Winter visitors

Winter has come at least in part to the village. The moors are covered with a dusting of snow and it has turned cold enough to bring the blackcap to the bird feeders. Loth got a surprise when a sparrow hawk, so intent on snatching a meal from the garden birds clustering round the peanuts that it didn't swerve in time, clattered into one of the kitchen windows. leaving a ghostly silhouette of outspread wings on the glass.

The next day I saw a kestrel hunting like a sparrow hawk. Instead of hovering in the freezing wind, it was skimming along in the lea of a drystone dyke no doubt looking for voles or mice in much the same way as a sparrow hawk patrols the hedgerows for unwary tits and sparrows. 

Greylags

The wee lochan beneath the Lowrie Knowes - the Hillocks of the Fox in auld Scots - has its usual quota of winter visitors. There were whooper swans and grey lag geese along with a small flock of wigeon paddling around in the decreasing circle of open water as the ice crept across the surface.

Whoopers, wigeon and coots  sharing the small patch of open water

There seem to be an increased number of snipe and jack snipe presumably due to winter migrants but no sign of the large flocks of fieldfares and redwings that were a feature of previous winters, possibly due to the enthusiastic tidying up of the local hedgerows with scarcely a haw or a berry left on the clipped bushes.

Along the sea shore, a golden eye and a diver were seen fishing among the kittiwakes and the shags, The diver was too far out and too elusive to be seen accurately but it might have been a red throated diver. It looked smaller than our usual resident, the great northern.

All in all, its nice when old friends call back.