Coot, Conference & Coal Tits!

As I type this I’m currently sat on a train at Edinburgh Waverly station, heading back to Manchester. Chris Bridge & I have had a long weekend up in Scotland with Gillian. We’ve been rather busy doing various things mainly attending the Scottish Ringers’ Conference but also we’ve colour ringed the first Scottish Coot!

Friday started early for Me & Chris as our train left Manchester Piccadilly at 5am. By 09:30 we were pulling into Linlithgow where we were greeted by Gillian in her wellies, old scrags and waterproofs and she quickly whisked us off to Linlithgow Loch.

It didn’t take long for Gillian to capture the first bird which was duly darvic ringed, measured & weighed before being released. 20 more birds followed making Friday’s total 20 new Coot & 1 recapture – that of a bird ringed by local ringers.

We noted several Black-headed gulls already sporting rings, several of these being foreign rings. So we attempted to catch any already ringed birds, resulting in the above Swedish ringed bird being controlled.

We left the Edinburgh area via a rather nice chippy were Gillian treated us both to the delights of a deep fried Pizza! Mmmmm! And then left for Stirling to check on whether any Coots would play ball with us at Airthey Loch at the University of Stirling. It turned out non of the Airthey birds wanted shiny darvic rings so we captured this rather smart male Goosander instead!

After a quick coffee and meeting the rest of the Dinsmore family, we headed up to the Cairngorms National Park to the lovely Carrbridge Hotel to participate in this years Scottish Ringers’ Conference.

The conference went down a real treat! Hosted by the Grampian Ringing Group a fantastic selection of talks were presented to the conference congregation. I rather enjoyed those talks given by Raymond Duncan on Waxwing ringing, by Jane Reid on the movements & ecology of Shags & talks by Ewan Weston and Clive Mckay were both very interesting. A fantastic evening quiz, along with several videos made by Euan Ferguson & Calum Campbell kept us all entertained on the groups catching methods! Most impressed we were by Calum & Euan’s gull catching methods (quite different to the method used by us) that Chris will be trying attempting the Scottish method in Wales over the coming week!

During a free period from 1-4pm on Saturday all three of us took the short trip down to Loch Garten to see Crested Tit. A visit made especially for Me & Gillian to add Cresties to our invisible lists! We watched several of the adorable little critters until we realised that around 20 tame Coal Tits we could come to feed from our hands! They stole the show I’m afraid……

We left the ringers conference earlier than most on Sunday as I was giving a talk to several students at Stirling University, about the Coot Ringing Programme.

Today we toured around several other sites around the Edinburgh area to look for Coot. Several more birds were captured along with 13 new Black-headed Gulls & a Tufted Duck at St Margaret's Loch.

Thanks to Gillian for a super weekend & for doing most of the driving. Thanks must also go to Gillian for sorting out most of the site permissions before hand, and to those ringers who allowed us to use their sites to catch & colour mark a sample of Coot. Lastly a big thank you to the Grampian Ringing Group for hosting a most enjoyable ringers’ conference…..

Tonight we’re back in Manchester and then heading south again to Slimbridge tomorrow morning. Rather looking forward to getting back to Slimbridge in the morning to see the newly arrived Bewick’s Swans, now over 100 for us to look at! Also knowing that when I’m in my office tomorrow I’ll only be several hundred meters away from 13 Spoon Billed Sandpipers!! Click here to read a blog post written by WWT’s Head of Species Conservation – Baz Hughes.