{"id":2337,"date":"2014-04-21T15:07:05","date_gmt":"2014-04-21T14:07:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2337"},"modified":"2014-04-21T15:07:05","modified_gmt":"2014-04-21T14:07:05","slug":"a-sting-in-the-tale-druridge-bay-10042014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/birdwatching\/a-sting-in-the-tale-druridge-bay-10042014","title":{"rendered":"A sting in the tale; Druridge Bay 10\/04\/2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

With a holiday for a family wedding in Scotland looming, my last day out with clients for a couple of weeks was a mini-safari around Druridge Bay<\/a>.\u00a0 The unpredictable weather of recent weeks had been replaced by something much better as we headed north along the coast.<\/p>\n

The remnants of winter birdwatching, in the shape of Wigeon, Goldeneye, Pintail <\/strong><\/em>and <\/strong>Red-breasted Merganser,<\/strong><\/em> were intermingled with the early spring in the elegant form of at least three Avocets,<\/strong><\/em> and a lone Whooper Swan<\/strong><\/em>, in the midst of a herd of Mute Swans,<\/strong><\/em> probably hasn’t made it’s mind up what it’s doing for the summer yet.\u00a0 Towards the end of the afternoon a yapping flock of Pink-footed Geese<\/strong><\/em> flew north, quickly gaining altitude as if heading off towards Iceland…before encountering the stiff northwesterly wind and looping back round again…and again…and again, before they eventually gave it up as a bad job and settled on the water with the discordant sounds of Canada <\/strong><\/em>and <\/strong>Greylag Geese<\/strong><\/em> around them.\u00a0 The comings and goings at a feeding station held the attention for some time, with Great Tits, Coal Tits, Blue Tits, Tree Sparrows <\/strong><\/em>and <\/strong>Chaffinches<\/strong><\/em> all clustering around the feeders.<\/p>\n

Trips including young children can be a bit fraught but 3-year old Sylvie demonstrated a sharp eye for finding spiders,<\/strong> <\/em>and 5-year old Felix, with some help from his little sister, wove a remarkable tale of a superhero Otter<\/strong> <\/em>with a poisonous sting in it’s tail that I could have listened to for the rest of the day – a great way to finish work before NEWT’s first ‘proper’ holiday for a long time \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With a holiday for a family wedding in Scotland looming, my last day out with clients for a couple of weeks was a mini-safari around Druridge Bay.\u00a0 The unpredictable weather of recent weeks had been replaced by something much better as we headed north along the coast. The remnants of winter birdwatching, in the shape […]<\/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],"tags":[40,46,560,102,101,168,45,190,178,129,179,188,125,130,181],"class_list":["post-2337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birdwatching","category-druridge","category-northumberland","tag-avocet","tag-blue-tit","tag-canada-goose","tag-chaffinch","tag-coal-tit","tag-goldeneye","tag-great-tit","tag-greylag-goose","tag-mute-swan","tag-pink-footed-goose","tag-pintail","tag-red-breasted-merganser","tag-tree-sparrow","tag-whooper-swan","tag-wigeon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337","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=2337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2339,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337\/revisions\/2339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}