeast Northumberland is the skyline-dominating range of the Cheviot Hills. I collected Susan from Cheviot View and we headed towards the Harthope Valley via the ford at Coldgate Mill. A stop along the road produced Redshank, Oystercatcher, Lapwing and the always impressive Brown Hare. In glorious weather…
-
Promising conditions?
‘Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep…beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep…beep, beep, beep’, the mega-alert on my pager wasn’t entirely unexpected… I’d collected Charlie and Edna from Holy Island for a day of birdwatching, from Druridge Bay and southeast Northumberland north along the Northumberland coast and eventually back to Lindisfarne. Eponymously disyllabic Chiffchaffs, the…
-
Returning
Returning clients have been a bit of a theme this year, and I was really looking forward on Wednesday to be collecting Carolyn and Brian for a day of birdwatching in and around Kielder. The weather was looking less than promising but, as I collected them from their holiday cottage in Cresswell with it’s stunning view out…