long time no blog....squirrels galore though!

its been a sadly neglected blog this - i've been so busy over the last few weeks and months, what with the new job, the survey season, the wedding planning, the garden building...its been a bit hectic. but there we go - lifes a funny old thing, busy as anything one moment - dead as a dodo the next!

the breeding season (aka that survey season) has seen me running around county durham, teesdale and bits of northumberland for a few months and now that the results are finally all in i reckon its time to share a few observations. sad to say it but i really think our farmland birds are on a bit of a downer up here - the populations are supposedly increasing but we surveyed a whole bunch of farms and some of the things i expected to see just didn't turn up - not even once. take turtle dove - regular enough visitor to the yorkshire area, but a total no show on any of the arable sites we looked at this year, a fact not unnoticed by the senior rankers in my project...corn bunting weren't much better - a bit pants in fact, only showing up on a couple of sites - and even then it was only a handful of arable sites scattered in a fairly small area...this doesn't bode well for corn buntings in the north east...on the more positive side though, some of the waders seem to be doing pretty darn well at the moment, so fingers crossed our lovely farmers keep doing their thing in the uplands and managinf for the lapwing and golden plover...

on the local wildlife around me our lesser redpoll population seems to be doing pretty well - finally managed to sneak a good look at them from my car on the way to work on friday morning...pretty little guys they are as well. all twittery. a wilsons phalarope turned up on a loch not that far from me and i managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of it - little grey and hite jobby it is aswell - not worth standing in the rain for 30mins and getting soaked for i think...and we've had nesting kestrels at the main farm which means we've been regulalry seeing a couple of juveniles all spring and they like to sit on the telephone wires so opportunity for exciting views. we also reckon our lovely red squirrels have bred becuase, despite the slight smoking the woods behind the cottage (and the cottage itself) got earlier this year when the wood the otherside of the road went up in flames, we've seen a couple of titchy and quite recognisable new squirrels since then. they are eating my flatmate and our landlords out of house and home...not to mention managing to get into the house on at least one occassion - yup, my housemate came home, heard a bang from my room, wnt to investigate and found a red squirrel sat on my bed. needless to say it didn't want to be photographed, left m some squishy presents and then st on the curtain pole and chittered angrily at janet until she opened the window for, where upon it escaped...and all this happened while i was at work, so all i got was the delightful job of cleaning up the squirrel poop. lovely...

winter is now on its way up there as well, and the numbers of birds at the feeders is getting steadily higher - if i'm ucky maybe i'll get some photo's for you all this year!