Collared Dove

A very busy day, moving sandbags ready for any winter floods we may suffer and various jobs.  The week in general looks busy with a visit from a friend who emigrated to Canada 40 years ago and getting ready for being away from home for 2 weeks.

The result blipping?  Take the easy way out bird shots in the garden.  Collared Doves are a bird that is a bit special to me.  As a lad and a budding birder they were a rarity I desperately wanted to see.  I saw my first on Iona and then in Cumbria in the late 1960s.

They are a bird of the Indian sub continent which expanded its range.  Hardly known in Europe until the 1930s they were first recorded in Lincolnshire in 1952.  They have now reached as far as the Faeroe Islands and has been recorded as a vagrant in Iceland on 50 or so occasions.