Last Wednesday's bike ride turned into a time trial rather than a nature watch but a visit from Malcolm gave the opportunity to make a couple of excursions into birdland.
On Friday we decided on an evening trip to the Ken Dee Marshes Reserve, my personal agenda being the continuing pursuit of summer visitors as well as the chance for Malcolm to see things he hasn't encountered before. I was also hoping that an evening visit might be more productive than the last couple of late morning sessions.
Frankly, the reserve proved somewhat frugal in revealing its potential. A possible explanation was the large colony of nesting black-headed gulls that have colonised the islands between the two main hides. Noticeably there was not much non-gull life out on the lagoon apart from a couple of sunbathing tourists on the far bank of Loch Ken. Remarks in the logbook suggested that other species are not best mates with black-headed gulls.
The feeders did at least attract male and female woodpeckers, a great tit and eventually a rather pale looking nuthatch, presumably a female.
On the way to and back from the second hide, I did at least manage to identify a spotted flycatcher emerging from the nesting boxes. Of redstart there was (as ever at this location) no visible sign and we did not hear the wood warbler singing, though we did both have the experience of thinking that birds emerging from nesting boxes looked too yellow to be flycatchers. Surely not?.. More likely to have been blue tits.
As last year even pied flycatcher seemed to be a bit of an isolated experience rather than the frequent one encountered in past years. ON the feeder at the now somewhat dilapidated hide, woodpecker and nuthatch duly reappeared.
There wasn't anything else on the way back to the car park, where a singing song thrush displaying clearly at the top of a nearby tree kind of ironised the whole experience.
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