Friday 24th October

Weather: Moderate breeze picking up through the day with heavy cloud mostly

The days sightings included lots of Red Deer, a ringtail Hen Harrier and 2 male Hen Harrier, one of which gave great views quartering the flat grassland not far away, 3 sightings of sadly distant Golden Eagles, who despite the breeze didn't want to play ball, some sizeable flocks of Redwing and Fieldfare, Great-Northern Divers in the sea lochs and lots of Buzzards enjoying the breeze.

The star sighting of the day came from a fantastic Otter encounter we first watched a subadult male fishing from the van before parking up and waiting for it to come our way which it duly did, disappearing it popped up in the shoreline seaweed still unaware of our presence and caught 50cm long young Codling right in front of us maybe only 8m away and over the next 20mins devoured the lot! A quite unbelievable encounter.

We finished the day as the light started to drop with another Otter encounter, wandering around almost cat like on top of a rocky skerry just off the shoreline whilst a pair of White-tailed Eagles perched preening up in the spruce behind us.