White (winged) Winter & a Bad Place to be a Vole!

While the rest of the coutry seems to be under a layer of snow, Strathbeg seems to have missed out on the worst of the weather with just a couple of heavy frosts overnight. Unfortunately one of the cold nights was enough to crack one of our outside pipes, which meant Tom and Ben spent most of their Saturday morning off lifting slabs in the yard trying to find the outside stopcock. At least the reserve car, which was parked under the jet-wash style spray looks much cleaner now.

Whatever the weather we're starting to get some good birds on the reserve again after a fairly quiet January. The highlight of the weekend has been the first Iceland Gull to be seen on the reserve for a couple of years. Iceland Gulls are around the same size as our Herring Gulls or Lesser Black-Backed Gulls but are very pale and have very distinctive white wings with no black on the wing tips. There's been a huge influx of Iceland Gulls across the country this winter, including several just north of us in Fraserburgh and just south in Peterhead so it's great to finally get one on the reserve. You can tell it was a good sighting because, despite my often-mentioned lack of interest in gulls, even I walked all the way from the office to the centre to have a look at it- the furthest I've ever gone to twitch a gull!

Fairly calm seas this morning meant a good seawatching session. Disappointingly there were no divers (we still haven't seen the usually common Red-Throated Diver from the reserve yet) but we did manage to add our first Razorbill of the year and a very brief glimpse of a Puffin. We don't usually see Puffin until early March as they spend most of the winter far out to sea. We'll have to wait and see if any of them show up early at Troup Head and Fowlsheugh or if this was just an odd bird that had managed to get a bit lost.

The other highlight of the weekend has been a couple of our resident owls. A late return from the Aberdeenshire Birders Evening last night rewarded us with some great views of a Barn Owl perched next to the entrance track. This afternoon, the Short-Eared Owl put on another display outside the visitor centre, hunting up and down the grass bank and then perching on a tussock. It was joined by a fox who also spent a good half an hour hunting in the grass- a great thing to see if you're a visitor, but perhaps not that welcome if you're a bank vole...