{"id":3540,"date":"2016-08-16T14:50:50","date_gmt":"2016-08-16T13:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3540"},"modified":"2016-08-16T14:50:50","modified_gmt":"2016-08-16T13:50:50","slug":"the-sharp-eyes-of-youth-otter-safari-110816","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/northumberland\/druridge\/the-sharp-eyes-of-youth-otter-safari-110816","title":{"rendered":"The sharp eyes of youth; Otter Safari 11\/08\/16"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve always said that the best thing for spotting wildife is other wildlife, although the sharp eyes of younger humans could probably give them a run for their money&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I collected Gill from Alnwick, for her third trip with NEWT, and we headed to Bamburgh to collect Debbie, Roger, Joe and Ben.\u00a0 Our plan for the afternoon and evening was to search <a href=\"http:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/experiences\/tour\/12\" target=\"_blank\">Druridge Bay<\/a> and the Northumberland coast\u00a0 for <em><strong>Otters<\/strong><\/em> and other wildlife.\u00a0 <em><strong>Oystercatcher, Lapwing<\/strong><\/em> and <em><strong>Curlew<\/strong><\/em> quickly became the target for some digiscoping by Joe as five <em><strong>Little Egrets<\/strong><\/em> sat on the riverbank opposite and a brood of <em><strong>Goosander<\/strong><\/em> formed a menacing fleet crossing the river.\u00a0 Digibinning (yes, that is a real thing!) was then employed to capture images of a <em><strong>Great Crested Grebe<\/strong><\/em> and well-grown chick while the light was still reasonable, and we headed to our favourite dusk site.\u00a0 A <em><strong>Grey Heron<\/strong><\/em> stalked the shallows, catching lots of small fish and other unidentified prey, becoming another digibinning target, <em><strong>Mute Swans<\/strong><\/em> stalked serenely across the water, a <em><strong>Sedge Warbler<\/strong><\/em> flitted around in the reeds just in front of us and then <em><strong>Little Grebe, Mallard, Teal, Gadwall<\/strong><\/em> and <em><strong>Tufted Duck<\/strong><\/em> all fanned out from one reedbed giving the distinct impression that they&#8217;d rather be somewhere other than close to those reeds.\u00a0 <em><strong>Starlings<\/strong><\/em> flushed from their nighttime roost as a <em><strong>Grey Heron<\/strong><\/em> flew over and, as dusk began to take on a dark grey cloak, two young <em><strong>Tawny Owls<\/strong><\/em> flew out from a bush nearby, a <em><strong>Hedgehog<\/strong><\/em> trotted along in front of us and <em><strong>Noctule<\/strong><\/em> and <em><strong>pipistrelle bats<\/strong><\/em> could be seen and, with the aid of our bat detector, heard.\u00a0 The walk back to the car brought lots of wildlife and the benefit of Joe and Ben&#8217;s keen eyesight allowed us to avoid treading on <em><strong>slugs, snails, spiders<\/strong><\/em> and an incredible number of <em><strong>toadlets<\/strong><\/em> and <em><strong>froglets<\/strong><\/em> \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve always said that the best thing for spotting wildife is other wildlife, although the sharp eyes of younger humans could probably give them a run for their money&#8230; I collected Gill from Alnwick, for her third trip with NEWT, and we headed to Bamburgh to collect Debbie, Roger, Joe and Ben.\u00a0 Our plan for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,141],"tags":[319,62,172,378,488,283,489,123,243,360,171,60,210,292,227,161,78,169,182],"class_list":["post-3540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-druridge","category-northumberland-coast","tag-common-frog","tag-common-toad","tag-curlew","tag-goosander","tag-great-crested-grebe","tag-grey-heron","tag-hedgehog","tag-lapwing","tag-little-egret","tag-little-grebe","tag-mallard","tag-noctule-bat","tag-oystercatcher","tag-pipistrelle","tag-sedge-warbler","tag-starling","tag-tawny-owl","tag-teal","tag-tufted-duck"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3540","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=3540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3542,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3540\/revisions\/3542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}