#nethybridge

We have a problem in the country! Our holiday home in the lovely area of Nethybridge has become a paradise for local wildlife. Our neighbours have some lovely little silkie chickens that the kids decided to feed and we now have 10 every day tapping on the window expecting fed!

Our biggest problem to date is selective feeding of birds and squirrels. The area is renowned for it’s red squirrel population so we have invested in a little squirrel feeder. So the birds haven’t been left out we bough a nice little bird feeder and a very large (in fact huge) 20kg bag of peanuts.

But there is a problem. Any time we fill up the bird feeder we have the local flock of crows eating them in about 15 minutes. Having spent our hard earned cash on the worlds most expensive nuts I have to say I got more than a little annoyed. Opening the door and clapping my hands every 20 minutes has also worn thin – so it had to be technology to the answer (of course).

Luckily the bird feeder is close to the decked area of the house – and since there is a set of Bose environmental speaker located on the deck linked to the Sonos system it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out there was a better solution.

Firstly off to the RSPB website to find out if the Carrion Crow had any mortal enemies – I thought owl’s or other birds of prey maybe an option (osprey live close by) But having spent an hour downloading MP3 files nothing moved these little blighters.

But finally on a forum for pest control, one post alerted me to the Goshawk which seems to make killing crows one of their main hobbies.

So downloading this simple MP3 – uploading and reindexing the sonos system and creating a “Kill the crow” playlist it was time to try it out.

I plan to get a little Youtube video this week – but confirmation is it works – approx £2,500 of scarecrow – but lets see if they get used to it!

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Following on from yesterday’s post about Google Adwords, I thought it was worth looking at SEO techniques which I have found useful in generating more natural search traffic. The first thing to state is that working on a reasonably uncluttered and simple SEO target like “Nethybridge”, “Nethy bridge” and “Aviemore Cottage” was pretty easy as they are not competitive terms.

If focused on my header tags at first with Goal one to make sure i was picked up by Google. I added a sitemap to the site and also made sure that it was clear to Google that the main subject of the site was Nethybridge using the header:

Saddleback Cottage, Nethybridge near Aviemore

The Aviemore was actually added later. The slight issue is that Nethybridge could also be searched for as “Nethy bridge” with a space so I needed to target both. The competition on page 1 was fairly weak and I would never get ahead of the www.nethybridge.com website itself.

Google’s own advise to use clear references and good content paid dividends for me. I spent absolutely ages putting together a What to do list for the area featuring links to other sites but a lot of narrative copy. I updated this virtually daily so Google saw that content was changing regularly.

I was aided by WordPress, which I used as a content management system and its great XML sitemap plug in. I have found that I can publish a post and within 20 minutes it was showing up within the Google index.

We are now on page 1 for Google for Nethybridge, Nethy bridge and Aviemore Cottage.

NB. It did take over 3 months to get there so don’t expect things to happen overnight.

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Well after a quick dive to Hillend on Thursday we were lucky enough to get a great dump of snow in the Highlands.

So we had a great day at the Lecht on Saturday the snow cover was excellent, well groomed and perfect (apart from the chilly wind – but it is Scotland after all!).

Freyja and DJ really enjoyed their first visit to the Lecht apart from the slight weight issue they had on the Eagle Poma. DJ was so light that he ended up doing a 1.5m twirling flight on a steep section of the Poma.

He tried a few times but it defeated him!

A big thanks to Winter Highland website that gave a great up to date report on the weather

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