After a couple of days in the office (although I’m not complaining; I spent those two days finalising details for two new projects and taking bookings for group photography trips and a Northumberland birdwatching holiday) it was good to get out with clients this morning.\u00a0 Our three clients became just one though, due to the Icelandic volcano,\u00a0and I collected Ellen from Newbiggin by the Sea for a tour of southeast Northumberland and Druridge Bay.\u00a0 We started with a search for Mediterranean Gulls.\u00a0 None of the nice, ghostly white-winged adults were around but there was a 2nd year bird amongst the Black-headed Gulls.\u00a0 It made\u00a0a good identification subject, as the lack of obvious white wings meant that it was\u00a0possible to focus on structure rather than just plumage, although the obvious wing-bar\u00a0ensured that a discussion of wing topography was easy to relate to what we could see flying in front of us.<\/p>\n
Under deep blue skies with fluffy white clouds this was a beautiful morning, although the bitingly cold, howling northwesterly meant that hats and gloves were in order.\u00a0 At Cresswell we admired our bird of the day; a stunning male Black-headed Wagtail.\u00a0 I’d never seen one before, and as Ellen is from the southwestern US it was a lifer for her as well.\u00a0 The geographical connection to where I spent 6 months in 1999\/2000 focused conversation on two of my favourite topics; birdwatching and Mexican food.\u00a0 Summer visitors were evident, with Swallow and Sand Martin flying over all the coastal pools, Willow Warblers singing their silvery, descending cadence\u00a0sheltered from\u00a0the wind, a nervous Common Sandpiper just a few metres away from us and, best of all one of the best looking ducks to have ever dabbled around Druridge Pools, Garganey, was another lifer for Ellen.\u00a0 A pair of Stonechats perched in a bare hawthorn were a welcome sight, after a winter that will have surely decimated their population.\u00a0 The three hours passed incredibly quickly and I dropped\u00a0a happy birdwatcher in Morpeth to continue the next leg of her journey through Northumberland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After a couple of days in the office (although I’m not complaining; I spent those two days finalising details for two new projects and taking bookings for group photography trips and a Northumberland birdwatching holiday) it was good to get out with clients this morning.\u00a0 Our three clients became just one though, due to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9,5,139],"tags":[823,216,214,212,219,193,220,218,215,217,213],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birdwatching","category-druridge","category-northumberland","category-southeast-northumberland","tag-birdwatching","tag-black-headed-wagtail","tag-common-sandpiper","tag-garganey","tag-icelandic-volcano","tag-mediterranean-gull","tag-northumberland-birdwatching","tag-sand-martin","tag-stonechat","tag-swallow","tag-willow-warbler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","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=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":490,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions\/490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}