April '08
Welcome to the April news letter and our new look website. I hope you enjoy looking around the new galleries and pages.

Announcements:

Loch Visons wins award
e commerce business of the year

Follow on Experience
Brand new and very exciting weekends and days out are now available, spaces are going so please book early to avoid dissapointment.

Guests
Gallery page of guests from 28th of February to the 2nd of April have been uploaded. Great shots, well done to all!

Gallery from our Red Squirrel weekend now available for viewing


Stories and pictures: Weasel surprise

Apologies for the delay in this months newsletter, I was on the insanely magical island of Mull for the first part of April, not having time to do the news page update before I left. Galleries and stories from Mull will be posted in next month's news page, this month however a weasel stole the show.

I noticed occasionally that a weasel gets interested in a peanut feeder on a wall in our Garden. Originally I thought this was to do with the voles the feeder was encouraging, but when I spent a little time watching I soon learnt different and learnt a whole new respect for the amazingly agile and cunning weasel.
This incredibly adaptive mustelid was in fact catching birds. It would hide away in a wee hole next to the feeder quietly waiting and watching. Eventually a bird would land, feeding away on the nuts oblivious to the incredible danger it was in. In an awesome display of agility, power and skill, the weasel would explode out of the hole nailing the bird mid flight, killing it almost instantly while falling 10 times its on body length to the ground, meal ready on landing. After which it would nonchalantly walk away bird in mouth to enjoy its exotic new meal in the safety of its den.
The weasel would often take birds the equal to its own size.
To put all this in context this would be like a human leaping from an 8 story high cliff catching a pig mid-flight and humanely butchering it before hitting the rocks below. Then walking away unharmed, carrying the pig under their arm to enjoy some tasty rashers of bacon at home.

So I hear you cry you must have got some fantastic action shots, er well not quite. A mixture of photographic incompetence, Argyll's dreadful weather and the action being far to quick for my meagre human reactions meant all I managed to get was some portrait shots of the Weasel as it assessed its next stake out. Luckily when seen this close up weasels are extremely photogenic so I am still very pleased, and who knows what might happen in the future, although we have not seen the weasel for a while now!

One of the reasons I only photograph wild animals is due to the whole experience and never knowing what might happen. I had a glorious few minutes watching these Robins display while waiting for the Weasel to appear.

Archive
Jan '08
Feb '08
Mar '08

All wildlife experiences, wildlife photography holidays, wildlife tours, wildlife photography courses, and wildlife images only feature wild animals in Scotland, no captive or semi feral animals are used