Cottage Holidays throughout Scotland

The success of breeding birds in the Highlands depends on a number of factors some of which are related. The breeding season is one of the key times and this varies considerably with some birds such as the swift having a very short season. This avian master of the skies only comes in to land when they lay and incubate eggs and feed their young. The rest of the time they are on the wing all the year round. The fact that young birds do not breed until their fourth year means they may not land at all for the first four years of their life. They eat and sleep on the wing for those years and at one time it was thought that if a bird was grounded on a flat surface such as a road they could not rise gain. In fact they can sometimes get off but with great difficulty. In contrast other birds may have a prolonged breeding season and in the right conditions may have a number of broods in the same summer. Birds such as the robin, greenfinch and dunnock may have three broods whilst, surprisingly, common bird such as the great and blue tit only have one. Other birds that can have three broods are the swallow and house martin. Seabirds from gulls to auks generally only have one brood but this is partly because they are large and the larger the bird the longer the chick or chicks take to grow until they fledge. The birds that do have two or three broods depend on a number of factors such as adequate food supplies and shelter.

Whilst the swift may have a very protracted season, they are the last of the summer migrants to arrive and the last first to go, others do the opposite. There are a small number of birds in the Highlands that have been found nesting in every month of the year. Interestingly most of these have been affected in recent years by two aspects of their survival pattern and requirements. One is the weather and the recent run of comparatively mild winters have no doubt helped. The other is the increasingly widespread practice of people putting out feed in their gardens all the year round. Whilst the traditional feeders are those with peanuts, increasingly a wider variety of food is being offered. This includes mixed grain, whole wheat, sunflower seeds, nyjer and various so called specialised feed mixes for individual species.

The feral pigeons are good examples as far as birds in and around Inverness are concerned. Their origin is a mixture of racing pigeons from lofts in gardens and pigeons from the old traditional doocots as the buildings fell out of favour and into disuse. The other source is the once native rock dove, now believed by some to be extinct in Britain, with which the other pigeons hybridised. The photograph of feral pigeons was taken last week and the majority of the birds are asleep and sunning themselves on the top of a block of flats at Hilton in Inverness.

The other birds that have been found breeding in all months of the year are the house sparrow, collared dove and wood pigeon. All of these birds find various sources of food in and around the City so it is rather a mystery as to why the house sparrows are declining as they have done in the last few years. Perhaps it is the lack of cover as old barns and outbuildings are either refurbished or taken down. House sparrows were once so common nobody bothered to study them!

The “special” birds and animals in the Highlands, in other words the ones that people want to see, includes a wide range. Some of these are difficult to see because of their habits such as the pine marten that is mainly nocturnal and rather unpredictable. In contrast ospreys, at the right time of the year, can easily be seen from such places as Loch Garten. Even the re-introduced sea eagle is not that difficult as there are public hides overlooking one or two nests. Red stags are fairly easy to see, especially at this time of the year, as they move to lower levels on the hills with the onset of winter. Golden eagles are difficult to see as they range over such huge territories even in the winter.
There is one animal that is often at the top of the lists and that is the otter, perhaps because of its secretive habits and being so elusive. It is also partly to do with the attention it has been given in the past by such writers as Gavin Maxwell in “Ring of Bright Water”.

There is an image projected by the media of an animal that is nocturnal and one that feeds on fish and even so far as saying that its main prey are eels because they cannot swim as fast as other fish. In fact the otter comes out not only at dawn and dusk but also, where it is not disturbed too much, during the day. As for its prey it takes a very wide range of food and is opportunistic in taking many birds and animals that come its way. One of the main reasons it is difficult to see is that if the water is rough or even choppy, on loch or sea, then the otter can often go undetected. This is partly because it swims mainly with only its head showing above water.

Whilst its main prey is largely fish and, mainly in the Highlands, eels, pike, salmon and trout, increasingly a much wider range of prey is being taken. This may well have always been the case as there are simply more people watching wildlife these days and recording much more. Even black-throated divers have not escaped their attention. Some years ago someone was watching divers from a hide on the side of Loch Sheil, west of Fort William, when the diver suddenly left its eggs. It had been disturbed by an otter that promptly ate the two eggs in their scrape at the waters edge. On Loch Maree an otter was seen to grab an adult diver from below and whilst the diver escaped it was later found dead.

Other large birds do not escape the otters attention as someone watching an adult female mallard near Brin just south of Inverness suddenly saw the duck disappear and moments later an otter was eating it on the shore. Even Slavonian grebes have been prey with eggs, young and adults being taken from nests. One interesting development in recent years has been otters attacking toads. This is not surprising as toads often occur in very large numbers as a number of lochs around Inverness will testify. Once the conditions are right weather-wise toads move out of their hibernation site in large numbers almost overnight. The otters just feast on them but leave the obnoxious and poisonous skins alone. To offset this range of food naturalists say that the numbers of prey taken outside the fish diet is low and do not adversely affect the overall numbers.