Ben Cruachan – natural history

We’ve had rain, twenty two and a half beautiful millimetres of it, and it was really needed. This morning dawned fine and cool, good birding weather, so my son and I went out to the Avon to have a look at the Rainbow Bee-eaters. Matt’s camera has a much longer reach than mine, and as it turned out he was able to put it to good use. The Bee-eaters showed up right on cue at the first location, and one sat on the fence in an obliging manner to have its picture taken.


Further on at the stream junction we saw another pair, and then decided to walk on to the start of the private property in the hope of seeing something else out of the ordinary. And we did. There is a dead tree up at the end, and as we approached it we noticed a distinctive shape perched on a limb, a Dollarbird, or Broad-billed Roller. In the past five years I’ve only seen one other bird along the river here, although they are always upstream in the spring and summer. They’re a breeding migrant of course, and arrive down from the north towards the end of October. For the next ten minutes we followed it through the scrub, and saw it joined by two more, one being immature, so it was a family party. Finally we managed to get close enough to the youngster to get pictures, the light wasn’t ideal, but we weren’t complaining.




There were many other birds about enjoying the moist conditions after the rain, including Sacred Kingfishers, and our little favourites, Mistletoebirds, but I’m afraid they only got a cursory glance after the great time we had with the stars of the show. Click on the pictures for larger images.