The Montrose wildlife Centre.

above; view as we left the Montrose wildlife centre

Saturday 25 April 2015

I’m back home after house/ garden/ dog/ teenager sitting for the week. My daughter is studying environmental science at University and she needed to go away for the week on a field trip. Not sure exactly what she was doing, but the photos are wonderful, she spent the week at Aviemore counting rocks or measuring the ‘roundness’ of boulders or some such thing. 

above; Montrose Wildlife Centre main building.

Her partner was away and so….. Granny ( that’s me) to the rescue. It’s a while since I lived with a 14 year old. The days went by something like this;

Me, ‘Good morning dear, everything OK?’

Her, ‘Yeah, fine’.

She then fed the dogs and ate her breakfast in silence.

Me, ‘Bye then, have a nice day hun’

Her, ‘yeah ok’

Me, ‘Hi Hun, how was school today?’

Her, ‘OK’

Me, ‘what did you do today hun?’

Her, ‘nothing’

Her, ‘what’s for tea today Granny?’

Me…. Told her what I planned and asked if that’s ok

Her, ‘Yeah, fine’.

Her, ‘going to my room now’

Me, ‘OK hun, see you later’

5.50 she reappears

Her, ‘Tea ready yet?’

Me ‘almost ready just getting it out of the oven’.

Her, feeds the dogs in silence and hovers until her tea is served.

Me, ‘here’s your tea, hope you enjoy it’

Her, ‘yeah, going to my room now’

Me, ‘OK then see you later’

After that she made another appearance and either walked the dog or took it into the garden to play for a while ( second dog was post surgery and not to be walked or excited). Then back to her room, then a final appearance about 9.30pm to look for something to eat before bed, and then nothing until the following morning when we start all over again. At the end of the week, I could say in all honesty, yes, she was absolutely fine, no bother at all, hardly knew she was there. Such is life with a typical 14 year old I guess.

above; some of what you are 'supposed' to see at the wildlife Centre

It’s been a bit like a mini holiday, I filled my day with pottering in the garden, talking to the dogs, attempting to play on the laptop, (although that didn’t work out very well, I gave up in the end and decided to wait until I could be back here in front of my own computer) and catching up on some reading. I’ve been reading Russell Brands book ‘Revolution’ and to my utter surprise, I’m quite enjoying it.

 Goldfinch

Once you get past his weird, disjointed way with words, there are little gems of pure truth and astounding insights into well, everything really, all buried deep within his verbal diarrhoea. I found it on my daughters bookshelf and started reading, I’m glad I did now.

Chaffinch

Anyway, I’m back home now and its catch up time on the computer, my first task will be post here about the Montrose Wildlife Centre; which is something I wanted to do while I was away but ended up giving up with daughters laptop, then on to catch up with every one else here, then over the flickr to edit and save more of my huge backlog of photos, and that’s more or less, my plan for today

 outside the wildlife centre

Montrose wildlife Centre

This was supposed to be another photo opportunity for my photographer friend and myself. Off we went on a lovely sunny morning a couple of days before I was needed for house sitting. We were hoping to capture lots of interesting wildlife on our cameras. It didn’t quite work out as we planned, for a start, it may have been bright and sunny but it was also windy and freezing cold which was a bit of a disappointment because we had packed a tasty picnic lunch. Hardy souls that we are, we sat outside, enjoying the sunshine, trying to ignore the biting cold and ate our lunch, I was so glad I decided to take my flask with hot coffee and not a bottle of water. The second disappointment of the day was the noise; there were people doing routine maintenance at the Wildlife Centre. They were banging, sawing, hammering, shouting to one another and stomping around. Obviously any wild life that may have been about that day was scared off.   Undeterred we tried to make the most of it; we found ourselves a good viewing position from inside the centre and waited; hopefully, for something of interest to appear. We resigned ourselves to having to photograph through glass, which isn’t ideal but we didn’t want it to be a totally wasted day. On to the third disappointment of the day, well it was more of an irritant than a disappointment really. I think I must have been particularly grumpy that morning, because there was a young member of staff who (through no fault of his own) began to seriously grate on my consciousness, he irritated the life out of us. He was very young and very enthusiastic. He wanted to constantly engage us in conversation, he wanted to point out all and every single detail of the centre, the tiniest footnote could not be overlooked, he was driven to educate us on the history of the place and explain to us, at length, about every species of wild life EVER seen there. In general, he just wanted to talk, and talk, and talk. My friend was born and brought up in Montrose, and as she said to me afterwards, she has probably forgotten more about the area, its wild life, its history, and the history of the centre than he will ever learn. I think the final straw for us was when he focused the telescope way out on a sandbank to show us some seals sunbathing there. He was so proud that the seals were there and desperately wanted us to share his enthusiasm. The bit he didn’t understand was that yes, seals are great, but we have seen them many times before, we live around here, and unless we are in a position to photograph them (which we were defiantly not) they were not of that much interest. We were both doing a good impression of grumpy old women that day.

In the end we left the centre (and Mr Enthusiastic) and made our way down to the hide, the solitude down there was lovely. Still not a lot of wildlife to be seen but the views were spectacular, the little windows opened up to allow us to take photos without looking through glass which was great. There was no heating in that tiny hide but because it was well crafted from solid wood it was out of the wind, draught free and warmed by the sunshine. It was like another world. It was also a Mr Enthusiastic free zone.

It’s from here that we took most of our photos. I looked up just in time to see a heron landing on the shore, it was quite a distance away and I didn’t have time to focus properly but it was nice to see.   

We saw a variety of song birds that stayed long enough to get some photos of. We saw Chaffinch, Goldfinch, Great Tit and Pied wag tail. 

We also saw one solitary yatch sailing by, it looked as if it was a beautiful sunny day, blue sky and blue sea, but I bet it was cold way out to sea in that little single sail yatch.

I also watched a mosquito fly into a spider web and become hopelessly snared. The web was so fine I didn’t even notice it until I saw the mosquito land. My first thought was, shut the window because I didn’t want Mosquitoes in the hide with me. 

Then I realised that poor little mossie wasn’t going to bother anyone any more. He wriggled and turned trying to get free, but it was hopeless, from the nano-second the tip of his little leg touched the web his fate was sealed. Funny how you can think lots of different things about the same subject all at the same time. I felt immensely relieved that he couldn’t get into the hide and feed off me; I tend to come up in gold ball sized lumps if bitten or stung by flying pests, I also felt a bit sorry for him, it’s a most unpleasant demise, then I felt a bit happy that an unknown, unseen, spider would get a meal that night and then, I stopped the random thoughts and started to closely observe him. He has delicate lace wings with long legs, his legs have little barbs on them and at the bottom of his body is what looks like a large sharp stinger. At that point I realised he probably wasn’t a mosquito at all but another, unidentified flying beastie that could render harm to me if freed. Anyway, what ever he was, he ended up as a meal for the unseen spider and a nice subject to practice my macro photography on.

As we left the hide we thought maybe the temperature had risen a little, the sky was so blue and the sound of birdsong was every where, it really looked lie a mid summer day, it was just the cold that reminded us we were still in early April. 

The flowers were another reminder, nothing quite so cheery as a good display of spring flowers.

The last thing I remember seeing that day was the old gnarled tree who laughed at us on the way back from the hide. He threw his arms in the air and gave a rumbling belly laugh as  I passed him. I  looked back to make sure I had seen him properly and there he was, still laughing. He looked as if he was standing,  mouth open, throwing his arms toward the sky and laughing at us as we alternated between admiring the scenery and shivering in the cold air.