One New Bird Fan

So I was baby-sitting my niece today, she's two-and-a-half, a cracking age for having fun, and in the midst of the day something catches her eye on the computer as it flicks through on my screensaver gallery. It was this shot of a Pied Flycatcher at Coombes Valley RSPB. She asks with no small puzzlement, "What's that birdie doing on that 'ole?"
I explain it's a daddy bird and his babies are keeping safe inside the box, and that he takes food to them there. She asks me what his name is and I try to get across that they're called flycatchers. Anyway, her conclusion to all this new information, "It's cute!"

She's hardly wrong and you know what, I think we might have snagged her already!

For Birds, For People, For My Niece!

The Beginning of It for Me

I've been thinking about what is was that first excited me about birds, whenever I do so my mind immediately returns to something my father told me.

He explained how during a family holiday to Argyle, Western Scotland, his father showed him an Oystercatcher. My dad says that as a small boy seeing for the first time this very distinctive bird he thought it was a clockwork toy.
Years later when he had a family of his own he took us to the same loch - Loch Caolisport - (pronounced 'killis-sport') the name means shallow sandy inlet and it's a beautiful quiet stretch of the coast not often visited, as if it's a secret to those of us fortunate enough to have been there. At this very same spot I must have seen the very same bird as my father because I thought precisely the same thing he had when he'd been a kid there 35 years before.
Well okay, maybe it wasn't the same bird, just the same magic.