Wednesday 23rd January

A better day, later on that was, as first thing this morning we had some frost, even at midday, it was quite icy outside with the rain that had fallen turning to ice on the untreated roads.....I went down with Bob to do a count on Loch Indaal, from Bowmore to Gartbreck. The sky did not look to promising but we decided to give it a go... after around 40 minutes or so into the count, the light got poorer and it had started to rain making use of our bins and scope a difficult job, so we gave up! But before that we had the following birds counted, 20 Shag, 2 Heron, 20 Common Gull, 1 Black headed Gull, 10 Greater Black backed Gull, around 1,500 Barnacle Geese, 38 Mallard, 317 Teal, 121 Wigeon, 17 Red breasted Merganser, 11 Eider, 2 Goldeneye, 8 Mute Swan, 1 ringtail Hen Harrier, 24 Common Scoter, 30 Oystercatcher, 30 Curlew, 1 Golden Plover and 3 GND. 2 of the Common gulls in flight were having a tussle as one of them had a sandeel in its' beak, then up came one of the Blackbacks who hounded the the smaller Common Gull into dropping the said sandeel with the blackback picking up the food parcel in mid air no bother! The Barnacle geese figure was a high count as the geese were resting up below the high water mark after an almost full moon when they quite often feed through the night! Later on Bob had gone to look at Loch Skerrols on his way home. There he counted 2 Coot, 8 Mute Swan, 32 Greylag, 50 Mallard, 57 Wigeon, 81 Teal, 5 Goldeneye, 4 Tufted Duck and a male Ring necked Duck. Along the road up to Knockdon, Bob saw 3 Red legged Partridge and a male Merlin.