4^th April 2024

Thursday was a surprisingly lovely day – i.e. it wasn’t raining.  In fact, it was sunny and warm in the sun.  Sabine went to her Helensburgh quilting group in the morning, so I went over to our nearest RSPB Reserve on Loch Lomond, about 25 minutes’ drive from us. 

A winter view from the RSPB website: https://www.rspb.org.uk/days-out/reserves/loch-lomond

I still have the Audi in Rhu and it needed a bit of a run as it gets used here even less than in Jersey.  Even though it’s 14 years old this year, it’s still a lovely car to drive so, with the sunroof open, it was no hardship to make the journey.  I resisted the call of the garden centre near the reserve as I already have more plants to bed in than I can cope with.

The Reserve carpark is actually about a mile from Loch Lomond, so I got a little exercise as well as doing some birdwatching.  Except I didn’t …. do much birdwatching.  I was warned by the volunteer lady at the entrance that it was quiet.  She mentioned someone had seen a nuthatch, and an osprey had been seen overhead earlier in the week, heading east.  Which is like someone saying to you when you arrive at your holiday destination “Oh, you should have been here last week, the weather was beautiful”.

So I had a stroll down to the loch and back and saw ….. virtually nothing, or so I thought.  The walk was lovely though, through woodland, over fields where recently a couple of large ponds have been dug out and trees planted as part of a restoration project, and across a big marsh on a boardwalk and back to more woodland.  The only trouble was the other people in the Reserve, who were nearly all pairs of dog walkers, not birdwatchers, who didn’t follow the etiquette of keeping quiet and their chatting seemed to travel a long way.

But when I came to write this note, I realised that I had seen a few birds.  The nuthatches were making a lot of noise, more noise even than the dog walkers, as were two chiffchaffs (onomatopoeic name) newly arrived from the Med or West Africa.  There were plenty of robins and blue tits, a pair of geese on the loch too far out to be sure that they were greylags, mallard ducks in the marsh, and round the two feeders a coal tit, lots of chaffinches and some goldfinches.  There was also a blackbird and a crow and some wood pigeons and the ubiquitous gull.

Apart from the chiffchaffs that I hadn’t seen this year, though, they were all fairly common birds.  I looked for the water rail on the marsh – Sabine had seen one there once but, not knowing what it was, didn’t call me over.   This time, it might have been too early in the year for it, though.

I reflected on visit on the drive back  The Loch Lomond Reserve is a wonderful facility to have fairly close by and I only covered about half of the area.  The other half is along the loch east towards a sheltered bay where on another visit we have seen osprey and a whitethroat warbler.  Just walking and hearing all the bird songs was uplifting in itself and I was easily able to appreciate how much care the RSPB, supported by the volunteers, takes in maintaining the Reserve. 

But I realised that if I’d stayed at home, I’d have seen more birds than I had at the Reserve, albeit of the garden bird variety and mostly on the feeders. 

We have four kinds of finches – goldfinches, chaffinches, greenfinches and Mr and Mrs Bullfinch (an unexpected delight – they come round first thing in the morning and dominate the back feeder).  

We have four kinds of tits – blue, great, coal and long-tailed.  Suddenly we have a flock of siskin, having been absent all winter, the males unmistakeable in their yellow and green coat and black cap. 

We have robins and dunnocks, a wren, nuthatches, blackbirds and a song thrush (seen in the front garden for the first time, inspecting the new pond). 

Nuthatch

Every now and then, a pair of blackcap warblers stop by, surprising during the winter.  We have had a great spotted woodpecker this year (but only seen once), on the big trees front and back I’ve seen a tree creeper and even a goldcrest at the back, and at night we hear a barn owl calling (I have only actually seen it once, in January last year).  And of course, wood pigeons and magpies galore, but although crows are overhead and jackdaws and gulls settle on roofs a few houses down, they don’t bother us (fingers crossed).

That’s not counting the shore and sea birds we get at the bottom of the hill on Gareloch, a few minutes’ walk away.  The photo is of an eider.

And from this, for those of you who read about me not wanting to feed the local rats, you’ll be pleased to know that the bowl solutions are working well. Which in turn allows Sabine and me such enjoyment from seeing so many birds using the feeders.