On days when one species doesn’t appear, the supporting cast can often be equally stunning.<\/p>\n
An icy breeze was whistling around the car as I collected Matt and Kate for a day searching for Otters<\/strong> <\/em>and other wildlife around southeast Northumberland.\u00a0 We started with a riverside walk and were soon enjoying excellent views of a Kingfisher<\/strong><\/em>, stunning orange and electric blue, as it perched, hovered, dived and whizzed backwards and forwards along the river.\u00a0 A Grey Wagtail<\/strong><\/em> bobbed around, oblivious to our presence, and a Little Grebe<\/strong><\/em> dived in the gravelly shallows.<\/p>\n Our next port of call produced a mixture of pleasure and sadness; while we were watching three Red Squirrels<\/strong><\/em> a Grey Squirrel<\/strong><\/em> appeared \ud83d\ude41 Northumberland is probably the best place to see Red Squirrel<\/strong><\/em> in England, and the southeast of the county still has a few sites where excellent views can be obtained, but the arrival of Greys is often followed by the rapid spread of parapox through the local Red population.<\/p>\n A stop at East Chevington produced lots of Tufted Ducks<\/strong><\/em> and Goldeneye<\/strong><\/em>, more Little Grebes<\/strong><\/em> and a Grey Heron<\/strong><\/em>…and a strengthening breeze and increasing cloud cover.\u00a0 If there was an Otter<\/strong> <\/em>about, it was doing the sensible thing and keeping itself hidden away out of the wind.\u00a0 Whooper Swans<\/strong><\/em> were sitting in a flooded field, with Mute Swans<\/strong><\/em> nearby for ease of comparison, and everything we encountered was facing into the wind to minimise heat loss.<\/p>\n Our final site for the day was another stretch of river; one that we walk regularly ourselves, and where we’d had up-to-date info about Otter<\/strong> <\/em>activity.\u00a0 A stunning Red Fox<\/strong><\/em> watched us inquisitively from the opposite side of the river, Moorhens<\/strong> <\/em>swam back and forth with that curious jerky motion that they have and, as daylight gave way to darkness and a Tawny Owl<\/strong><\/em> called nearby, a succession of dog walkers commented “you should have been here yesterday…”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On days when one species doesn’t appear, the supporting cast can often be equally stunning. An icy breeze was whistling around the car as I collected Matt and Kate for a day searching for Otters and other wildlife around southeast Northumberland.\u00a0 We started with a riverside walk and were soon enjoying excellent views of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,114,19,139],"tags":[372,168,283,256,120,360,178,837,847,833,78,182,130],"class_list":["post-1831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-northumberland","category-red-fox","category-red-squirrel","category-southeast-northumberland","tag-cormorant","tag-goldeneye","tag-grey-heron","tag-grey-wagtail","tag-kingfisher","tag-little-grebe","tag-mute-swan","tag-otter","tag-red-fox","tag-red-squirrel","tag-tawny-owl","tag-tufted-duck","tag-whooper-swan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831","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=1831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1832,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions\/1832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}