Wildife of The West Coast of Scotland - An Expedition Part 1

We finally arrived at the cottage that we would be spending the first week of our expedition in. It had been a long seven hours, from Penrith to wild Ardnamurchan crammed in the back of a car amongst four peoples hiking, camping and living gear for two weeks.

Our first mission - check out the cottage and its surroundings, for here we would be on a search for the wildlife and exploring the natural world that the highlands has to offer. We were really in the middle of nowhere, radio and phone signal were nowhere to be found. A great opportunity to get away from the gruelling day to day life of a university student and enjoy nature in a personal, hands on way.

For this expedition we were equipped with four DSLR cameras, a range of different size lenses, from macro to 400mm, a hide, binoculars, tripods, a telescope and many other objects that would help us view and capture images of the creatures and landscaped we would see in the next two weeks.

Some advice I have if you are wanting to make the most of a place you don't know too much about is - ask the locals. Find out before you go about who you can contact, where you can visit and ask any questions you want to know. You you more often than not find that people are very willing to help if you are polite and friendly.

Luckily for us around the cottage that we were staying in Ardnamurchan there were pletny of friendly people happy to help us on our journey. We visited the Ardnamurchan Natural History Centre and met with a guy called John Polak, who we had previously contacted in order to gain some knowledge of the area. He showed us the first Grey Heron egg of the season on a live cam they had set up by the nests.

We were surrounding by large ancient oak woodland which carried an array of wildlife including many common Lizards and Slow worms, not to mention the vast quantity of ticks.

We set up our hide on the marshland infront of our cottage so we could see it visibly through the huge glass windows that surrounded the front of the building. We set up this hide so the animals would get used to it and we could go early morning and evening to see what passed.

As we were all set up I began to day-dream about the two weeks ahead and what the nature of this magical place would have in store for us.