It has been a while since my last blog and much has happened at Tollie and the Red kite population since then. Sadly, there was the loss of Red T, one of the last of the Swedish birds brought over in 1993 to RAF Kinloss. It was even reported by STV.
I was serving in the Photographic Section at RAF Kinloss in the late 80’s when the first of the kites were brought in. I remember going out to meet the aircraft as there was quite a bit of interest. Little did I know that 30 years later I would be so involved with their offspring.
Work has started on a bug stack in the grassy area adjacent to the visitor centre. At the moment it looks like a pile of pallets, but come the summer it is hoped that it will be teeming with all sorts of bugs and beasties. More work will be done on the stack and we hope to get a pond started in the future.
Should you want to do something similar in your own garden take a look at the Homes for Wildlife Community page. There are lots of great tips and ideas and you don’t all need a stack of pallets!
As you are probably aware we use satellite tags to track the kites as they make their way around the local area and on occasions further afield. Whilst this technology is normally associated with the likes of James Bond tracking the baddies round the world it has on this occasion shown that a tagged Red kite has visited Tollie for a feed. Here are the details of a few days in March which show the bird, wing tagged 9G at Tollie:
Here is another photo of 9G swooping to the table, this was taken on the 24 February, you can just make out the aerial of the sat tag on her back. Thanks must go to Ronald Mackinnon for this and many of the other great photos posted to the website.
9G, a female bird that fledged in 2011 from a nest in the Tain area, was found caught in a fence in August and spent some time in the SSPCA wildlife hospital near Dunfirmline. She was released in September, now fitted with the satellite tag. At the moment she can regularly be seen at Tollie.
Of all the other tagged birds we have, most are still in the area around Inverness, though a couple have ventured further afield and are down in Angus and we do have one at Loch Ruthven, so if you go over there to see the Slavonian grebes keep your eyes peeled for a kite or even two as we are now starting to see the birds pairing up.
On a recent visit to Tollie, I heard a young lad exclaim 'the Tardis! ' when he saw the new toilet that has just been installed. Whilst it does appear to be larger on the inside, we won’t be able to travel back in time to when our waistlines were smaller and our hairlines a little closer to our eyebrows.
The toilet is an evaporation unit and at the forefront of waterless toilet technology. Without going into to much detail, once everything has been dried out by the wind (hence the chimney on the unit) the remains can be composted.
Here we can see James from Woo Woo - and that is the name of the company, and not a planet in the far reaches of the Delta Quadrant of space - wielding his sonic screwdriver during the final stages of construction.
You can use the Woo Woo evaporating toilet for free. So now that there will be no more nipping into the woods to spend a penny, all those pennies can go into the donation stone!