{"id":2273,"date":"2014-03-25T18:31:23","date_gmt":"2014-03-25T17:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2273"},"modified":"2014-03-26T17:27:12","modified_gmt":"2014-03-26T16:27:12","slug":"now-you-see-them-now-you-dont-mini-safari-22032014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/birdwatching\/now-you-see-them-now-you-dont-mini-safari-22032014","title":{"rendered":"Now you see them, now you don’t; mini-safari 22\/03\/2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

To many people, the natural world around them is a bit of a mystery.\u00a0 I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in a hide, people have come in, gazed quizzically out of the shutters, very quietly said “there’s nothing here” and left…oblivious to all of the wildlife that was actually there \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 Sometimes though, there’s a lot of wildlife that even we haven’t noticed…<\/p>\n

I arrived at Church Point and collected Jillian and Clive & Lucie and Anna, and we set off on an exploration of the Northumberland Coast from Druridge Bay<\/a> to Alnmouth.\u00a0 A stiff breeze was ruffling the water’s surface as Cormorants<\/strong><\/em> roosted, with that look of prehistoric menace that they do so well, Little Grebes<\/strong><\/em> dived and Wigeon<\/strong> <\/em>grazed.\u00a0 Curlew<\/strong> <\/em>flew by and, as several noisy pairs of Canada Geese<\/strong><\/em> and Greylag Geese<\/strong><\/em> honked in alarm at an unseen danger, I was wondering where the bigger goose flocks were.\u00a0 We hadn’t heard them, there hadn’t been any distant skeins breaking the skyline, nothing in fact to suggest there were any other geese<\/strong> <\/em>around.\u00a0 Then, we had help from the heavens above…as the RAF Sea King helicopter flew over from the south.\u00a0 Suddenly, the sky was filled with nearly one thousand agitated, yapping, Pink-footed Geese<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 They’d presumably been feeding just out of view behind a hedge, quietly getting on with the serious business of feeding up ready for the journey back north that they’ll soon be undertaking.\u00a0 As the helicopter disappeared to the north the geese<\/strong> <\/em>settled back down, and again they were very unobtrusive.<\/p>\n

Our dusk destination was a little stretch of river that we’ve visited regularly in recent weeks.\u00a0 Moorhens<\/strong> <\/em>were patrolling the reed edges, a Grey Heron<\/strong><\/em> flew across the river and perched in a tree, before\u00a0 flying westwards towards the sunset behind another heron<\/strong><\/em>, Sea Trout<\/strong><\/em> were swirling, leaping, and sipping hapless insects from the surface and the only thing missing from the idyllic setting was our favourite predator…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To many people, the natural world around them is a bit of a mystery.\u00a0 I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in a hide, people have come in, gazed quizzically out of the shutters, very quietly said “there’s nothing here” and left…oblivious to all of the wildlife that was actually there \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9,5,141,139],"tags":[560,372,172,283,190,360,198,129,613,181],"class_list":["post-2273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birdwatching","category-druridge","category-northumberland","category-northumberland-coast","category-southeast-northumberland","tag-canada-goose","tag-cormorant","tag-curlew","tag-grey-heron","tag-greylag-goose","tag-little-grebe","tag-moorhen","tag-pink-footed-goose","tag-sea-trout","tag-wigeon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273","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=2273"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2279,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273\/revisions\/2279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}