Winter Wildlife

It's January and some of you may be experiencing winter weather. Some of you may even have snow. I know it is snowing in England............... because it's on the BBC News every five minutes!!

We had a little snow in Scotland at the weekend, not much just a dusting of icing sugar, but it was cold nevertheless. If it's cold for us wrapped up in our winter woollies imagine what it's like for the poor birds and animals!!
So I thought I'd grab my camera and go out and see if I could find some winter wildlife around the Queensferry & Kirkliston area.
My first stop was a little back road known locally as the Royal Elizabeth Yard (it used to be a Royal Navy Victualling Depot some years back i.e. it stored navy supplies including the rum rations).
Here I snapped the following picture of the distant Pentland Hills to set the wintry scene:


Snowy Pentland Hills

As you can see from the picture there was not a lot of wildlife to photograph so I moved on. Next stop was Pepper Wood, where I parked up and headed to the old railway line that runs between Dalmeny and Kirkliston. This is now a cycle/walkway and surprisingly enough there were a handful of people out walking some with and some without the obligatory dog.
I thought I might be able to snap a few birds in the trees along this walkway but they were being very elusive, hiding in the undergrowth and simply refusing to pose for me..........so I just had to photograph the walkway:

The Old Railway Line

I'm always on the look-out for quirky things and I did find a strange vision, where a gap in the trees had allowed some snow to settle right next to a bush with pinkish branches. Made for a bit or a surreal image I thought............

Pink'n'white

Looks like the bush has dandruff!!

Anyway I did manage to find some wildlife in the form of a gaggle of geese in a nearby field, the only problem was they were quite far away. I had no sooner got in a position to take a photo of them and they decided to take off. Oh blast! I thought.........so all I managed to snap was a couple of distant photos of them taking to the air and flying off:

 

Geese take-off

And disappear

 

I think they were Greylag geese but I couldn't be certain as I didn't get a chance to study them and my photos are too crappy to tell.

Anyway I thought I'd head towards the back of Edinburgh Airport, as there are usually a few geese hanging about in the fields round there. The B9080, which use to be the original A9 from Edinburgh to Stirling, Perth, Infinity and beyond before they extended the runway at Edinburgh Airport is a great road to learn to drive on and also surprising good for viewing winter wildlife. Here I managed to get a little closer to a largish flock of Greylags:

 

Greylag Geese in field, Kirkliston in background

 I did manage to get closer than that:

Greylags Grazing

Even though I was well wrapped up it was cold so I didn't dwell and headed back to the comfort of my car. Makes you realise that wildlife is made of tougher stuff than we are. Certain geese, ducks and swans come to Scotland in the winter because they find it warm, certainly warmer than the Arctic regions where they choose to nest and raise their young.

Some greylags stay all year round in Scotland but some go further North to breed, so when they return in the winter the numbers swell, hence it is the most common goose to see in Scotland in the winter. We do get other flavours of geese, particularly Pink-footed Geese which also come here in large numbers and if your lucky you'll see Barnacle, White-fronted, Brent and Bean Geese to name but a few.

Goose seems to becoming a popular Xmas dish so these Greylags need to be wary............I wonder what Bean Goose tastes like??......... Perhaps in a Black Bean sauce..........hmm!!!.......not very wildlife-friendly.

These geese, and thousands of others, spend all day grazing in stubble field and munching new shoots but in the evening they all take to the air and fly back to their evening roosts which are usually beside water such as a loch or river estuary. Places like Loch Leven in Fife, Aberlady Bay in East Lothian and Caerlaverloch near Dumfries as brilliant places to visit if you want to see thousands of geese arriving to roost in the evening or leaving to graze in the early morning (depending on your approach to early rises)

As grazing birds like geese seem to thrive well enough in Scottish winters, I wondered how other wildfowl that depend heavily on open water for their food were coping. For this reason I jumped back in the car and drove to nearby Humbie Reservoir (aka Carmelhill). This is more of a fishing pool created by a restricting weir on the Swine Burn, never-the-less it is a good little stretch of water to see wildfowl.

Humbie Reservoir (aka Carmelhill or Swine Burn Pool)

Although the far end of the pool was covered in a layer of ice the near-side (where the weir is) was relatively ice-free and occupied by a family of Mute Swans. It may actually be two families as there appeared to be two adults and five cygnets. However one of the adults may have been a juvenile from two seasons ago as it would also be all-white by now (unlike this season's cygnets which still had a significant covering of grey feathers in this their first winter):

Swan Family

If it was one family, that's a lot of cygnets to bring-up in one season, I'm sure one of you Swan experts out there will put me right. Anyway it was rewarding to see they were all thriving and managing to find something to eat in this half-frozen pond (even though it was some rancid looking pond week............not to dissimilar to the cabbage we use to get for school dinners.....yuk!)

You might be wondering how mammals cope with the Scottish winter, after all they don't migrate to warmer climates. Well most British mammals are hard to see (and photograph) in the summer months and appear to become even more elusive in the winter months, especially small mammals like voles and mice which don't hibernate but do keep snuggled up in their homes unless they really have to go out to feed. This is why a lot of birds of prey such as buzzards, kites and even golden eagles will scavenge more than normal during the winter months, when live prey is less abundant. Larger mammals such as Red Deer will venture off the hilltops in severe weather and come down to lower ground where they can find grazing that is free of snow and ice.

The only mammal I did manage to photograph was horses in jackets (makes a change from pigs in blankets!!):

Horses in Jackets (not in Tesco beefburgers)

As we have seen the larger birds such as geese and swans seem to be coping well with the winter but what about the smaller birds? Well there are some smaller birds that find our Scottish climate relatively balmy and leave the chill of Scandinavia behind to sunbathe over here in the winter. These include thrushes like Redwing, Fieldfare and Blackbird as well as Starling, Brambling, Goldfinch, Waxwing, Robin and Bluetit to name a few. So the birds in you garden in winter time could well be a mixture of resident birds and migrants, perhaps why there appear to be more in the winter than in summer, especially if you feed them.

Feeding garden birds is very popular in Britain and I'm sure it must have a significant impact on the survival of many of the smaller birds over the winter months (so keep it up!). Here is a couple of snaps of birds that visit my garden to be fed:

 

 

Goldfinch in the Buddleia

Starlings love seed in dripping

Goldfinch & Siskin on the Feeders

 Well that's enough from me on the winter wildlife in my locality, not always the most exotic but great to see anyway. Hope you all keep wrapped up during the winter months, but don't be frightened to get out there now and again and see what wildlife you can find.

 

Take care,

 

Teddy Edward