Ray Strandings

As we walk the beach we keep an eye on the crows and gulls as they often lead us....

....to things washed up on the beach, in this case the rather chewed remains of a small ray, which we inspected for a few minutes while....

....the original finder waited patiently offshore for us to move on.

Later we came across another ray, this time a cuckoo ray, which was well up the beach - so it had come in on last night's high tide - yet seemed still to be alive. Somewhat against my better judgement I was persuaded....

 ....to move it back into the sea where, although it did show signs of life, it very likely ended up on the beach again, all this activity watched....

....with some puzzlement by a pied wagtail.

Rays do seem to be the most common of the fishes stranded on our local beach, most often cuckoo rays about a foot or so long.

A History of Sutherland's Birds

This little booklet, borrowed from the Golspie Heritage Society, contains a paper from the Journal of the Scottish Ornithologist's Club written by Ian Pennie in 1962.

Pennie was Golspie's doctor, living and practising in an imposing house at the northern end of Main Street. He was obviously an old-style country practitioner, much respected by his patients, all of whom were well aware that they were of secondary importance to the good doctor: his main interest was the birds of Sutherland.

His paper is entitled 'A Century of Bird Watching in Sutherland', not because he lived long enough to watch birds for a hundred years but that a proper scientific record of the region's bird life only extended back a century. Prior to that, the records were vague, but the good doctor did unearth one account which dated back to the 17th century, written by Robert Gordon in 1630. This pre-dated the final removal of the last of the great Caledonian pine forests from the area, and gave a taste of the bird life which existed before man altered this environment beyond recognition.

"In this forest," Robert Gordon wrote, "and in all this province, there is a great store of...." A great store - one can only imagine what this meant, but one would love to have seen this area, which now boasts neither golden nor sea eagles, as he saw it.

As Dr Pennie goes on to explain, the eagles were another grim casualty of the coming of the sheep to Sutherland at the time of the clearances. As he describes it....

These great birds, and others, including the osprey, could barely withstand the slaughter. Relief only came in the 1870s and 1880s when sheep farming failed and large areas were turned over to deer forests and wildlife became more tolerated. However, from the middle of that century, Sutherland's birds faced a new foe, collectors, who went to any lengths to shoot specimens and take eggs.

A degree of recovery came with the 20th century but by that time many species which had been common in Sutherland had disappeared from the region. The osprey was extinct in Scotland by1916 but by 1954 birds had begun to appear from Scandinavia and the first pair nested successfully in 1959.

To Tain Again

We were in Tain today to visit Lidl but, while Mrs MW enjoyed the shopping, I wandered down to the shores of the Dornoch Firth to inspect the birds feeding on the scalps - the mudflats - exposed at low water. Today they were present in bigger numbers than on my previous visit (link here) and....

....while there were still plenty of oystercatchers, redshanks, curlews, mallard....

....and large numbers of wigeon, some new species had appeared, including....

....teal, many in pairs. They're a very pretty little duck which I haven't seen since our days in Maldon when they used to come in to feed in winter in the Blackwater estuary.

It was also good to see flocks of shelduck in numbers I have never seen before, perhaps a hundred, but they were very shy, moving well away from land to feed on the edge of the mudflats.

On the Beach

My mind often wanders these days and alights on all sorts of random memories. Perhaps it was that we were actually walking on one that brought back Nevil Shute's late 1950s novel 'On the Beach'. At a time when we were all expecting that the world might end in a cataclysm at any day, it was a profoundly disturbing book. For those who haven't read it, the story described the thoughts and actions of a group of Australians at the end of World War III, when all the rest of the human world had been destroyed and a huge radioactive cloud was heading their way.

I read all of Nevil Shute's novels, of which 'A Town Like Alice' is probably best know, and many of which were turned into films. He, Hammond Innes and Alistair MacLean became my favourite novelists and, when I began writing novels, I tried to write as they had done, with uncomplicated story lines and honourable heroes in an often rotten world, but with more vivid description.

It is a regret that the books I wrote which were most like those of these three authors weren't published while two much more graphically violent ones were.

Balblair Wood

All our walks since we came here in November have started from home but today we did the first 'drive-walk', taking the car south of Golspie along the road to Littleferry but stopping just short of the hamlet at Balblair Wood, on the north side of Scottish Natural Heritage's Loch Fleet Reserve.

The part of the wood near the car park has been done out with interpretative signs, and there is a small bird hide within easy walking distance which has a good view across the loch and the extensive mudflats - populated today by flocks of rather distant ducks and several curlews.

Beyond the first pine plantations....

 ....the woodland becomes more mixed and the paths a little more rough. The main walk takes one along the shore of the loch with several places where one can....

 ....get down to the shingle beach. This view is from the most southerly point of the wood looking up the loch towards the bridge which carries the A9 across the its upper end at what is called 'The Mound'.

The wood has much to offer. In summer, the hide is busy with bird watchers as ospreys nest around the loch, and there are several flowers which are unusual, including the creeping lady's tresses orchid, twinflower, and one-flowered wintergreen. At this time of year the Scottish crossbills which live in the conifers are already mating, and we had hoped to see some of them, but they did not oblige. We did, however, have a glimpse of what was either a gold- or firecrest, and watched a very smart pair of goldeneye.

We'll be back. The area also has pine marten, roe deer and otters and, although we've seen them here before, I'm still anxious to watch some crossbills.

Culmaily Hut Circle

This hut circle stands on the hillside to the north of Culmaily farm and to the west of Golspie.

The hut circle is at bottom left of this picture, covered in dead bracken with a couple of small gorse bushes growing out of its walls.

The Bronze Age farmers who built and lived in it, like many of their contemporaries, enjoyed a good view. This one faces almost due south, looking across the post-Clearance fields to Loch Fleet.

It's a substantial building - the word 'hut' does not do it justice - measuring over 9m internal diameter with walls up to 1.5m thick.

This picture looks across the 'hut' from the rocks and earth of the western wall in the foreground to the rocks which line the interior of the far side.....

....seen in close-up here. These rocks are flat-faced and stood on end to give the wall an interior lining.

The conical roof was formed of poles which were supported on the wall to keep their ends relatively dry. A circle of interior posts also supported the roof and enabled an upper floor to be built, which is where the family may have slept, the 'ground floor' being partly for the animals and partly for living and storage.

If the bracken and shrubs were cleared it would be an impressive feature, the more so when it is remembered that it may be as much as 3,000 years old.

The hut is surrounded by narrow, elongated, terraced fields, the loose rocks and stones from which were piled into low walls and 'clearance cairns'. Conditions at the time must have been much better than today: the soil is waterlogged and miserably thin.

Small Bird Report

The last time I reported on our small garden birds, here, we were fighting a battle to keep the starlings, with their dreadful table manners, off the bird table. We did make some progress but it was at the expense of more and more wire. Each time further lengths are added it puzzles the smaller birds but most, but not all, quickly find their way in.

Meanwhile, the starlings have made a nuisance of themselves elsewhere, finding ways of hanging on to the oat feeder which we had thought impossible and then scattering oats everywhere. This does mean that some of the more neglected birds, like the blackbirds, get fed on the ground below but Lidl is struggling with the demand for oats.

For my birthday I was bought a very smart squirrel-proof feeder which I confidently expected would also keep bigger birds out. The blue tits were first to work it out, followed by the sparrows, but the starlings soon found their way in. So we once again added more and more green wire which, inevitably, they found their way round.

So there has been further huge expenditure on a sheet of 14mm x 14mm galvanised iron mesh so the starlings really, certainly, absolutely cannot get at the feeding points.

This female sparrow worked her way over the barrier within five minutes but we wait with bated breath to see if the starlings can get in.

This all sounds very discriminatory as the sparrows, in increasing numbers, are the ones who can get into everything - including this tits-only peanut feeder. The general mayhem does put off other birds. The coal tits, which were the first species to visit us, have never returned. The blue tits come and go quickly when the other hoards aren't around. The robins keep visiting but spend half their time fighting with each other. And the dunnocks just get on quietly with getting fed.

However, it's just so, so good to have plenty of small birds in the garden after the small-bird desert of Felixstowe.

First Signs of Spring

We walk every day, sometimes twice a day, the walks varying between four and seven miles. Today we spent time meandering through the woodland around Dunrobin Castle where the first snowdrops are in flower.

After the slight but now noticeable lengthening of the day, this mass of flowers is the first real sign of the end of a winter which has, so far, been almost worryingly mild.

We keep discovering new things, this a monument to Harriet Sutherland, 1806 - 1868, who was a daughter of the 6th Earl of Carlisle and married the second Duke of Sutherland, her first cousin, by whom she had eleven children.

It's approached along an overgrown path and the area round the monument is unkempt. Various small bits have fallen off it, but a carving on one side of it tells us that the foundation stone was laid by Queen Victoria and another has a quote from one of Harriet's last addresses in which she said, "Neither failing sight nor altered health will make dear Dunrobin less vivid nor change the love I bear to Sutherland."

There are more buzzards in the skies above Suffolk than there are here. We've occasionally seen and heard them call but we disturbed a pair in the woodland today so I managed the first photograph of one since we arrived, pursued, as always, by a small bird.

Then, this afternoon in fading light, we strolled along Golspie's beach, and stopped on our way back to watch upward of a thousand geese pass over in skein after skein, probably heading for Loch Fleet for the night.

Backies

We set off this morning up the Big Burn - previous post here - with the intention of climbing the hill on its far side into the area of the old township of Backies, passing on our way the Golspie Mill buildings. The mill was built in 1863 by the Sutherland Estate to grind flour for the area and I had rather assumed it had fallen into disuse but was surprised to find it is working, having been bought and refurbished in 1992. It now produces an interesting range of flours - link to the Mill's website here - and is powered using water from the burn.

We followed the paths along the Golspie Burn then cut upwards through the deciduous forestry, admiring....

 ....an interesting selection of fungi and seeing....

....more tits than we've seen in years. In one place we stood and watched blue, great and long-tailed tits, frustrated that the dull light made photographing them so difficult.

Many but not all of Backies' scattered croft houses which replaced the small township when it was cleared in the early 19th century have been refurbished and brought back into use, and many of these houses have....

....enviable views southeastward across the Moray Firth and to the hills behind Loch Fleet (right).

We came back by a different route through the glen, one which took us past Golspie's skating pond. It would be interesting to know when the ice was last thick enough for anyone to use it. So far this winter I would doubt whether it has been covered by much more than a thin skin of ice. It's this sort of local evidence of the climate's warming trend which brings home so graphically the changes that are taking place.

Gull Attack

Grey skies, a low tide, and a beach empty of humans and dogs welcomed me for a late afternoon walk to the south of the town....

....the tide low enough to expose some of the ancient peat beds that underlie the beach.

There was unusually little in the way of bird life along the beach - a passing walker informed me that most of the waders would have moved along to the mud flats exposed around Loch Fleet - but a dozen or so red-breasted mergansers were working hard offshore for a meal....

....the success of one of them bringing the unwelcome attentions of a black-backed gull which....

 ....chased the merganser around until....

....when the first gull was joined by another, the merganser dived....

....coming up a few moments later with an empty beak: either it had managed to swallow its prey or the fish had escaped.