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Wild life sightings at ancient sites
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Branwen
824 posts

Edited Jan 21, 2010, 18:23
Re: Wild life sightings at ancient sites
Jan 21, 2010, 18:19
postman wrote:
a buzzard flew low across the road infront of us and hit the people carrier infront


Ouch. What a shame.

My first year on the bus tours to the highlands I would drive along the road that runs alongside Loch Laggan, spouting my spiel into the microphone and trying to concentrate on what is a very dangerous bit of road. As you get to the worst stretch where it narrows, just by Dun Da Lamh hillfort, I got a shock. This ewe and her two lambs were startled by a large goshawk swooping out of the trees at them. I only narrowly avoided killing them, as there is cliff on one side and a drop off on the other, so no where to swerve to really. It happened regularly at Dun Da Lamh for the next three months, so that I realised the Goshawk was deliberately trying to scare the lambs under the wheels of the buses. Confirmed one week when I saw it feasting on one. Then there was a month with nothing. The sheep had grown accustomed to it, and refused to startle anymore. So all quiet, and I got less twitchy. Until, that is, I was driving up to the hillfort part of the road as usual, saw some sheep, and suddenly the Goshawk came screaming out of the trees straight at the windshield! Missed it by inches and effortlessly flew ahead of the bus for a minute before flying away. It was now trying to startle the drivers into hitting the sheep instead of the other way around. Just about died of a heart attack I can tell you. It did that for about a month, which the tourists loved.

It gave up in the end, I hope, and didn't just end up like the buzzard you mention. I was too busy keeping one eye on the skies and one on the road a few weeks later when a brightly coloured pheasant went up in front of the bus. So calm was I after the all the other stuff I just swerved and interrupted my history commentary to comment on the bird itself - only to have the dun coloured female he was with fly straight into the offside mirror in an explosion of feathers and screams from the bus.
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Re: Wild life sightings at ancient sites (postman)
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