Scotland 2025 Day 7 Puffins and Castle!

 08/05/2025

Today in pursuit of Puffins we headed North to the RSPB,s reserve at Fowlsheugh, I like to visit at least one Seabird Colony a year. A fantastic place with all the sights, sounds and yes smells you'd expect and far fewer knobs with cameras than you'd get at Bempton, in fact I think I was the only one!!😃😃😃!! No Gannets here,but wall to wall, Guillemots , Razorbills, Kittiwakes, Fulmars and Shags apparently there are only about 20 Puffins present but we fond 5 of them!! Whoop!

The Walk down to the Cliffs the gorse in flower singing Yellowhammer, Whitethroats and Willow Warblers

Birds Galore!

Guillemot

Not seen that many Wheatear as yet! 

Herring Gull

Kittiwake

Razorbill

Fulmar

Kittiwake staring at the wall

Couldn't see any nesting Gannets, but plenty flying through

Lots of Auks flying through as well!

Fulmar making flying look effortless

Great Black-backed Gull on the lookout for unattended eggs

Bit of Razorbill romance

Now I know what you're thinking, soaring Fulmars and bonking Razorbills are all very well, but where's the Puffins!?

Puffin

They look all cute and innocent but they can get aggro pretty quick when someone's in their hole!

Calmed down in the end!

On the way back to the car one of the Yellowhammers put in an appearance

Dragging ourselves away we headed into Stonehaven where we admired some sculpture whilst enjoying an Ice Cream, got to say Scotland let's itself down on the provision of gluten free ice cream cones, don't think we found any, yet when we were in Wales practically every shop had em! Some pics of the Harbour and  sculptures below.

Think I enhance it to be honest

To be fair they were pretty amazing, I think they were all done by one bloke in his spare time, but I could be wrong as I wasn't really listening to Margie as she was reading the board😲! So I was thinking we were all cultured out and that we should possibly head off birding somewhere else, sadly  I was wrong!!  Margie had spotted the signs to Dunnottar Castle !!! So we spent the afternoon there instead, as Castles go it was pretty impressive and there were a couple of Fulmars flying around the walls !! Though it was a little strange that someone who "couldn't walk another step" at the bird colony, suddenly had the energy to walk miles up and down hundreds of steep steps then all round a castle, Hmmmmm? 😲😅Some of our pics below

Castle ahead

The view from the top

I was bored at this point and was trying to recreate my Clint Eastwood look

Don't go into the light!

Me contemplating the 219 steps, visualising the walk back😢

Trying to turn back, but forced on!😃

An amazing place in glorious weather!!! After that we were pretty much zonked out!!! So called it a day and  headed back to base!