Crossbill!

I do like to set off on my morning walk with an objective in mind, and today's was to see a crossbill. This is a good time of year for spotting them as they're already paired up and nesting so they're at their most active and most visible high in the coniferous trees. We've seen them before where the track up from Golspie Tower into Beinn Bhraggie woodland crosses Queen's Drive so I walked up there in a mixture of bright sun and sudden, cold rain showers.

The males tend to occupy the topmost branches of coniferous trees so this might have been one, though it turned out to be a coal tit. That said, the crossbills are usually in the thicker branches so when....

....I saw this bird I managed to fire off five pictures which show, without any doubt....

....that the bird was a crossbill, a female judging by the greenishness of its breast feathers.

At the time there were several birds calling, one definitely a blue tit, but one of the calls was a fairly distinctive a-tweet-a-tweet-a-tweet. This doesn't sound anything like the recordings of a crossbill on the internet but one of the problems is that this bird may have been a crossbill, a Scottish crossbill or even, possibly, a parrot crossbill.

The photos were taken at the extreme range of my camera so they're not the best, but at least here I have a picture of a crossbill eating the seeds of a pine cone.

So.... an objective set and achieved. Very satisfying!