Birdwatching in Northumberland in mid-late October usually means praying for southeasterlies and rain, and staying on or close to the coast.<\/p>\n
Yesterday I did something very different…<\/p>\n
I met up with my guide for the day at an anonymous rendezvous location and we set off on a mystery tour. It was a mystery to me anyway, as all I knew was that we were going to visit a number of confidential sites in search of Hen Harriers, the heavily persecuted, much maligned ‘grey hawk’ of the upland areas of northern Britain. For nearly seven hours we walked across heather moorland, banks of bracken, swathes of rush, up hills and down narrow gullies. The topic of conversation rarely departed from raptors; where are the blatant ‘holes’ in Buzzard distribution in the county? where are Hobbies present during the breeding season? what really happened with the failed Hen Harrier breeding attempts in Northumberland this year?<\/p>\n
Undaunted by the cold wind, occasional stinging raindrops and the rough terrain that induced a strangely satisfying burning sensation in my thigh muscles, we continued combing the moorland. Raptor workers throughout Britain are doing this regularly, monitoring populations and distribution and unearthing evidence of wrongdoing. Eventually we arrived at a regular roost site. As the wind strengthened and the rain began lashing our faces, the highlights of the day happened; first a male Merlin raced up a gully next to us and then, our prime objective for the day, an adult male Hen Harrier closely hugging the heather-clad slopes below our watchpoint before plunging into the bracken on an adjacent hillside. It was a real busman’s holiday, as I regularly check a couple of roost sites myself during the winter months, but educational to spend time on someone else’s patch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Birdwatching in Northumberland in mid-late October usually means praying for southeasterlies and rain, and staying on or close to the coast. Yesterday I did something very different… I met up with my guide for the day at an anonymous rendezvous location and we set off on a mystery tour. It was a mystery to me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190","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=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}