Lochore Meadows

 We finished January off with a walk down the Meadies. It was a lovely but very cold couple of hours. The highlights were some very busy Bullfinch;

A Great White Egret from the nature reserve hide:

and a couple of squabbling Treecreepers, this one won the bragging rights and stayed put:

Other birds of note were Long-tail

ed Tit,

a couple of Grey Heron

Goldeneye on the Loch,

and a Robin sunning itself:

Other birds seen or heard were, Cormorant, Teal, Mallard, Coot, Moorhen, Chaffinch, Blue Tit, Blackbird, Great Tit, Mistle Thrush, Wren, Magpie, Pied Wagtail, Jackdaw, Crow, Woodpigeon and Mute Swan.

Always a great time down the Meadies! (As long as we have coffee!)

Waxwings at Sighthill in Edinburgh

 We took the opportunity last week to catch up with some Waxwings again, this time in Sighthill. They had been around for a couple of weeks but we hadn't had the time to drive over and see them. The location was easy to find, but of course no Waxwings when we arrived. Another birder told us they had been there about 10 minutes previously. We decided to be patient and hang around, of course we had Coffee with us so it wasn't a great hardship, although it was very cold and icy, meantime some Bullfinches and Fieldfare showed well:

In addition, much to our surprise, a solitary Reed Bunting popped up over the road. Bizarre!

Anyway our patience was finally rewarded with some brief views before they shot off again.

A Walk Around Lochore

 We went for a stroll around the Loch on Tuesday and added Gadwall to our year list and our Loch list up to 39 (only two visits this year so far!)

Out and About Around Our New Home

 We are spoilt for choice of places to go birding near our new home, but we are conscious that we need to keep as local as possible, so we are trying to keep it within five miles and also trying to find places to walk where the paths aren't an ice rink! With continual sub zero temperatures that is proving difficult.

But we have manged walks at Loch Leven and Lochore Meadows and a bit of driving around to familiarise ourselves with our new surroundings.

So with just doing that we are up to 43 species so far for 2021, not too bad. But with the current restrictions, I don't see that number increasing much in the near future.

Here's just a few pics from our travels:

Corngreaves Nature Reserve (Haden Hill)

Despite having out local park and natures reserve down as our local patch on this blog site, we have seriously neglected it for the past couple of years, thinking that we don't see much!

Well on a very busy Monday we took an hour out and went to the park, and what a brilliant hour we had. The weather wasn't too grim as it has been, so I hoped for some decent photo opportunities, if there was anything about, forgetting that the walk along the river is in the wood, so not a lot of light!

We entered the park, by the pool to see if there was anything interesting, we have seen Kingfisher and Goosander here in the past, but not today! Just Mallard, Black-headed Gull and a couple of Coot, strangely we didn't see any Moorhens.

From here we left the park and went into the small reserve, there were as you would expect the usual woodland birds, Great Tit, Blue Tit, Blackbird, Robin and Dunnock. But as we walked on we came across a couple of Treecreepers being 'frisky' one finally calming down to do some hunting:

This was followed by some Long-tail Tits right over our heads, so making for a poor photo,

Next up were two or three Goldcrests, trying to take a photo was nigh on impossible, they just wouldn't, as they don't, keep still! This is the best I could do,

Sadly the crest isn't on view.
Immediately after this we claimed our first Nuthatch of the year.

In between this we had a Buzzard sail through the trees, awesome.
We now had to turn back as time was short, lots to do. On the way back we saw the Treecreeper and Goldcrests again, then finally finishing up with a Chaffinch and a Bullfinch that allowed me one shot before departing,

We saw 19 species in an hour and had a great time, so we will definitely be visiting much more often.