Worth The Wait

On Sunday Alex, Vicki and I visited a certain location in Southern Scotland to see if we could catch up with some goshawks and ideally a better sighting than the very distant one I had at Kielder a few years back.

A location in Southern Scotland

Immediately on arrival we found the first thing we hoped to see - a man with a telescope.

It turned out he had come up from Derbyshire for the week and was able to give us all kinds of tips on goshawks and all kinds of other birds as well as butterflies.  He reported that goshawks were indeed about but that he hadn't seen any for the past half an hour.  So it was a case of waiting to see if anything turned up over lunchtime.

There were plenty of buzzards going up and I remembered being told at Kielder that looking for buzzards is a good start.

Eventually one goshawk appeared briefly but disappeared behind a nearby tree and only our expert companion got a view.

About half an hour later, a couple (I think) appeared but only Alex and the expert could see them.

Another half an hour and another bird was spotted over the treeline to the right and this time we could all see it clearly.  We noted its languid, slow-flapping flight pattern and shape in contrast to the gliding buzzards.  It was in fact the last bird to be identified although the three of us hung on for an hour or so afterwards.  

Certainly better than the Kielder sighting, it was still too distant for the couple of snaps Vicki managed to be usable.

The same could be said for the only other interesting event.   At one point I reckoned to have seen a brambling in the silver birch behind us and Vicki thought the same.  But it moved on sharply and the expert identified a bird landing nearby as a chaffinch.  Not necessarily the same bird though and Vicki and I reckoned the one we saw probably was a brambling.  It seemed to have a double white stripe on its flank and hints of speckling on the underside near the tail.

Apparently ospreys and peregrines can be seen at the same location and the scenery on the way looked fantastic in bright spring sunlight