Sunday 16 September 2018

Amazing birds on Arthurs Seat

We had a lovely walk round Arthur's Seat yesterday





We were delighted to get brilliant views of a kestrel hunting

Kestrels used to be the most common bird of prey in the UK, it used to be that you couldn't drive any distance along a motorway without seeing akestrel hovering over the grass verge. Now they're much less common but Arthur's Seat is a consistently good place to see them still.


It's also a great place for ravens, which are more thought of as a bird of wild places (and the Tower of London). They nest on Arthurs Seat though and can often be seen here, though for such big birds they're oddly elusive. We had several good views yesterday and heard them calling too. No good photos though!

We were slightly surprised to see this speckled wood butterfly, it seems like too open an area to find one, as they tend to prefer shady woodland





The lichens (mostly Xanthoria parietina) on this fallen branch are beautiful when seen close up


It was nice too to see lots of hoverflies, like this footballer (Helophilus sp) on the yarrow flowers (which were full of hoverflies)






5 comments:

Jenn Jilks said...

What an great spot! There is nothing like that here!

eileeninmd said...

Hello, pretty scenes and photos. Love the Kestrel photo. Happy Sunday, enjoy your day and new ahead.

Gwil W said...

That's a lovely photo of Arthur's Seat.

Sallie (FullTime-Life) said...

Great walk and especially lovely at the end of the summer season. I like seeing kestrels although when they visited our yard it felt as if we were providing them a cafeteria. (back when we had bird feeders in our former life). very odd that ravens would be so elusive... I think of them as quite the opposite.

Lowcarb team member said...

Lovely pictures here, especially the Kestrel.

All the best Jan