Monday 31 August 2015

A brilliant day on safari with our friends from Yorkshire

The Safari met up with our AFON mentoree, AH, and her family for a day's wildlifing. We were supposed to go over to her local reserve on the far side of the Yorkshire Dales and watch her ringing and find out how she's been getting on, as well as getting the grand tour of the reserve but the stars aligned against us and a half way meet was arranged at the big reserve to our north instead.
We had a superb day in the warm sunshine with an amazing plethora of wildlife seen.
here's a selection of what we saw in no particular order. We almost bit a pic of a Kingfisher, much nearer than last week in the Midlands, but youthful excitement and over-exuberance meant it wasn't to be.
Black Tailed Godwits - a small section of the flock
Buzzard
Elephant Hawkmoth caterpillar found by the young lad on whose arm it is crawling
Great White Egret (180)
Greenshank, the first three we saw - more were to be seen later
Told you
Heron hiding in the reeds
Heron in the marsh
Marsh Harrier - the only one of this year's youngsters left on site
Red Deer fawn
Red Deer hind and fawn
Young Red Deer stag
Redshank
Spotted Redshank
Juvenile Robin - cute as can be
A welcome return to our 'tick' list was a Stoat, it's been far too long since we've seen one of those sinuous little beasties bouncing around as if powered by an over-tightened elastic band. Not so the other mustelid at his site, the Otter, we could hardly look anywhere without seeing one at the farthest two hides. No pics though, sadly too far away.
We've not told you too much about the day's adventures as we're going to leave that to Alicia and we're also fairly sure her pics will be a tads better than ours and might (better had!) include a lovely portrait of a Kingfisher.
Here's a bit of video of the Red Deer, all very Serengeti-like

Where to next? We've been out n about on safari over the holiday weekend and Alicia will be sending us the second installment of here Scottish trip shortly - that'll certainly one to watch out for!
In the meantime let us know who's 
In the meantime let us know who's bouncing around with too much youthful exuberance in your outback.



1 comment:

cliff said...

Looks to have indeed been a brilliant day. I missed out on the GW Egret on my 2 recent visits, & Jane of course missed out on the Deer, I've just shown her your video, she's not happy :-)