The road to Scotland: Fairburn Ings & St Aidan’s RSPB
With everything that has happened over the last couple of years, it’s quite something to be able to write about this week long trip up into the Highlands of Scotland.
A lot of planning had been put into this by Phil who has plotted practically ever step of the trip we are taking. There are five of us going up for the Heatherlea tour of the Highlands and Skye with three of us, Phil, Brenda and myself starting off from Essex and winding our way slowly but purposely stopping at some strategic sites along the way. We will meet our other cohorts, Kev and Viv at the Mountview Hotel in Nethy Bridge on Saturday evening.
Our first port of call was Fairburn Ings. This is a 1,000-acre RSPB nature reserve developed from the area being flooded regularly by the River Aire. and includes a large lake and a number of smaller lakes, ponds and dikes. The area has been the scene of industrial and mining operations for circa 150 years, and, although the valley floods naturally, the permanent waterbodies are the result of subsidence of a former coal mine.
In the pond-dipping area, Brenda spotted a kingfisher – a flash of turquoise and orange at the dipping pool. We then went to view the sand martins who were making regular visits to the nesting bank and we watched them from the open hide.
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| Sand Martin |
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| Spoonbill |
As we negotiated the strong breeze, we had at least three occasions where we heard booming bitterns. Unfortunately we didn’t get to see these majestic birds but just the audio experience of the booming is enough to make me smile.
Another amazing thing were the numbers of willow warblers singing their sweet summer song. These warblers are generally in trouble with their numbers dropping year on year. Certainly in the Home Counties, I have found them harder to come by as the spring season unfolds. Here at Fairburn Ings, the opposite seems to be the case. With a lot of birch and willow planting, the RSPB has clearly found a way to encourage these dainty birds and I counted at least thirty singing birds as we went.
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| Willow Warbler |
Most of the watercourses held similar birds; tufted ducks, pochard, little and great crested grebes, coot, moorhen, geese galore and black-headed gulls. We occasionally heard cetti’s warblers and one or two reed buntings.
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| Great Crested Grebe |
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| Tufted Duck |
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| Little Egret |
As we took the circular walk around the reserve, I was flushed two grey partridge – quite a surprise for me, However, it turns out that the RSPB have in place a biodiversity plan that includes the development of grey partridges at Fairburn Ings. So not really a surprise it would appear.
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| Welcome board in front of the Dragline Excavator (Oddball) |
From Fairburn Ings, we headed to St Aidan RSPB reserve, a forming opencast mine. We were meet by Kylie, a cheerful and extremely helpful RSPB ranger from South Africa. She gave us directions to a Little owl haunt and pointed out where we would (not) see black-necked grebes.
With many of the same species as Fairburn Ings, we quickly made our way to where the black-necked grebes has been noted. We looked long and hard but couldn’t locate these lovely grebes. We did see common terns and a great white egret – now really becoming established across the UK as well as a few stock dove and skylark.
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| Skylark |
As we worked our way back to the start, we saw a few people watching something up at the dragline excavator (oddball) and we guessed we were about to see the little owl but in fact it was a pair of nesting kestrels. The little owl was playing hard to see but after a bit of searching, someone located the owl and eventually, we all got to see it.
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| Common Kestrels |
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| Little Owl |
It had been a full day but we had covered a lot of ground and had made it to our halfway mark for the trip to the Highlands.
Our overnight stay was at the Marriott in Gateshead and the next day was highly anticipated as we looked forward to a trip to the Inner Farnes.
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