A trip to RSPB Vane Farm

Last month me Mum Dad and my baby brother Sam went to the RSPB reserve at Vane Farm, which is in Fife in Scotland. We've been RSPB members for over a year but we hadn't gone before. It was a beautiful sunny day and I saw loads of things.



When you first get there, there is a main building with a cafe and a shop. (The cafe and the shop were really good). Then across the road you can walk to three different hides to watch the wildlife. This is what the hides look like:



Here are some of the birds that I saw:



↑ This is one of the grey herons. They stand still in the water, wait for fish to come and then they catch they with their long beak. This one has just caught a fish.



↑ When it flew off, it had enormous wings.



↑ This is a male widgeon. You can't really see in this picture but he has a yellow patch on his head.



↑ These are tufted ducks. I think these are all drakes (males) too.



↑ This is a beautiful duck with a different shaped beak. It is a shoveler, and the beak is a a different shape to filter out small particles of food. Most of them fly away from Scotland in the winter.



↑ These are greylag geese and they weren't on the loch but they were in the field next to it. They would have come from Iceland last October to spend their winter here and they hadn't flown back yet.



↑The hide nearest the buildings was like a big classroom. You could see loads of goldfinches on the bird feeders. I've only ever seen one goldfinch, and that was on my bird feeder last winter.



↑ This is a coot. They dive under the water to eat plants on the loch bed.

After we finished at the hides, we went and had a packed lunch on the picnic tables, then we went to climb a huge hill with an amazing view of Loch Leven at the top:



On the way up we saw this bird:



↑ It is a skylark and they like to live to live on heather moors.

There was one last thing flying in the air that I didn't expect to see on the hill:



It was a glider, flying around over the hill !

It was a very good trip and I hope to go back there soon !

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