Morton Lochs
With one of my intentions for 2019 being to get back to wildlife photography, Jen and I went hunting for waxwings, having had a tip about where in Dundee we might find some. It was a beautiful, but very chilly morning, and having skulked for an hour and seen only redwings and fieldfares after the berries we gave up. Still, both were new species to me, so that was a bonus.
Fieldfare
Jen abandoned me at lunchtime, so instead of staying at home and missing her I headed out again, this time over the bridge into Fife to check out a local nature reserve, Morton Lochs. I took a short stroll along the paths and stopped at one of the lochside hides, where I spotted a little egret, some Canada geese and a couple of swans. I startled a squirrel who was happy to show off his acrobatic skills leaping from one tree to another away from me!
I then settled down for a while at the hide closest to the car park, where there was a frenzy of birds taking advantage of the food that had been put out there. When I arrived there was a group of mallards who kept disturbing the smaller birds, but fortunately they soon got bored and left everyone else alone. There was a small group of long tailed tits, but I didn’t manage to get any photos of them as they didn’t hang around for long. I could hear a couple woodpeckers, but they never showed themselves, and I heard from others that there were also crossbills, treecreepers and siskins around, so plenty more birds to try and see on future occasions.
European Robin 
Great Tit 
Coal Tit 
Robin 
Great Tit 
Blue Tit 
Coal Tit 
Blue Tit 
Chaffinch (m) 
Chaffinch (m) 
Chaffinch (f) 
Blackbird
Oooh they are so lovely! Too bad about the longtails 😉 So what we call koolmees is a great tit, and your coal tit is… a zwartkop? Or matkop? Can’t keep those apart anyway.
DID I TELL YOU WE SAW WHITEFACED LONGTAILS no pics, but they were so lovely!
I will keep looking for them, planning to take mum there on Thursday! Yep, koolmees is great tit (very confusing) and I think zwartkop is our coal tit. Pretty sure (thanks to google) that matkop is our willow tit, which I have not yet seen, but they look like really cute bundles of fluff – https://ebird.org/species/wiltit1
No, you didn’t tell me you saw them, SO JEALOUS! Where were they?
They were in the little willow wilderness to the south of our neigbourhood, before crossing the highway. The longtails are there pretty consistently, but the whitefaces are seasonal visitors (I’m told!) I’ve seen a willow tit (or a glanskop, apparently the difference is in the small white patch on the beak) on the other side of the park – in passing, it looks like a great tit which accidentally set itself to greyscale for the day.