{"id":1574,"date":"2012-05-04T09:50:48","date_gmt":"2012-05-04T09:50:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1574"},"modified":"2012-05-03T03:51:48","modified_gmt":"2012-05-03T03:51:48","slug":"north-pennines-busmans-holiday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/birdwatching\/north-pennines-busmans-holiday","title":{"rendered":"North Pennines – Busman’s Holiday"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve got a busy few weeks coming up, giving talks locally,\u00a0exhibiting at\u00a0the Scottish Bird Fair<\/a>\u00a0and delivering the bird identification training courses for the North Pennines WildWatch<\/a> programme.\u00a0 Once that’s out of the way, we’ll be into our busy period for trips out with clients, and then delivering more training courses – this time on offshore wildlife survey techniques for MARINElife<\/a>\/North East Cetacean Project<\/a> and our local Wildlife Trusts.<\/p>\n

With all of that in mind we had a weekend in the North Pennines, staying at Saughy Rigg Farm<\/a> and making an early start on Saturday to visit a Black Grouse<\/strong><\/em> lek.\u00a0 Armed with our new Telinga Pro8W and Stereo DATmic…we sat in the car with the heaters on as the temperature hit 3C and it started snowing \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 We could see the grouse – they were sitting huddled in clumps of rush, looking decidely miserable – but they weren’t performing (at least not early on Saturday morning).\u00a0 A ghostly-pale Short-eared Owl<\/strong><\/em> braved the elements, quartering the grassland in search of prey, and the mic picked up the sound of drumming Snipe<\/strong><\/em>, calling Curlew<\/strong><\/em> and cackling Red Grouse<\/strong><\/em>, but once the Blackcock<\/strong><\/em> started lekking they were upwind of us and the wind tunnel effect of trying to record them led to a change of tactic and concentrating on photography.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the two days, we had excellent views of Red Grouse, Black Grouse, Golden Plover, Curlew, Common Snipe, Redshank, Curlew, Brown Hare, Roe Deer <\/strong><\/em>and <\/strong>Rabbit<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 The maze of little roads throughout the area offer lots of photographic opportunities so we made the most of them \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

\"Black<\/a>
Greyhens, Allendale, Northumberland 28\/04\/2012<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/div>\n
\"Brown<\/a>
Brown Hare, Weardale 28\/04\/2012<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/div>\n
\"Golden<\/a>
Golden Plover, Upper Teesdale 28\/04\/2012<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/div>\n
\"Black<\/a>
Black Grouse, Weardale 28\/04\/2012<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/div>\n
\"Black<\/a>
lekking Blackcocks, Upper Teesdale 28\/04\/2012<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve got a busy few weeks coming up, giving talks locally,\u00a0exhibiting at\u00a0the Scottish Bird Fair\u00a0and delivering the bird identification training courses for the North Pennines WildWatch programme.\u00a0 Once that’s out of the way, we’ll be into our busy period for trips out with clients, and then delivering more training courses – this time on offshore […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12],"tags":[54,57,373,172,175,94,453,544,210,284,208,358,66,543,456],"class_list":["post-1574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birdwatching","category-pennines","tag-black-grouse","tag-brown-hare","tag-common-snipe","tag-curlew","tag-golden-plover","tag-marinelife","tag-north-pennines-aonb","tag-north-pennines-wildwatch","tag-oystercatcher","tag-rabbit","tag-red-grouse","tag-redshank","tag-roe-deer","tag-scottish-bird-fair","tag-short-eared-owl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1574"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1609,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1574\/revisions\/1609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}