May 30, 2016 archive

Scotland Holiday Day 2: Laggan and Anagach Forest, 30^th May 2016

On our way to Grantown on Spey we saw a Raven, a pair of Red-legged Partridge, a Buzzard and a few other birds. We were in plenty of time arriving at the hotel so we came off the main road to Grantown on Spey and took a detour to Laggan. This was really just a tea stop on our way to Spey Dam (which we heard was a potentially good site for birds) but we didn’t get any further than Laggan because, as we neared a layby, we saw a chap who had a camera out and he was obviously taking pictures of birds. We stopped next to him and he said that he had a Cuckoo on one side of the road and an Icterene Warbler on the other. To say that we were overjoyed would be an understatement as we had never seen an Icterine Warbler before and, although we have been getting better views of Cuckoos of late, we have not seen an adult bird this close before.
We parked in the lay-by just after the toilets and café (closed) and walked a bit back towards them. The Cusckoo had gone so we turned our attention to the Icterine Warbler took some locating but eventually it came out into the open and showed itself really well at the top of a tree. You could actually see it clearly with the naked eye but I did get my scope on it for a good minute or two. Fantastic to look at, the bird was also easily identifiable by its unique song which it gave us examples of for the next few minutes.
It eventually disappeared into the trees and so we returned our attention to the Cuckoo which had returned by now and, in fact, it spent the best part of half an hour or more perched on the “telegraph wire” and dropping down occasionally to pick up a morsel from the ground. It was probably also keeping an eye out for Meadow Pipit nests as the field below was full of them.
We watched for so long, and even got many photos of it, that we were able to show a passing family with children the bird in my scope, now lowered to a few feet from the ground to allow the children to see it in close up. As ever with Cuckoos (and we had this experience recently at the Goyt Valley when we were able to show a couple of people a Cuckoo in the scope, people are amazed because whilst everyone has heard a Cuckoo, few have ever seen one.
We stayed for a long time entranced by the Cuckoo and the appearing and disappearing Icterine Warbler. We thanked the chap for his help and decided we needed to get to the Grant Arms Hotel at Grantown on Spey before the afternoon wore on too much.
Rather amusingly there was a story attached to the chap who had shown us the Icterine Warbler. We met him again at the hotel and he was actually heading up a guided party of birders and even giving a talk in the hotel cinema / lecture hall. His name is Jim Almond and he goes under the title “The Shropshire Birder”. He is a pretty good photographer as well. When we first met him, we took him for a local patch birder who had found this bird himself. Conversely he thought that we had seen the bird listed on the “Rare Bird Alerts” web site/app. When we met at the hotel we were both amused when we found out that he had gone there because he had seen the Icterine Warbler listed on the “Rare Bird Alerts” app and he was amused to find out that we had stopped next to him entirely randomly and I hadn’t even looked on the RBA site yet. We continued to meet Jim during our stay at Grantown on Spey and even ran into him after we had left but more of that later.
We eventually got to the hotel and settled in to a nice room on the front right corner of the first floor as you look at the hotel. This meant that we actually had three windows in the room; one looking onto the grassy area at the front of the hotel, one on the corner looking down the street, and another one overlooking the side of the building and with a good view of the big clock on the building next door. We never worried about knowing the right time.
After getting settled in at the hotel and went for a walk to the nearby Anagach Forest where the first animal we saw was a Red Squirrel. In the forest we saw Treecreepers, Coal Tits and a Song thrush amongst other birds but no Crested Tits which we had seen there before.

Bird Sightings : Laggan

Bird Sightings : Anagach Forest