Scotland 2017

Mountain Hare - Cairngorms, Scotland

Scotland seems to be becoming a regular venue for our wildlife trips and our latest visit had been planned for some time. If you want to secure the services of one of the many togs now offering guiding services, booking twelve months in advance is very much the norm. The flipside of this is we wanted to photograph Red Squirrels and Mountain Hares in the snow; try booking those conditions that far ahead.

Our ultimate destination was the Cairngorms, but we decided to break the journey in two and started off with a day in a hide just over the border. Frankly that was a disappointment. The weather wasn't the best and the fact we needed to use ISO 3200 to get any sort of usable shutter speed was never going to make it easy. Biggest let down of all was the particular species we were after didn't show up all day, always a possibility in this game. We just have to accept the fact and move on.

Move on is what we did the following day and managed to get to the RSPB visitor centre at Loch Garten with about 30 minutes of useable light left. There was no-one about, but plenty of birds and our first sighting of Crested Tits. A number of the birds there were quite tame, we even had a Blue Tit fly inside the car.

Our base for the next three days was Grantown-on-Spey from where we were hoping to get the pictures we wanted. Naturally enough, there was no snow so we had to make the best of it.

Day one saw us start with Red Squirrels and at one time we had six of them in range to choose from. After a morning with them we moved on to get Crested Tits. This was more of a challenge, the birds were backlit and there was a considerable amount of flare that was hard to control. It does seem a bit churlish to complain about getting sunshine in Scotland, but that's how it was.

Day two and still no snow, but we went off to the Findhorn Valley to do Mountain Hares and they were easy to spot. We had a very productive, if cold, day as there was a strong, icy wind blowing down the glen. We ended the day happy.

Day three dawned with a sprinkling of snow and we were hopeful that we could get what we'd driven six hundred miles to get. It turned out that there was nowhere near enough snow, although showers were forecast for the day, so we had another session in the Crested Tit hide. It was planned to be a morning only visit and then move on elsewhere, possibly for Buzzards, but we elected to stay with the Cresties all day. The showers did materialise, but it wasn't until we drove back to Grantown that we realised how much there had been. More significant falls were forecast for that night, so the decision to stay an extra day was taken. Fortunately both our accommodation and our guide were able to cope with that and a plan was set.

There was about four inches of the white stuff on the ground when we got up on the fourth day and we knew the gods were smiling on us at last. We spent a couple of hours with the Red Squirrels and then headed off up the glen for a second time. Finding Hares this time was naturally totally different, but our guide is a regular there and has a good idea of where certain individuals like to hunker down. A successful afternoon resulted and it was job done. We had already bagged some beautiful images of both the Squirrels and the Hares, but getting them in the snow just took them to another level.

Had we not stayed for the extra day, we wouldn't have been able to get home anyway, so it was a good decision to stay. There was more snow that night, but by delaying our departure until mid-morning next day we were able to get down to Perth with little trouble. In fact, we actually made it all the way back to Dorset. A successful week completed.