On the 6th March 1993 our team took a late winter trip to Scotland on a twitch for a Ross’s Gull near Inverness but unfortunately it was not there after the long journey north (fortunately I had seen one in 88 in Devon). We hired a car from a local dealer where my daughter then worked, a Ford Granada automatic a bit of a novelty so we all had a drive of it during our trip. Geoff and Roger Wyatt, Martin Hallam, Justin Taylor and myself all went north and decided to make a week end of it so after dipping the gull we continued up to Grantown on Spey to clean up on some Scottish specialities.
We arrived at Grantown and booked in to a B&B and then went to one of the local hotels to get some food and a few beers, as luck would have it there was a two piece band performing in the hotel that night complete with a drum machine, guitar etc, doing covers of pop songs from the 60’s and 70’s which fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your view) we all knew the words to so as the beer flowed so did our vocal prowess led by our choirmaster Geoff.
We even complimented vocally the drum machine intros and sang along with just about every track they played and at one point the guitarist broke a string but we managed to fill in on the song until the guitar was restrung. Come the end of the night we even got applause from band themselves and some of the audience and needless to say we were well oiled!
This was one of several trips to Scotland we made for various rarities and we must admit that apart from the birds (‘cos they are in our notebooks) the memories of the rest of the trips tend to be rather vague and especially as influenced by alcohol. On one trip we camped in Grantown cemetery for a night as we could not get a B&B, luckily it was not Halloween that night.
OK, so the following morning we are out early, all with various degrees of a hangover and Roger being particularly worse for wear. One of our target species was Black Grouse as Justin had not seen them before so we started a tour of potential sites. Every now and again we would have to stop for one of the passengers to get out of the car and regurgitate some of the previous nights intake, now at one point Roger said “stop the car”, he opened the passenger door and immediately regurgitate and at that point two male Black Grouse flew from right to left over the car that proves the point that “chumming” and for Black Grouse inland can work.
Some irony here also as in the back seat Martin was sat on one side of the car and saw them, me sat on the other side saw them but Justin sat in the middle missed them and he was the one who needed to see them! However we did see some more on the trip so Justin did get his Black Grouse.
Overall we had a pretty good week end with Crested Tit, Scottish Crossbill, Golden Eagle, Ptarmigan, Red Grouse, Black Grouse, Snow Bunting, Iceland Gull, Goshawk, Hen Harrier, Capercallie, thousands of Pink-footed Geese, a Snow Goose, many Common Eider and a several Red Squirrel and thanks to Geoff Wyatt for his input on this one.
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