Tag: birds

Friday Flickr – Puffins Galore

Puffins have got to be cutest birds ever. I can spend hours sitting and watching them.

For this week’s Friday Flickr I’ve decided to go with a theme rather than a place.

And for my first theme, I’ve chosen puffins.

Puffins have got to be the cutest birds. With their colourful beaks and soulful eyes, to say nothing of their clumsy gaits and comical crash landings, how can anyone not love a puffin?

The best place I’ve found to see puffins is Shetland. There are two huge colonies; one right at the bottom of the islands at Sumburgh and the other right at the top at Hermaness on Unst (my favourite island).

Sumburgh is the easiest to get to as it’s on the Shetland Mainland (main island) and is easily drivable from Lerwick. You can even get a bus if you don’t have a car. I say easiest to get to, but it still involves getting to Aberdeen and then a 12-14 hour ferry journey before you even get to Lerwick.

Unst is a little trickier (but so worth it), as from Lerwick you have to drive to the top of the Mainland, get a 20-30 minute ferry over to the island of Yell, drive for 30-40 minutes to the top of Yell, get another ferry for 10-15 minutes over to Unst, drive as far as you can to Hermaness at the top of Unst (half an hour or so), then walk across the boggy moorland for around an hour (dodging skua attacks) to get to the most northerly bit of coast in Britain.

Looking out from cliffs there are a couple of bits of rock that belong to Britain (Muckle Flugga and Out Stack), but that’s it. No more land. You’d have to keep going until you reached Antarctica before you  hit land again.

Hermaness is well worth the effort of getting there. Not only do you get to see Muckle Flugga lighthouse (of Shipping Forecast fame), have the overwhelming sense of being on top of the world and sit among hundreds of puffins, but you get to experience a ginormous gannetry.

Puffins might be the cutest birds, but gannets are my all time favourites. They’re just so sleek and skillful as well as stunningly beautiful to look at.

The gannetry is a massive assault on the senses – the sheer number of birds, the sound, the smell – about the only sense not being assaulted is taste, though I’m sure that could be fixed just by breathing in through your mouth.

But back to puffins. Sit on the grass on the cliffs at either Sumburgh or Hermaness and you will have puffins pop up out of their burrows and crash land on the grass all around you.

They spend most of the year at sea and only come back to land when they breed. This means there’s quite a limited season to see them. They start arriving around April and have pretty much disappeared by early August.

I can sit for hours just watching them or snapping away trying to get the perfect photo. The photograph I really want to take is of a puffin with a mouth full of sandeels, but so far I’ve never managed this.

So I have a reason to keep going back. Not that I need one.

Click on the image below to access the Flickr album.

Puffins

 

Peregrine falcon

Caves, cheese and a peregrine falcon

I drove home from Exmoor via Cheddar. I’d walked around here a few years ago, but hadn’t been in the caves. As I like caves I felt like I’d missed out. I spent most of the day here and bought a day ticket which gave me admission to both sets of caves, the museum and an open top bus tour through the gorge. 


First I went into Gough’s Cave which I walked through with an audio guide. Unfortunately the audio guides, which are included with the price of the ticket, are aimed at children. It would have been nice to have had an adult version giving me facts about the caves rather than telling me ‘when my parents are ready’ to do this, that and the other! The caves were well worth seeing though, with lots of interesting formations. There were racks of cheeses maturing inside too. 


Next I went down the road to Cox’s Cave and the Crystal Quest. The name itself had me a bit worried and I was right. I know I was in Cheddar, but do things really have to be this cheesy? The cave was a lot smaller than Gough’s Cave and most of it was some kind of adventure quest with dummies and voices and sound effects leading you through in search of some kind of magic crystal. 


The museum was quite interesting as was the bus tour through the gorge. The guide pointed out a layby where the RSPB had a telescope set up watching a couple of peregrine falcons who had nested at the top of the gorge. When I got back to my car I drove back to the layby and stopped for a while to chat to the RSPB people and check out the falcons. I was just too late to see the male fly off and the female was nowhere to be seen. I decided to stick around for a bit and was glad I did. After a while the male reappeared and flew round for a bit before coming in to land. Once back on top of the gorge he was very difficult to see. But patience paid off and he took off again for another fly round before settling in a much more viewable position. 


He was wonderful to see, but if I’d been there without the RSPB pointing things out and making them obvious I’d probably have never noticed him. I’ve been trying to learn about birds for a while now. It would nice to know what it is flying past me when I’m out walking and I should be learning about all things nature-ish for my walking group leader’s qualification. I find it hard to identify birds as when I look in a bird book they never quite look the same. I’ve thought about joining the RSPB on and off for a few years now, and I think I really should. Their magazines might help me with gaining knowledge and I’d be quite happy to support them. But as I’ve spent way too much money lately, it will have to wait a while. 

Books

A few good book finds

On my days off from walking I went on a book hunt in Minehead’s charity shops and tourist office, and Dunster National Trust shop and got myself a few bargains.

I’ve got a few bird books but never take even the smallest of them out with me when I’m walking as I don’t want to carry the extra weight. Then I see a bird and want to know what it is. I look it up when I get home but by that time I don’t remember exactly what it looked like, just that it was small and brown (usually). My bird books have about twenty small, brown birds in them so I end up no wiser. 

So when I spotted the ‘I Spy‘ bird book in the tourist office I pounced on it straight away. It’s meant for children and is basically a tick list so they can tick off the birds they see, but it’s small, light, has clear pictures and basic descriptions and was only £2.50. I was so pleased I bought the one on wild flowers too. 

 I also picked up a printed out copy of the South West Coast Path Association’s guide to the section of the path I’m walking. It has quite a lot of detail and should be quite useful. 

Then I found a big, softback geology book which seemed quite simple. Most of the geology books I’ve looked at are categorised into sections that you have to understand before you can find anything. I really need an idiot’s guide to get me started off and so hopefully this will do the job. 

One of my best finds though, was in the secondhand bookshop in Porlock. I found a Reader’s Digest book on being a countryside detective. It’s big, chunky and hardback so definitely not one for the backpack. But it’ll be good to have in the car or to read at home. It beautifully laid out and is very simple; pefect for my level of inexpertise. it tells me what can be found where and how to find it. Wonderful. 

So all in all, a very productive couple of days book hunting.