I can’t think of a species of bird that I don’t enjoy watching.\u00a0 Every last one of them has something special, but some just have more than others…<\/p>\n
I collected Steve and Carrie from the Bamburgh Castle Inn<\/a> and we headed north towards Lindisfarne<\/a>.\u00a0 Starting with a walk along the Crooked Lonnen we’d soon found Spotted Flycatcher, Fieldfare<\/strong><\/em> and a stunning male Whinchat<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 Surely the rest of the island would be dripping with passage migrants?\u00a0 As it turned out that was pretty much it for migrants, but the rest of the day produced a wealth of great birds.\u00a0 The male Whinchat<\/strong><\/em> was a clear leader in my own personal bird of the day competition, but a plethora of Meadow Pipits<\/strong><\/em> and Skylarks<\/strong><\/em> were pretty impressive.\u00a0 Male Reed Buntings<\/strong><\/em> are always strikingly contrasty birds and Turnstone, Purple Sandpiper, Oystercatcher, Curlew, Red-breasted Merganser, Eider<\/strong><\/em> and Common Scoter<\/strong><\/em> are in really excellent condition at the moment.\u00a0 Lines of Gannets<\/strong><\/em> flying south were impressive and Sandwich Terns<\/strong><\/em> were plunge-diving right in front of us.<\/p>\n Then, as we were about to leave the island (after all, it wouldn’t do to get stranded by the incoming tide…) Carrie spotted a Short-eared Owl<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 I soon found a second one, as they hunted through the dunes, and the Whinchat<\/strong><\/em> had been unceremoniously kicked off the top step of the podium.\u00a0 I find it hard to think of any time that an owl<\/strong><\/em> wouldn’t be my bird of the day…and then we came across a couple of breeding-plumaged Grey Plovers<\/strong><\/em> \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I can’t think of a species of bird that I don’t enjoy watching.\u00a0 Every last one of them has something special, but some just have more than others… I collected Steve and Carrie from the Bamburgh Castle Inn and we headed north towards Lindisfarne.\u00a0 Starting with a walk along the Crooked Lonnen we’d soon found […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[67,172,149,23,185,400,207,210,176,761,127,223,456,191,285,359,262],"class_list":["post-3295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lindisfarne","tag-common-scoter","tag-curlew","tag-eider","tag-fieldfare","tag-gannet","tag-grey-plover","tag-meadow-pipit","tag-oystercatcher","tag-purple-sandpiper","tag-red-brested-merganser","tag-reed-bunting","tag-sandwich-tern","tag-short-eared-owl","tag-skylark","tag-spotted-flycatcher","tag-turnstone","tag-whinchat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3295","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=3295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3297,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3295\/revisions\/3297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}