{"id":1469995,"date":"2017-05-11T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-11T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/?guid=5f1c5653291d40698e4829ac6dda07d5"},"modified":"2019-12-23T01:18:42","modified_gmt":"2019-12-22T12:18:42","slug":"scotland-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/scotland-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Scotland 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

A short break in Tomatin up in the highlands of Scotland has given me the chance to see some fabulous sites again whilst picking up a few year ticks and grabbing a few record shots.<\/p>\n

First I visited a fish farm near Cairn Gorm and managed to see my first Osprey of 2017 without having the camera with me to capture the image. At Cairn Gorm I picked up a single Ptarmigan in the distance from the top viewing platform and heard another lower down.<\/p>\n

Whilst sitting in the car out of the strong cold wind I managed to get a few images of the Snow Buntings and Ring Ouzels feeding around the edge of the car park. It was good to see the male in his summer plumage.<\/p>\n

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Snow Bunting at Cairn Gorm<\/p>\n

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Ring Ouzel at Cairn Gorm<\/p>\n

From the car park I also picked up my first Red Grouse of the year.<\/p>\n

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Red Grouse<\/p>\n

Day two saw me make an early morning visit to Loch Garten where the Cappers are having a year off and not showing at all and with the wardens alarming and depressing commentary blaming every visitor to the area for the birds demise I left.<\/p>\n

In the car park I watched the feeders and after an hour got lucky when a single Crested Tit visited. A Red Squirrel visited the same feeders and I managed a single shot of him too. I picked up Tree Pipit and Redstart here before finding Black Grouse in a nearby field as I drove down the A9.<\/p>\n

Later a trip down the Findorn Valley delivered Dipper as a final year tick of the day although I also enjoyed good views of six Mountain Hares.<\/p>\n

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Crested Tit<\/p>\n

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Red Squirrel at Loch Garten<\/p>\n

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Mountain Hare<\/p>\n

At Lochindorb more Red Grouse and a few waders were enjoyed on a quick drive around the Loch.<\/p>\n

Back at the cottage we had three Red Kites, two Buzzard and a Goshawk over along with a calling Tawny Owl and a few deers running through the garden.<\/p>\n

A very large Bat also hunted around the stream last night but I’ve no idea what species it would be.<\/p>\n

Year list now 210<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A short break in Tomatin up in the highlands of Scotland has given me the chance to see some fabulous sites again whilst picking up a few year ticks and grabbing a few record shots. First I visited a fish farm near Cairn Gorm and managed to see my first Osprey of 2017 without having […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1913,"featured_media":2148677,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6984,5],"tags":[2708,535,2144,3368,8468,608,7109,578,786,1790,2215,940,3174,2743,7974],"class_list":["post-1469995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","category-wildlife","tag-black-grouse","tag-buzzard","tag-crested-tit","tag-dipper","tag-goshawk","tag-osprey","tag-ptarmigan","tag-red-grouse","tag-red-kite","tag-red-squirrel","tag-redstart","tag-scotland","tag-snow-bunting","tag-tawny-owl","tag-tree-pipit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1913"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1469995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2148677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1469995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1469995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1469995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}