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In 2016 I’m doing a 365 Nature project. Learn more about the project and see all the 365 Nature posts.


Today we arrived in Scotland, flying into Inverness . Unfortunately our luggage didn’t arrive with us and with only one flight from Amsterdam to Inverness a day, we have to wait until tomorrow and hope our bags arrive. After an emergency shopping trip, we drove to the Cairngorms to our rental cottage.

We arrived in the afternoon after much exhaustion to find a peaceful house with cows and sheep as the only neighbors. The house sits along side a marsh and I immediately spotted many birds around the cottage starting with Barn Swallows flying all around the house within a couple feet of the windows. I also spotted some brown, streaked birds that I think may be Meadow Pipits. They’re all over the area. There are also a lot of Greylag Geese in the fields and I identified a Blue Tit in the trees, Hooded Crows in the fields and Pied Wagtails all over.

We’re here for two weeks, and we don’t have much planned. There are a lot of RSPB reserves around here that I hope to visit along with some dolphin spotting and maybe a few castles. Otherwise, we’re going to just explore around the area. Hopefully our bags arrive soon along with our rain jackets that they contain because it’s raining, it’s Scotland.

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Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner is a naturalist, writer and artist based in Seattle. She is the author of THE NATURALIST AT HOME: Projects for Discovering the Hidden World Around Us and NATURE OBSCURA: A City’s Hidden Natural World from Mountaineers Books, a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and Pacific Northwest Book Awards. She writes articles about natural history and has bylines in Crosscut, Popular Science, National Wildlife Magazine and others. On the side she writes fiction.

One Comment

  • Yay! You’re in Scotland!
    Kelly, may I suggest you delete the intro “365 days of nature” as that is the lead for all of the bloglovin’ updates I get and it usurps any of your daily stories. So it’s like getting the same update every day and I havent been clicking on your dailies as a result. Those who follow you know about your 365 effort so you can drop it from your intro all together. Just my two cents! Can’t wait for more updates and sorry about your luggage!

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