FOR the last couple of weeks, my trail-cam has been located down by a tributary burn of the River Devon in the hope of capturing on film some of the local wildlife that haunt our rivers and streams.

In particular, I was hoping to video otters as there is a good population of these animals in Clackmannanshire.

Happily, I struck lucky, with my sensor-operated camera managing to capture a night-time clip of an otter as it made its way up the burn.

Otters wander far and wide during a typical night and the fact that I only got one video clip over the whole fortnight illustrates that they are not really creatures of habit and will vary their foraging routes considerably.

Other interesting creatures were caught on film too, including snipe and a grey heron.

Snipe are small waders that haunt bogs and wet flushes, where they use their long bills to search for worms and other invertebrates in the oozing mud.

This snipe was caught on film at a time when the ground had been hardened by frost, which is no doubt why it was visiting this shallow burn as an ice-free place to feed.

The camera also detected a kingfisher as it flashed up the burn in a bolt of blurry-blue. Kingfishers like to fish in these small tributary burns that feed into the Devon as they are good places for small trout and minnows.

Other highlights included a bank vole swimming across the burn and a weasel foraging by the bankside.

The amount of wildlife revealed by my trail-cam by this burn in Clackmannanshire has been quite remarkable and I’ll leave the camera there for a few more weeks yet to see what else turns up.

@BroomfieldKeith