A Contrail

When we owned the Ferry Stores in Kilchoan, before bed each night I would go out and check that everything was okay in the shop. This wasn't onerous as we lived next door but I couldn't do this, night after night, without beginning to take an interest in the night sky.

Over the years we witnessed some wonderful sights, including the most spectacular aurora we have ever seen and....

....phenomena such as comets, shooting stars, satellites, moondogs and moonbows.

By the time we sold the shop, going outside each evening to look at the sky had become a habit which has continued ever since. Last night, when I went out as usual, the most noticeable thing was....

....the moon, one day past full, but just below it was a something which, a year ago, one wouldn't have remarked on: a contrail.

A quick check on FlightRadar24 showed that this was an Atlas Air Boeing 747 freight flight from Cologne to Indianapolis, but what was also interesting was the complete lack of other flights in the air over Scotland at the time. How things have changed!

Snowbow

We woke to a thin coating of snow this morning, enough to make Beinn Bhraggie pretty in the early sunshine and to make....

....walking anywhere in town a slippery business, though we now feel rather more secure with snow grips on our boots.

Periodically through the day it has snowed, but the thaw has kept pace with any additional accumulation. We did, however, have some beautiful moments, for example when....

....the low afternoon sun caught the next incoming snow shower and projected across a powder blue sky what is, surely, a snowbow.

Lonely Littleferry

We drove to Littleferry this morning, mostly to have a walk but also to give the car a run after several days of icy weather. We started by walking along the eastern shores of Loch Fleet, through the forestry, which was not a pleasant experience as the northwesterly wind, which had brought snow last night to the higher hills around Golspie, was searchingly cold. We did, however, drop in to commiserate with....

....the tree-hugging man whom some kind soul had cheered up with a length of tinsel - see earlier post here.

Dismal weather like this does have the advantage that it keeps all but the hardier souls indoors so we had the forestry, the village and the views of the loch almost to ourselves, the main exception being a couple of young women on mountain bikes who shot past us with a cheerful greeting.

The beach was even lonelier, for we saw no-one along it. This picture looks across the mouth of Loch Fleet to the sand bar which is one of the favourite roosts of the local cormorants. More difficult to see are two groups of oystercatchers, to right and left of the cormorants. Of the flocks of eider, geese, dunlin and other waders there was no sign except.... 

.....on the beach on the Littleferry side where a pair of busy little sanderlings ran ahead of us along the high-tide mark.

'Here Comes the Sun'

There was a time when I was a great fan of The Beatles but, unlike some of their contemporaries, their music has faded, with the exception of a handful of songs, of which 'Here Comes the Sun' is one. At present, with a cold winter still in prospect, the words, "Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter," resonate.

That we are past the solstice gives one hope that the days will be lengthening but day length increases glacially slowly. Dawn and dusk this morning in Golspie were at 09.02 and 15.33 giving us a day length of 6 hours and 31 minutes while by Saturday 9th January they will be 08.56 and 15.50, a day length of 6 hours and 54 minutes, an extra 23 minutes, most of which is added on to dusk.

There is one peculiarity about dawn here: we often see the sun at sunrise (above), even on days which are, otherwise, overcast. It's as if, somewhere to the southeast, there's a permanent gap in the clouds, perhaps above some far off land.

I think I may know where that land is. It's a place where I used to live, many decades ago, and all my memories of it are of sunny, warm days with the southeast trades blowing above a blue, blue sea.

Hair Ice

Britain is being hammered by Storm Bella except, it appears, for Golspie where, although the barometer reading is about to fall off the bottom of the scale, it's....

....a fine, if icy day. Last night the temperatures dropped to -2C and it was still -1.3C when we set out on our morning walk through Dunrobin Woods, where....

....we spotted what looked like a ball of cotton wool cast aside by an unecological litter-lout. However, on closer inspection, we discovered that it was....

....a mass of fine fibres of ice, looking incredibly like asbestos, and very brittle and easily broken.

It took moments on the internet to identify it. It's called hair ice or ice wool or - I prefer this - ice beard. It's uncommon, and only forms in very precise conditions. It occurs between 45–55N in broadleaf forests, in our case, on small, rotten, damp birch branches, when temperatures are slightly under 0C and the air is humid. The smooth, silky hairs have a diameter of about 0.02mm and are up to 20cm long The hairs can take the shape of curls and waves and may maintain their shape for days, which suggests that something is preventing the ice from melting.

In 2015 scientists identified the fungus Exidiopsis effusa as responsible for the formation of hair ice. The fungus was found on every hair ice sample examined, and disabling the fungus with fungicide or hot water prevented hair ice formation. The fungus shapes the ice into fine hairs through an uncertain mechanism and probably stabilises it by providing a recrystallization inhibitor similar to antifreeze.

Nature never ceases to amaze!

Information from Wikipedia - here.

Christmas Walk

The forecasters had been insisting for several days that this part of Scotland would have a cold, grey day for Christmas but the weather was far kinder, so we took a morning walk along the shore towards Dunrobin Castle where....

....we spotted a young buzzard feeling very abandoned, sitting in a tree and repeating a most mournful call. Mum and Dad have probably recently told it that it's on its own, so it's cold and lonely and hungry.

This was a pleasing sight, a mistle thrush sitting on a post on the edge of the Dairy Park. It was good to see it as they are not common birds and we had seen a pair in the same place last summer.

We're still finding the occasional fungus, though they're much more uncommon now, and we certainly didn't expect to see one in 'full bloom' in the snow. With the fungi fading out I should be looking for a new challenge for the winter, one possibility being....

...lichens, of which there are umpteen species here thriving throughout the year. This area is wonderful for them as they have miles of stone walls to grow on as well as the damp trees in the forestry. However, I've tried my hand at lichens before with little success, one of the few which has stuck in my mind being.....

...this one, commonly called British soldiers. So, probably not.

Season's Greetings

Wishing all our readers a very enjoyable day.

First Snow

We woke this morning to half-an-inch of snow which had managed to settle despite heavy rain last night.

It looked pretty in the early sunlight but the temperature had dropped below zero before morning so the ground was slippery, giving us the first opportunity to try out....

....our snow grips on a....

....short walk around the town followed by a last visit to the shops. Verdict on the snow grips: brilliant!

This is miserable weather for the birds. The first job after feeding them was to find my trusty geological hammer to break the ice on the bird baths. We were rewarded with some great entertainment from....

....the robins. Our poor garden robin now faces two incomers, the graveyard robin and a new robin, so he has spent most of the daylight hours chasing them. It can't last: he's going to be exhausted.

Colours

We're reaching the time of year when we become used to winter landscapes, when the background colours are shades of grey through black with washed-out tints of a limited palette - blues in sky and sea, greens in the leaves.  Bright colours are so rare they stand out rudely, like....

....the brazen red in the robin's breast. This is the graveyard robin, distinguished by his white posterior, who is as brazen as his colour, now spending all his time in our garden, much to the discomfiture of the garden robin.

Even muted colours are noticeable. We saw this tiny bird in Beinn Bhraggie woods yesterday and had to wait some time for it to turn enough to confirm that....

....it was a goldcrest: we hadn't seen such peachy pinkness in the species before.

But here's an example of what might be termed 'colour inversion', where a small bird who decks himself in black and off-white stands out because his favourite haunt in amongst the orange berries of the sea buckthorn below Dunrobin Castle. It's a male blackcap, and we've recently seen his mate, so perhaps they have settled here for the winter.

Even the palest of pale colour is remarkable. A cherry - or is it an almond? - in the churchyard below our house has decided this is a good time to make a tentative offer of delicate flowers, which is kind of it as it is heartening to be reminded of what is in store if we can weather the storms of the coming deep winter.

Scotrail's Inverness Service

This is today's 10.12 service from Wick to Inverness standing at Golspie station and running ten minutes late. It's sadly underused at the moment. Other than the guard, seen standing next to the train, only one other person alighted and no-one boarded. At the moment there are three services a day, this one, the 08.25 and the 14.47, and three the other way.

The journey to Inverness takes just over two hours, and its one of those journeys where reading a book, or doing anything else other than looking out of the window at the passing view, seems little short of criminal. It's a friendly little train: when we've travelled, we've fallen into conversation with a fellow-passenger.

That there is a railway station, and this excellent service, was one of the reasons we came to Golspie. From Inverness, the Caledonian Sleeper leaves six evenings a week for London Euston, and there are connections to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Kyle of Lochalsh for Skye. While we've done the journey to Inverness, we haven't travelled the other way, to Thurso and Wick, which also takes just over two hours. We very much look forward to using this little train much more next year.

Solstice Sands

We have a grey day here today for the solstice, light breezes and dry, so we took a walk along what's left of Golspie beach, most of the sand stripped away by the waves, at least in part to check out the area just beyond the pedestrian ramp that leads down to the beach. We were told by a couple we fell into conversation with yesterday that this was a good place to see otters. It seemed unlikely as there is a constant flow of humans with their dogs but....

....sure enough, we found the distinctive twin-tracks of an otter. The story is that they live amongst the boulders of the sea wall, and have the outflow pipe - seen in the top picture - in which to wash themselves, something they have to do in fresh water each day to maintain their coat's condition.

It was just as well that we had some excitement at the start of the walk as the beach was, otherwise, bereft of much of interest. We kept disturbing a small flock of a dozen or so ringed plovers who finally gave up, flew out to sea, and then back to the beach behind us, only to be disturbed again upon our return.

In fact there was more wildlife on the beach immediately below the town's promenade, including a couple of very fine curlews stalking the ripple marked sands.

Bird 'Flu

We walked up into Beinn Bhraggie woods this morning in bright sunshine, yet there was hardly a bird singing. This worried us as the BBC has a report about a bird flu outbreak in chickens in Orkney which is spreading - here - a report which includes a reference to....

....a goose being found near Golspie which subsequently tested positive for H5N8, possibly the goose we saw on the beach at Littleferry a couple of weeks ago. We have also seen a sparrow in our seed feeding area which looked listless, though it was eating some of the seed. The idea of a bird 'flu outbreak is depressing but then our spirits were lifted when we spotted....

....a male crossbill singing at the top of a fir tree. Whether it is the rarer Scottish crossbill or the inappropriately named common crossbill is impossible to tell. He's almost in his mating plumage but they do mate and rear their families very early, in February and March when there is a plentiful supply of the pine cones on which they feed. Unusually, he was alone: they usually move around in small flocks.

The Night Sky

The night sky is worth a look this December. In the early morning - this was taken at 7.45am yesterday - the bright 'star' sitting above the sunrise is Venus. The two bright 'stars' in the evening sky in the west are Jupiter and Saturn which will, on 21st December, the day of the winter solstice, be at their closest since 1623. The fancy word for this is a 'conjunction' and there's a diagram to help find them on the NASA website here.

Unless it's totally overcast and raining, I always step outside last thing at night, something which was worth doing on Thursday night as I saw three shooting stars in the ten minutes before I was driven back inside by the cold. The Geminids are past their maximum, which was on the night of 13th/14th. There's a photo of the Geminids over China on the NASA site here.

The lunar month started badly for me yesterday evening when, in the twilight, I saw the fine crescent of the new moon. My mother told me always to nod seven times to the moon on the first sighting to earn a month's good luck, something which, according to her, was negated if one saw it through glass - which is what I did.

Printed in the Sands

Printed in the sands at Littleferry today were the memories of hundreds of events between this morning's one o'clock high tide and our arrival around ten. In this little backwater, just inside the entrance to Loch Fleet, was the evidence of....

....the circular to-and-fro of the wavelets as the tide fell through the early hours, and....

....the memory of scavengers – two of these are hermit crabs – that worked the sands as the tide ebbed.

Out on the ripplemarked main beach, with the tide in full flood, a pattern of....

....bubbles, like tiny underwater volcanoes, gave away the entrances to hundreds of worm holes, until moments before being probed by a flock of oystercatchers.

A little further along, a single track, from just above the high-tide mark to the advancing front of the sea, told the story of a small seal which pulled itself onto the beach at high tide but chose to drag itself down the beach at low, while, not much further along....

....multiple tracks along and up-and-down the beach showed how an otter had been enjoying the sands some time before the first dog-walkers arrived.