A Wintery Quiz...

You've not had to go far to get some fantastic wildlife at Strathbeg over the past few days. The garden has been absolutely alive with small birds and this morning I counted 14 different species on the (very short!) walk between the office and the visitor centre.

So the quiz question for the week is- can anyone name all 14? There are quite a few possibles so it'll be interesting to see if anyone can get the right ones!

The visitor centre has also been a great spot for mammals this weekend. The Stoat was out and about on Saturday morning, deer are almost always around and the Koniks have been really easy to see out on the low ground. We've had otter sightings from right around the reserve in the past few weeks but on Sunday this large dog (male) Otter was splashing about in the pool directly outside the centre, just a few yards from the window. It then trotted off across the grass, rather startling this poor Pink-Footed Goose as it went...

Otter from the rear

Our final dusk Goosewatch of the season (we still have one more dawn Goosewatch on Saturday) was on Sunday evening. The geese did their best to perform but were a bit overshadowed by a huge starling murmuration over the airfield/south end of the loch. We're not quite as practised at counting Starlings as we are at counting geese but there must be between eight and ten thousand in a roost this size. We think they're roosting at the very south end of the loch but the volunteers are off to investigate and find our exactly where they're coming down. At the moment, the best way to see them is probably to sit in Tower Pool Hide at about 4pm and look right!

As for the geese, it was another early morning count on Sunday and brilliantly our numbers seem to have actually gone up. Last month's count of Pink-footed Geese was around 16,700, on Sunday we hit 21,326! There's a couple of hundred Greylags in there too, around 2,500 Wigeon on the loch this morning, and you can find both types of White-fronted Goose if you look closely enough.