My tech stress and the raven’s nest have nothing in common except that one is proving therapeutic in the face of the other.
I think you can guess which one is which.
The technical bit is boring, so I’ll just tell you that my file storage system is suddenly lifeless and incommunicado. Shades of the timeless Monty Python “dead parrot” sketch.
Fortunately (sort of) I’m a veteran of 35 years of “oh my god, how can all that priceless information have vanished in a heartbeat” moments, so I’m pretty neurotic about backing up most of my backups. Still, I’ll be much happier when I get the new hardware and see for sure that the backup drives are OK.
To talk myself down from the stress ceiling, I’ve been looking at some of my favourite moments from our spring trip to the UK, and I came across videos of this raven’s nest we were lucky enough to see in Scotland.
And there WAS a lot of luck involved.
First of all, we almost didn’t go to St. Abbs — a lovely village just over the Scottish border from our B&B in Berwick-upon-Tweed.
We had planned to spend our last morning on the northern Northumberland coast at Lindisfarne. We’d been waiting patiently for that rare convergence of tides and byzantine bus schedules that would allow us to get to Holy Island on public transit, and Saturday was the day.
At the last minute, based on the advice of bird watchers we met on buses and in cafés, we changed our minds and instead hopped on a bus to St. Abbs. It was, we were told, a great place for seeing birds.
The St Abbs area stood in for New Asgard in the filming of the “Avengers: Endgame” — so we knew the scenery would be fairly spectacular.
Thor’s Hammer in the St Abbs Visitors’ Centre
And it really was.
The bus let us off in the village and from there we headed out on the walk along the cliff-side walk to the lighthouse at St. Abbs Head. We already had one eye on our watches as there was only one bus back south to Berwick-upon-Tweed to catch our train back to Newcastle.
A homing pigeon heading back to his loft in St Abbs
Walking the path with the village in the background
Spot the raven on the top of this rock outcropping. I didn’t even see it as we hurried past the first time on our destination, the lighthouse at St Abbs Head.
Galloping along, we reached the lighthouse and were rewarded by the sight of many sea birds nesting on the jagged cliffs.
We saw guillemots, eider ducks and kittiwakes. There may have been the odd puffin in. the crowd but, if so, we didn’t have time to pick them out.
Guillemots and Eider Ducks.
I was thrilled to get my first close up look at rooks too! I’d watched them tending to their young in rookeries in Wales and England, but always up high in the trees. There was another rookery at the start of the St Abbs path and, further along, the adult rooks were coming down to the fields above the crags to forage. Hooray!
There were lots of jackdaws too, making their pinball arcade game calls and wheeling about in the sky with the rooks.
I was already very happy with our trip to St Abbs Head as we headed back at a brisk bus-catching pace.
Here my telephoto lens makes Phillip pointing at birds and someone taking a selfie look like a promo shot for a Sound of Music remake
It was as we were striding purposefully back past that rocky tower when Phillip spotted it — a raven’s nest!!!
You can see the adult raven on the very top and, looking straight down to a pale area on the crags below — there’s the nest!
I’m pretty sure he almost regretted pointing it out, as it was then like prying a limpet off a rock to get me to move again in the direction of the bus stop.
The nest was pretty far away from the path and it was very windy, so the photo and video quality isn’t great, but I did my best — in the face of a lot of pressure to get moving.
Three babies still in the nest and one doing a bit of exploring below it
In the video below (sorry for the wind noise) you can see the one adventurous baby exploring among the sea pinks outside of the nest. One of the young ravens in the nest makes a tentative flapping motion. In this location there’s not a lot of room for error, so these raven fledglings (like other cliff-nest dwellers) , must be pretty sure of their flying skills when they make the momentous choice to take off.
By now, I was noticing a slight note of hysteria in Phillip’s warnings about the time, so it was time to stuff the camera back into the bag and set off at a jog towards the bus stop.
We caught the bus and were able to tuck this little raven’s nest memory away for a mentally rainy day. I like to close my eyes and think of all four of those young ravens now soaring over the cliffs at St Abbs.
While I’ve been writing the blog, the new computer hardware has arrived, so now I just have to wait for my tech person to come over and put it all back together for me. Fingers crossed!
__________________________________________________________________________________________
© junehunterimages, 2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to junehunterimages with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.