Sunday 19th November

A couple of trips to England to do with my voluntary work plus a long lasting heavy cold have cut back on my nature efforts recently.

Anyway got out on a bike ride on Wednesday and again did not get past the Nith before seeing these little items opposite the sewage works at Troqueer.  At first I thought tufted ducks but notable no tufts and not much like goosanders.  On inspecting the photo taken when they were at some distance, I think they are juvenile goldeneye.

Goldeneye

This ride was notable for the very large number of jays I heard screeching around and the sight of their white rumps as they took flight before me.  I've never known there to be so many to be around.  There must have been twenty on the way to and from New Abbey.

I stopped off briefly at Kirkconnel Flow to see if there were any crossbills around.  I didn't see any but a couple leaving the moss had seen them fly over.  There were also a few long-tailed tits around by the car park. A long-tailed tit also turned up in the garden this week but didn't show any interest in staying around.

Moving closer to New Abbey I took a bit of a detour on the path by Kirkconnell Hall towards the estuary, which revealed herons, curlew and a cormorant but by that time my hands were so cold I was starting to lose interest.

I don't think I'll go on the bike ride this week.  Apart from an increasing adversity to cold weather, the more I have got into cycling round in high vis gear at some speed, the less chance I get to be close to especially birds. So I think I may make a change and try walking a bit more over the next few weeks.

Back in the garden the coal tit has been turning up again, and a large amount of feathers in the area of the bird table hint that the apparently daft cat mentioned in a previous post may nearly have succeeded.  No pigeon has visited the bird table since, even though I moved it.

The last butterfly I saw was on 23rd October but there was one reported on Dumfries and Galloway Wildlike and Birding in early November.