Dipper

It’s been a beautiful day today, with more blue sky. The temperature is warming up nicely too, although it’s still not as warm as we’ve known it up here at this time of year.

When we returned from Allan Bank yesterday I downloaded the free Merlin birdwatching app from Cornell University that was recommended to me by the couple we met. I was keen to try it out this morning, so I took it for a walk around the estate but I couldn’t hear much birdsong until I reached a wooded area.

I then set the app to record and put the phone down on a nearby stone so I would have my hands free to take photographs. I was astounded at the results – every time it recognised a particular bird song it added the name and a picture of the bird to the list of suggested birds. Every time the bird sang, the name would be highlighted, so you could start to learn which song belonged to which bird. It’s a brilliant tool to have if, like me, you don’t know how to identify birdsong. I left it running for a quarter of an hour and these are the names of the birds it recognised, in chronological order: blackbird, chaffinch, wren, robin, blue tit, goldcrest, coal tit, bullfinch, great tit, wood pigeon, jackdaw, willow warbler, chiffchaff. The strange thing is, I actually saw very few birds, despite the wooded area being surrounded with their singing, so I wasn’t able to get any photos. 

I did, however, see a dipper in an unusual place earlier this morning. It was on the grass opposite our lodge, beside the little diverted beck. I took a few photos but didn’t see until I enlarged them afterwards that in one of them the dipper has a beak full of grubs (see extras). I had, however, already guessed that maybe it had a nest nearby because it kept flying low over the little beck, diving underneath a small pedestrian bridge, and disappearing into the slate arches where the beck goes under a building. I would have loved to have seen some baby dippers but it was not to be. So, although I’ve blipped a dipper before on this holiday, this one had to be my blip for today because I won’t see another dipper again for a long time.

We haven’t gone very far away from the estate today, mindful of the fact that we have a long drive home tomorrow, but just walking around here is a total joy and we have felt very blessed by being able to spend these three glorious weeks here.