{"id":934,"date":"2011-03-21T07:10:25","date_gmt":"2011-03-21T07:10:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/?p=934"},"modified":"2011-03-21T07:10:25","modified_gmt":"2011-03-21T07:10:25","slug":"pressing-the-right-buttons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/birdwatching\/pressing-the-right-buttons","title":{"rendered":"Pressing the right buttons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saturday evening saw me in the far southwest of Northumberland, with a potentially tricky assignment…’in 2 hours, show a visiting journalist, and her husband,\u00a0the best birdwatching\u00a0in the North Pennines<\/a>‘.<\/p>\n

So, we\u00a0stealthily approached\u00a0four of our favourite Black Grouse<\/strong><\/em> sites, enjoying unbelievably close views of 9 Blackcocks<\/strong><\/em>, \u00a0travelled across bleak, exposed, moorland roads,\u00a0marvelling at the luminosity of the red eyebrows of an almost endless succession of Red Grouse<\/strong><\/em>, watched Curlew, Oystercatcher<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 and Lapwing<\/em><\/strong> displaying and gazed, awestruck, at the incredible beauty of breeding-plumaged Golden Plover<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 The 2 grouse species were so close that Jo-anne was able to practice her wildlife photography using a small compact camera with a quite limited zoom.\u00a0 The big open landscapes, and birds perched on tussocks in the heather, lend themselves well to an ‘un-British’ style of wildlife photography; one that I’m planning to work on whenever the time, and opportunity, arises this year.<\/p>\n

I’d planned the route to take in a Short-eared Owl<\/em><\/strong> breeding site at sunset.\u00a0 They’ve been a bit thin on the ground (and in the air)\u00a0at some of their\u00a0traditional Northumberland wintering sites so it was a long-shot, and meant going beyond the 2 hour time limit although, unsurprisingly,\u00a0this went down quite well with\u00a0our guests \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 Fortune favours the brave and, after\u00a02 hours of\u00a0guided birdwatching that, I’m assured, delivered what I’d been asked to, the ghostly shape crossing the moors in the twilight, and the cryptic plumage and staring yellow eyes as the bird perched obligingly on a fence post just metres away from us, was\u00a0rightly described as\u00a0 “the icing on the cake”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saturday evening saw me in the far southwest of Northumberland, with a potentially tricky assignment…’in 2 hours, show a visiting journalist, and her husband,\u00a0the best birdwatching\u00a0in the North Pennines‘. So, we\u00a0stealthily approached\u00a0four of our favourite Black Grouse sites, enjoying unbelievably close views of 9 Blackcocks, \u00a0travelled across bleak, exposed, moorland roads,\u00a0marvelling at the luminosity of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12,5,16],"tags":[54,172,175,394,123,210,208,456],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birdwatching","category-pennines","category-northumberland","category-photography","tag-black-grouse","tag-curlew","tag-golden-plover","tag-guided-birdwatching","tag-lapwing","tag-oystercatcher","tag-red-grouse","tag-short-eared-owl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","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=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":943,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions\/943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}