It's been a bit of a mixed week so far as we seem to have caught every possible type of bad weather in the space of three days with snow, rain, a hard freeze and then high winds forcast for tomorrow. The combination of thaw and then another freeze overnight left the car park like an ice rink this morning. Some of us didn't even make it over the visitor centre for a coffee which shows just how bad it was! Most of the ice has melted now and we've gritted where we can but parts of the access track especially the junction between it and the road were still slippy this evening so please take care if you visit in the next few day and it hasn't noticeably warmed up.
Our white-fronted goose numbers continues to climb-reaching around 140 this morning. We're not sure if this is because we're genuinely attracting more birds or because Debbie and Tom have sussed out their usual roosting spots and are getting better at counting before they lift off in the mornings. Unsurprisingly the number of birds using the feeders has inceased as well with large flocks of tree sparrow, greenfinch, goldfinch, siskin, great tit, blue tit and blackbirds using the feeders outside the office. Another unexpected sighting was an American Wigeon from Fen Hide on Monday- given how hard these birds can be to pick out of a wigeon flock it makes you wonder how long this one has been around, or even if we've had the same bird on the reserve since spring.
We've had no more reported sightings of the Humpbacks, but there's a nice piece about them on the STV website, along with some photos taken by Phil Crockett one of the first people to definitely identify them on the Saturday morning which you can see at http://local.stv.tv/peterhead/galleries/humpback-whales