Last Wednesday was a trip I’d been looking forward to for some time.\u00a0 Janice and David have visited Northumberland annually for many years and it was David’s 50th birthday so Janice had arranged an afternoon out for him \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Arriving at Cresswell<\/strong>, I was impressed by the naked-eye view of a Red-throated Diver<\/strong><\/em> from the window of the cottage, and we were soon on our way up the coast, for an afternoon’s birdwatching concentrating on locations where there is a better than average chance of seeing an Otter<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 David is a keen reader of some of our local birdwatching blogs and it wasn’t long before we bumped into a familiar name as we enjoyed East Chevington’s<\/strong> quartet of grebes <\/strong><\/em>– <\/strong>Little, Great Crested, Slavonian <\/strong><\/em>and <\/strong>Red-necked<\/strong><\/em> – in the company of Alan Gilbertson, who showed us an image he’d taken of Bean Geese<\/strong><\/em> at Hauxley<\/strong>.\u00a0 Goldeneye, Red-breasted Merganser, Long-tailed Duck, Tufted Duck, Teal, Wigeon, Mallard <\/strong><\/em>and <\/strong>Gadwall<\/strong><\/em> were all stunning in the beautiful afternoon light and we continued on our way.\u00a0 The closure of one of the footpaths at Hauxley <\/strong>was going to make viewing the geese<\/strong> <\/em>slightly tricky, as we’d have to be looking into the sun.\u00a0 We managed to find one spot that gave us a good view of the birds and, after we’d sifted through plenty of Greylag, Canada <\/strong><\/em>and <\/strong>Pink-footed Geese,<\/strong><\/em> <\/strong>which were obligingly on the pool rather than on a distant field, I spotted the brown wings and orange legs of a Tundra Bean Goose,<\/strong><\/em> <\/strong>which was asleep but woke to allow excellent comparison with the Pinkfeet<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n On to a delightful spot that we’ve been checking recently for Otter<\/strong><\/em>, and the songs of Wren, Greenfinch <\/strong><\/em>and <\/strong>Goldfinch<\/strong><\/em> filled the air, as well as the persistent ‘rain song’ of a male Chaffinch<\/strong><\/em>, <\/strong>a Dipper<\/strong> <\/em>came along the river, calling, and secreted itself away from view under the bridge we were standing on, a Grey Wagtail<\/strong><\/em> flew over calling, a Common Buzzard<\/strong><\/em> glided low over the trees and a flock of Curlew<\/strong><\/em> rose noisily from nearby fields.\u00a0 The Chaffinch<\/strong> <\/em>and his mate were busy helping themselves to flies<\/strong><\/em> that were trapped in spider<\/strong> <\/em>webs, and a pair of Red-breasted Mergansers<\/strong><\/em> really looked at their best in the sublime low sunlight.<\/p>\n Our final port of call was Cresswell Pond<\/strong>, which was bathed in warm orange sunlight with the tops of the reeds appearing to be aflame as the sun sank closer and closer to the horizon.\u00a0 Common Snipe<\/strong><\/em> were roosting at the water’s edge and a Starling<\/strong> <\/em>murmuration twisted and turned above the skyline to the north as the light faded and I returned David back to the cottage.\u00a0 Incredibly, five hours had quite simply flown past as we enjoyed an afternoon birdwatching and chatting about wind farms, raptor persecution, marine conservation and Scottish independence.\u00a0 Do you know, you can easily tie all of those topics together \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last Wednesday was a trip I’d been looking forward to for some time.\u00a0 Janice and David have visited Northumberland annually for many years and it was David’s 50th birthday so Janice had arranged an afternoon out for him \ud83d\ude42 Arriving at Cresswell, I was impressed by the naked-eye view of a Red-throated Diver from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9,5,139],"tags":[560,102,148,373,372,172,257,170,168,103,488,75,256,190,128,123,360,68,171,129,188,609,69,177,161,169,182,611,181,421],"class_list":["post-2267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birdwatching","category-druridge","category-northumberland","category-southeast-northumberland","tag-canada-goose","tag-chaffinch","tag-common-buzzard","tag-common-snipe","tag-cormorant","tag-curlew","tag-dipper","tag-gadwall","tag-goldeneye","tag-goldfinch","tag-great-crested-grebe","tag-greenfinch","tag-grey-wagtail","tag-greylag-goose","tag-kestrel","tag-lapwing","tag-little-grebe","tag-long-tailed-duck","tag-mallard","tag-pink-footed-goose","tag-red-breasted-merganser","tag-red-necked-grebe","tag-red-throated-diver","tag-slavonian-grebe","tag-starling","tag-teal","tag-tufted-duck","tag-tundra-bean-goose","tag-wigeon","tag-wren"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267","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=2267"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2271,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267\/revisions\/2271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}