Sunday 15th June - Misty day with lots of bird of prey action

Ben and Indy co-hosted a mull nature explorer today ! To start the day off, the weather conditions were not in our favour, very low clouds and raining most of the day.

The day started on the coast, where a white tailed eagle was seen straight away flying and attempting to catch a fish but failing and then landing close on the pine trees, very kindly for all the guests to get great views of the biggest eagle in Europe.

Moving onto to our next location, we visited a rolling hills grassland site. And it was incredible, within minutes we had a male hen harrier flying rapidly across and then a distant short eared owl hunting along a fence line. We tend to get short eared owls on the tours in the day, if the weather was bad during the night or day beforehand, so they can be very active in the day if there’s a break in the weather because they have chicks to feed at this time of year. After a short wait, the male hen harrier appeared again calling, and you just couldn’t write it a stunning food pass occurred right in front of all of us and everyone on the tour saw this beautiful display and was definitely the highlight of the day.

Moving into the afternoon, the conditions turned really hard as you can see in this picture, the clouds were very low making some of the usual spots like the golden eagles and white tailed eagles nest not worth stopping as we couldn’t see 10 metres away from us ! Whilst driving there was a very close snipe next to the road landed on a post which some of the guest got some great photos. Also, some very close red deers to the road, it was just brilliant to get such close views.

Common snipe

Indy gave a great talk and showed some of the impressive botany on mull, mainly the carnivorous plants and orchids that thrive in our acidic peaty soils.

Finally, we got out of the low clouds and talked a little bit about the history of the islands we could see and entered a new loch to continue scanning for otters.

As we searched for otters, we just couldn’t help ourselves by finding the mascot of today’s tours the white tailed eagle again, landed nicely on a rock in the middle and gave great scope views as it looked miserable in the wind and rain. We then ventured round to the other side of the loch and Indy spotted two more white tailed eagles and there was a large haul of harbour seals resting up !

Then it was time to head back to Tobermory and to finish the day, on route Ben spotted the Irish hare again in the field they have been hanging around in next to the road which is just fantastic as it gives the guests an opportunity to see this subspecies of a mountain hare.

The guests were fantastic today and understood the challenging conditions, but we still managed to have a great day, so thank you to all the guests!