{"id":4314,"date":"2018-05-07T10:48:41","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T09:48:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/?p=4314"},"modified":"2018-05-07T10:48:41","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T09:48:41","slug":"into-the-arena-north-pennines-safari-03-05-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/uncategorized\/into-the-arena-north-pennines-safari-03-05-18","title":{"rendered":"Into the arena; North Pennines Safari 03\/05\/18"},"content":{"rendered":"

After collecting David from Newbiggin we headed across to Hexham and quickly found Becky, for her 2nd day out with NEWT, and then Emma and Rob before heading into the North Pennines<\/a>, with one particular experience high on everybody’s wish list for the day…<\/p>\n

In a bitterly cold westerly wind, birds were mainly keeping their heads down.\u00a0 Red Grouse<\/strong><\/em> popped up on the heather, Wheatears<\/strong><\/em> and Meadow Pipits<\/strong><\/em> hopped along drystone walls, Snipe, Curlew <\/strong><\/em>and Lapwing<\/strong><\/em> were displaying and Buzzard<\/strong><\/em> and Kestrel<\/strong><\/em> occasionally braved the breeze.\u00a0 A Red Squirrel<\/strong><\/em> ran across the road and vanished into a tree, a Stoat<\/strong><\/em> ran up a wall and Roe Deer<\/strong><\/em> were grazing in the relative shelter of the valley bottoms.\u00a0 A quick check of our favourite Black Grouse<\/strong><\/em> spot just before lunch produced no birds, and just a lone Blackcock<\/strong><\/em> feeding in a nearby field.\u00a0 A post-lunch walk didn’t last as long as planned, with fairly ferocious wind-chill making it seem more mid-Winter than early May so we headed back to look for grouse<\/strong><\/em>…<\/p>\n

Where there were no grouse<\/strong><\/em> a couple of hours earlier, now there were 17 Blackcock<\/strong><\/em>, some feeding in long grass and some sleeping in the open.\u00a0 Then, an unseen trigger launched the lek.\u00a0 White tail feathers could be seen with the naked eye from our vantage point and the birds were struggling for dominance of the gladiatorial arena.\u00a0 Some were half-heated about it and quickly stopped displaying and just watched the remaining birds.\u00a0 Some were aggressively charging at each other and, eventually, just two birds were still displaying.\u00a0 One seemed to be the alpha male of the lek, perched on a tussock in the centre of the lek he was holding the prime spot.\u00a0 Undaunted, his one remaining challenger continued displaying and, as far as we could tell, the challenger had more stamina than the ‘king of the castle’ who lowered his tail feathers, dropped his wings, hopped down from the tussock and made a slow dignified exit from the arena into the surrounding long grass before flying away and leaving the one last displaying Blackcock<\/strong><\/em> strutting his stuff \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After collecting David from Newbiggin we headed across to Hexham and quickly found Becky, for her 2nd day out with NEWT, and then Emma and Rob before heading into the North Pennines, with one particular experience high on everybody’s wish list for the day… In a bitterly cold westerly wind, birds were mainly keeping their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[54,53,172,128,123,207,208,833,358,66,204,183],"class_list":["post-4314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-black-grouse","tag-buzzard","tag-curlew","tag-kestrel","tag-lapwing","tag-meadow-pipit","tag-red-grouse","tag-red-squirrel","tag-redshank","tag-roe-deer","tag-snipe","tag-stoat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4314","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=4314"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4316,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4314\/revisions\/4316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}