After a break from work and blogging, and our first proper holiday in quite a while, I got back into the swing of things on Sunday with a visit to probably my favourite mid-October location…<\/p>\n
Crossing the causeway to Holy Island<\/strong> is always accompanied by a sense of anticipation, and when I collected Graham and Joan from the Manor House they mentioned that Yellow-browed Warblers<\/strong><\/em> had been seen the day before.\u00a0 Checking the bushes and trees in the Vicar’s Garden didn’t produce any sight or sound of the Siberian speciality, but everywhere was heaving with Robins<\/strong><\/em> – presumably recent arrivals from the continent – and Grey Plover, Pale-bellied Brent Goose, Bar-tailed Godwit<\/strong><\/em> and Grey Seal<\/strong><\/em> could be seen, and heard, by turning through 90 degrees from the trees.\u00a0 After checking other suitable spots around the village, and finding a couple of Goldcrest<\/strong><\/em>, we crossed to the mainland and down to Bamburgh.\u00a0 Oystercatcher, Turnstone, Curlew, Purple Sandpiper<\/strong><\/em> and Knot<\/strong><\/em> were around the rocks as Eider<\/strong><\/em> and Guillemot<\/strong><\/em> rose and fell with the gentle swell of the sea and Gannet<\/strong><\/em> and Sandwich Tern<\/strong><\/em> plunged into shoals of fish offshore in conditions that wouldn’t have been out of place in mid-June.\u00a0 We made our way slowly back up the coast, taking in vast flocks of Wigeon<\/strong><\/em> over the mudflats and a Weasel<\/strong><\/em> that responded obligingly to my imitation of a dying mouse (the sound, rather than a visual imitation!).\u00a0 Little Egrets<\/strong><\/em> and Shelduck<\/strong><\/em> were exploiting the food supply on the exposed mud and we crossed back on to the island…only to learn that a White-tailed Eagle<\/strong><\/em> had been soaring high inland of us while we were watching the Weasel<\/strong><\/em> \ud83d\ude41\u00a0 We headed down to the causeway, to see if the eagle would make a reappearance, as flocks of Sanderling, Dunlin, Knot, Bar-tailed Godwit, Pale-bellied Brent Goose<\/strong><\/em> and Golden Plover<\/strong><\/em> concentrated on the rapidly diminishing areas of mud above the rising tide and a Peregrine<\/strong><\/em> powered across our field of view before it was time for me to cross back to the mainland and head south.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After a break from work and blogging, and our first proper holiday in quite a while, I got back into the swing of things on Sunday with a visit to probably my favourite mid-October location… Crossing the causeway to Holy Island is always accompanied by a sense of anticipation, and when I collected Graham and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,3,10,5],"tags":[147,451,540,172,288,149,185,135,175,400,835,128,334,243,108,55,176,116,80,223,189,359,308,376,181,403],"class_list":["post-2651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bamburgh-castle","category-birdwatching","category-lindisfarne","category-northumberland","tag-bar-tailed-godwit","tag-barn-swallow","tag-common-guillemot","tag-curlew","tag-dunlin","tag-eider","tag-gannet","tag-goldcrest","tag-golden-plover","tag-grey-plover","tag-grey-seal","tag-kestrel","tag-knot","tag-little-egret","tag-pale-bellied-brent-goose","tag-peregrine","tag-purple-sandpiper","tag-robin","tag-sanderling","tag-sandwich-tern","tag-shelduck","tag-turnstone","tag-weasel","tag-white-tailed-eagle","tag-wigeon","tag-yellow-browed-warbler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2651","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=2651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2653,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2651\/revisions\/2653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}