An island used to the skies virtually darkening as its resident white tailed sea eagles – with their 8 foot wingspan – has seen visitors reacting to the beat of very different wings.
A pair of European bee-eaters – so geometrically coloured-in they look like the progeny of a child’s imagination – have found themselves in Calgary, the small sea-girt forebear of Canada’s mighty oil and gas metropolis.
The birds, which feed on the wing, were spotted around a week ago near the beach at Calgary on the west side of Mull, wondering what happened to the Mediterranean, North Africa and western Asia, their usual and more balmy hangouts.
Strong winds have probably pushed them off course and now that they’re in Calgary they’re pulling others off course too, as visitors try to get there to see them. The Calgary Farmhouse Tearoom is keeping twitchers sustained in between long spells of often fruitless watching.
According to Dave Sexton, the island’s RSPB Officer, it is not impossible – though unlikely – that this might become a permanent residence. He has said that a pair arriving in Durham some years ago found a quarry where they raised a brood.
If this were to happen, it would be some very bright additional feathers in Mull’s cap.
These arrivals coincide with the spotting – at Galston on the Isle of Lewis in the Western Isles – of a single gyrfalcon, one of the largest (wingspan 5 feet plus) and fastest types of falcon.
This bird, whose breeding habitat is the Arctic, is thought to have been on his way there and to have been forced off course by the ash cloud from Iceland’s active Eyjafjallajökull volcano.
Nature has been kind to the Lewis gyrfalcon. The same conditions that forced him to take refuge in Lewis have also flown in his food supply. Gyrfalcons prey on geese and and Lewis has a significant number of Brent geese and Pink-footed geese at the moment, also held back from getting back to the Arctic circle by the volcanic ask in their flight path.
And birders are en route to the western Isles as we write.
Photographs
The photographs accompanying this article show:
- top, a European bee-eater, by copyright holder William Kreijkes and reproduced here under the GNU Free Documentation licence
- left, a gyrfalcon . This image is in the pubic domain.
Amazing looking bird and name, Mull does ever so well in spotting the feathered visitors to their island.
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