After the changeable weather during the Birdwatching Northumberland press trip culminated in excellent conditions on Monday, I hoped that we would get more of the same on Tuesday for a Lindisfarne Safari that I was leading.\u00a0 It looked good; at home we had a heavy frost and clear blue skies.\u00a0 Yet just a few miles down the road, as I headed to Gosforth to collect our client, there was a bank of thick fog.\u00a0 Not to worry, conditions might be better on Holy Island…they weren’t, in fact the fog was even thicker.\u00a0 As we stood on the Heugh it was eerie.\u00a0 A bitingly cold southeasterly wind and visibility down to just a few metres.\u00a0 Oystercatchers, Redshanks and Herring Gulls could all be heard through the mist and we continued our journey around the island.\u00a0 Song Thrushes lifted from each clump of grass as we walked towards the harbour and slightly improved visibility allowed us to look closely at Teal, Bar-tailed Godwits and Curlew.\u00a0 Lichens and mosses came\u00a0under great scrutiny (remarkable structures when viewed under a hand lens).\u00a0 Off the island we found Pale-bellied Brent Geese, small groups of Whooper Swans, a field with lots of Greylag and Pink-footed Geese (and a ‘Canalag’ hybrid), several Kestrels, an incredibly obliging Common Buzzard, a mixed thrush flock (Redwing, Fieldfare, Mistle Thrush, Song Thrush and Blackbird), plenty of waders and, finally, as the mist returned and brought steady rainfall with it, Common Scoter,\u00a0Shag\u00a0and Eider on the sea. As we drove back down the A1 the worsening weather made it seem likely that we’d had better conditions than back at home.\u00a0 There’s always something to see, whatever the weather.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After the changeable weather during the Birdwatching Northumberland press trip culminated in excellent conditions on Monday, I hoped that we would get more of the same on Tuesday for a Lindisfarne Safari that I was leading.\u00a0 It looked good; at home we had a heavy frost and clear blue skies.\u00a0 Yet just a few miles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,5],"tags":[147,823,133,148,67,149,23,128,30,146,144,825,108,22,145],"class_list":["post-405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lindisfarne","category-northumberland","tag-bar-tailed-godwit","tag-birdwatching","tag-blackbird","tag-common-buzzard","tag-common-scoter","tag-eider","tag-fieldfare","tag-kestrel","tag-lichens","tag-mistle-thrush","tag-mosses","tag-northumberland","tag-pale-bellied-brent-goose","tag-redwing","tag-song-thrush"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405","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=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":409,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions\/409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}