Sunday 13th November

Longer than planned bike ride.  The plan was to continue along the Cairn valley past the Dunscore turn off, following the road (not a recognised cycle route) up into the moors to check for birds and see how steep it got, then turn back with a view to doing a circular next summer via Drumhumphry, Crocketford and Milton and home via the Military Road.

I knew it was only 10 miles to Corsock from the Dunscore turn off, and when the uphill proved to be a fairly gentle affair, it was just too tempting not to attempt the whole lot - so I ended up missing Drumhumphry and doing near on 30 miles while hurrying it a bit to make sure I was back in town before dusk.

Once again there were long-tailed tits all over the place.  As soon as the Cairn sidled up to the road, they were around but also again spotted a linnet (getting good at linnets!) in the top branches of a tree. Shortly after there were a couple of jays.

After that there was nothing extraordinary all the way to the Dunscore turn  apart from long-tailed tits and a young red deer I startled near the estate past the Shawhead turn off, which ran parallel to the road for a hundred yards before making an escape over the pheasant wiring.  I checked for dippers in the shallower bits of the Cairn but didn't see anything more than a heron startled by a farmworker crossing a bridge.  And of course a volley of long-tailed tits in the scruffy hedgerow past one of the farmhouses.

By now the road was in the middle of farmland that looked like it would offer more traces of pesticides than wildlife.  Once I topped the rise into the moorland proper, it was a brilliant downhill ride and looked superb - except that it was stunningly silent all the way to the T junction for the Corsock turn.

I may have sighted a couple of meadow pipits on the way into Corsock (where have all the meadow pipits gone?) but otherwise that was it!  What would it have been like in summer?

However the Law of Irregular Returns was again proved on the road to Crocketford, when I first saw a buzzard and then two pairs of red kites circling the area near Mawhirn Cottages.  This is the furthest I've seen them from their release point on the other side of Loch Ken.  Then just five minutes later, I saw my first fieldfares of the winter, a little group of six on a farmer's field.

Even the unpromising stretch along the military road had a couple of surprises with a lttle series of junior buzzards, and, just East of Lochfoot, another lonesome kestrel patrolling the young trees that have started to grow there, rather as if they were part of some conservation project.