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U3A Birdie Group -March 2019
by Peter Slater - 19:15 on 20 March 2019
Nine members of the bird group met at the Ring of Brodgar car park at 10am on 20th March. We had a brief scan over Harray Loch and had already counted ten species of birds before we set off towards the ring, but bearing leftwards to go down inside of the fence by the road.
It was quite spring-lIke, with a number of larks singing as we walked along, but with a cool southerly breeze. The main interest of this area is the ducks on the lochs. We saw tufted duck, wigeon, goldeneye and a long-tailed duck on Harray and then, walking back up the side of Stenness, added mallard, gadwall, shelduck and merganser to this tally.
Back at the Ring we scanned the ponds to the north and added teal, shoveler and pintail, giving a creditable total of 11 duck species. We did not do badly with other species either, seeing a total of 21 (mute swan, greylag goose, cormorant, coot, lapwing, curlew, snipe, oystercatcher, redshank, common gull, herring gull, black-headed gull, great black-backed gull, raven, hooded crow, starling, pied wagtail, twite, reed bunting, stonechat, skylark).
All in all, a fruitful and enjoyable morning.
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