There I was, hanging out my washing and watching the 10 imm. white-tailed eagles and 1 imm. golden eagle overhead and congratulating myself on being AMAZING at counting birds, only for James to get an absolutely ludicrous 17 WTE perched together on the low tide mud at Gruinart just a couple of hours later. Extraordinary scenes, and completely unprecedented on Islay as far as I know. The number of young WTEs appearing here has been a real feature of the past few winters, but the 2021-22 numbers have been astonishing. Maybe the bird flu in the barnacle flocks has attracted them with more easy meals than usual, maybe not. The number of breeding adults on the island doesn't seem to have changed, and adult birds are still relatively scarce at Gruinart. We presume these young birds will all very soon disperse along with the wintering wildfowl they have been chasing around these past few months, and we are going to have to wait and see what the long-term effect of bird flu is to both the barnacle goose and white-tailed eagle populations.
Anyway, I'm going to try and get through the rest of this post without mentioning WTEs. Peter stopped in at Loch Skerrols to check on the lesser scaup - no joy. Only a few tufties there today. Ken Reeves had an Iceland gull and a greenshank at Bowmore, 2 golden eagles plus 38 twite at Kinnabus, and a peacock butterfly at Lagavulin. In the afternoon, Ken had a slav grebe on Loch Indaal with good numbers of ducks and divers, before heading to Gruinart, where they saw 15 white-t.....you know the rest.
That's yer lot, thanks to you all for reading and Ken, Peter and James for their sightings.
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