Bag the bruck

Bag the bruck, part of the haul from Skaill Beach, not a huge area. There was a commercial waste bin full as well.

We missed joining in with the beach clean up at the weekend due to the need to sort out house and garden things and the horizontal rain on Saturday and nasty cold snow showers today, girls rather unwilling to have much to do with those. However, later today we did our bit by picking up the little that was left, or had come in on the next tides at Skaill.

Didn't do much birding due to to weather, house duties etc. Several attempts to add to the garden list met with failure until this evening when unusually the light and the shimmer were good and minimal respectively. Fulmar was finally added courtesy of a small colony on the very distant "cliffs" of Loch Harray. Fulmars nest almost anywhere here, including just on the ground on islands in the middle of freshwater lochs. Loch Harray does at least have sort of cliffs. Something like 95% of Fulmars have bits of plastic in their gut so hopefully bag the bruck will have helped them a little.

Pintail was added courtesy of a pair feeding in the near corner of Loch of Bosquoy as I put the final touches to the first potato bed.

Then at 19:50 I drove down to Loch of Harray, theoretically to try to see the Otter again but actually an ignoble plan was hatched. Sifted through all the nearby Tufted Ducks and found a smart drake Scaup. Drove back home. Unfortunately I couldn't resist stopping at The Shunan where the Spotted Redshank, now in almost complete summer finery, was feeding having been absent for some days. By the time I got home I'd missed the light and whilst I was 95% certain I could pick out the Scaup I just wasn't 100%.

The slightly maligned Zeiss scope is now a bit more healthy again as I managed today to remove the tripod attaching widget that has been damaged for some time, this has meant that the scope has frequently been in danger of falling off the tripod. Zeiss had kindly sent me a new bit gratis a while ago but having previously removed the old part for examination I'd put it back and it had got itself jammed in, fortunately today it came out so the new part is in and the scope more secure. I just needed the bigger model today and Scaup would have been mine ...