Watching wildlife tends to involve also having to spend some time waiting for it to appear, and conversations are occasionally slightly surreal…<\/p>\n
I collected Jo and Crawford from Eshott ahead of a day searching for Otters<\/strong><\/em><\/a> around Druridge Bay<\/strong><\/em><\/a> and southeast Northumberland.\u00a0 Heavy overnight rain had cleared but the roads were liberally strewn with deep puddles as we headed to the coast.\u00a0 Crawford has spent a lot of time watching and photographing Otters in Shetland and it was great to compare observations, and discuss photography, as we scanned the water looking for any sign of the elusive predator.\u00a0 Little Grebe, Goldeneye<\/strong><\/em> and Mute Swan<\/strong><\/em> all appeared unmolested, then I noticed three Mallard<\/strong><\/em> swimming slightly faster than all of the other ducks…and there was an Otter<\/strong><\/em> twisting and turning, surfacing to crunch whatever it had just caught before submerging again \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 We watched it for a little while but it was moving away from us so we moved along to a section of bank closer to where we’d last seen it.\u00a0 Better views there, and then another shift of position saw us on the water’s edge, with the Otter<\/strong><\/em> performing around 20m in front of Crawford’s camera.\u00a0 Our encounter lasted nearly an hour, and included several ‘porpoising’ dives with the Otter<\/strong><\/em> leaping almost completely clear of the water and diving near vertically.<\/p>\n The cold and damp of the afternoon brought views of a very obliging White-fronted Goose<\/strong><\/em> and, approaching dusk, Lapwing<\/strong><\/em> and Curlew<\/strong><\/em> called as Starlings<\/strong><\/em> hurried to roost and a Barn Owl<\/strong><\/em> ghosted by.\u00a0 Wildlife presenters featured in a very entertaining discussion which led on to game shows and the revelation that Keith Chegwin – that’s right the cherub-faced star of Multi-coloured Swap Shop, Cheggers Plays Pop and Saturday Superstore – had once presented a game show naked.\u00a0 Now two of us thought this unlikely, but a quick search on Google confirmed that Crawford wasn’t imagining it and that Cheggers had indeed hosted a one-off show called Naked Jungle, wearing nothing other than a hat!\u00a0 Every day’s an education…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Watching wildlife tends to involve also having to spend some time waiting for it to appear, and conversations are occasionally slightly surreal… I collected Jo and Crawford from Eshott ahead of a day searching for Otters around Druridge Bay and southeast Northumberland.\u00a0 Heavy overnight rain had cleared but the roads were liberally strewn with deep […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,139],"tags":[97,172,168,123,360,171,178,837,161,819],"class_list":["post-3711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-druridge","category-southeast-northumberland","tag-barn-owl","tag-curlew","tag-goldeneye","tag-lapwing","tag-little-grebe","tag-mallard","tag-mute-swan","tag-otter","tag-starling","tag-white-fronted-goose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3711","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=3711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3713,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3711\/revisions\/3713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}