birdpix

A day without bird watching?We visited a Donkey santuary in the High Peak,there are no opening times on their website ,we arrived at 11.00 assuming that the place would be open,only to be shouted  at from a rather unfriendly woman 12! Oh I take that to mean we open at 12 then .To fill in time we went to an Otter and Owl santuary that was fairly nearby they also have deer there ,hence the appaling pun in the title of this blog.We soon found ourselves looking at birds in the form of the recent robin pictured above .In an otter enclosure where Eurasian otters should have been we watched a grey wagtail busy catching flies.We admired the owls ,in one enclosure there was a short eared owl  along with a long eared owl ,another had a tawny ,another a barn owl and even a buzzard,hmmm,we have watched all of these in the wild in Derbyshire.I wanted to liberate them all.There were also some exotic owls including a burrowing owl that looked like a little owl on stilts,a snowy owl and Eagle owls to name just a few.Eagle owls have bred in yorkshire...The Eurasian otters never did put in an appearance,the giant otters ,North American were awesome .Managed to avoid the rain before admiring three deer species and heading back to the Donkey santuary .A female stonechat was flying along in front of us for several hundred yards ,bobbing from side to side in flight rather amusingly.Rather less amusing was that the Donkey santuary  at 3.00 was now closed! Rather fed up ,we headed back ,deciding on a whim to get a bakewell pudding to take to the mother in laws,drove through Chatsworth en route and saw some more deer.Avoided another soaking in Bakewell where the usual ducks geese swans and coots were on the river ,watched from above by jackdaws ,but we werent bird watching.....