Crossbill Crossroads

If we turn right out of our gate, as we did this morning, and walk straight up the road, passing through the hamlet of Golspie Tower and up into the forestry on the slopes of Beinn Bhraggie, we come to this crossroads where the track we follow meets Queen's Drive. Within a radius of a few hundred metres of it lies the best territory for spotting....

....crossbills. We've seen them in flocks but by now they've paired up, which they do very early in the year, and produced their young. We suspect that the two we saw today were a mother and one of her young, which was so intent on feeding that....

....to the concern of the parent, it let us approach as close as we've been to this unusual species.

Nearby we spotted a yellow bird which, for a time, defied identification until we realised that we weren't recognising it because we were seeing it out of context. This cheerful singer is a siskin, one of the species we've been trying to attract onto our nyjer feeder.

The plantation around Crossbill Crossroads is relatively new, the young trees being about five metres tall, and this seems to suit both willow warblers (above) and their cousin warbler, the chiffchaffs. At this time of year the forestry is filled with the joyous songs of these small birds, both recently returned from Africa.

Our morning's bird watching was capped by the sighting of a pair of red kites, circling round and round each other high above us, and by the call of one or perhaps two cuckoos, the first we have heard this spring.