The posse

We had a terrific morning spotting both welcome and unwelcome wildlife within 15 mins of each other, located in much the same place. 

We reported the unwelcome stoat sighting, as always, and were delighted when the dog stoat detecting team from Orkney Native Wildlife turned up on our doorstep only a little while afterwards!  It was wonderful to watch them. The stoat was flushed out but sadly managed to escape down a rabbit hole and didn't get dispatched. Apparently,  the team had caught two along our frontage onto the shore in the last week so were very keen to make it a hatrick. 

Stoats are wonderful little creatures and marvellously good killing machines. Unfortunately, they shouldn't be on Orkney and they are devastating native wildlife with a big knock on effect up the food chain. We used to get regular sightings of short eared owls but their prey has been gobbled up by stoats, who also love chomping ground nesting birds' eggs.  So they are a disaster here. 

But, we are very fortunate that we have a regular female hen harrier who hunts over our property and yesterday she literally dropped into the field right by our bird feeders. It was just after we'd seen the stoat so I was really hoping she'd got the little bugger, but sadly not! However she was incredibly interested in whatever was there and circled around and dropped again, only 30' away. What a treat  :-)

The rest of the day was much less exciting!!