Turnstones

We walked along the beach below Dunrobin Castle again today, in part because there's a strong northwesterly blowing which is bringing in sharp showers and this beach is relatively protected. Below the thicket where we watched the blackcaps on Saturday we....

....spotted movement in the kelp washed in by the rising tide. This was a small flock of....

....turnstones, waders which we've seen before along this same section of beach. With their black bibs, bright orange legs and short, dark bills, they're relatively easy to identify. They allowed us to approach quite close before taking wing, when we counted nine of them.

Having walked well beyond the castle we made our way back through the extensive woodland that extends for a couple of miles between the beach and the A9. One of the many paths that are open to the public is one that runs along the top of the steep cliffs of an ancient coastline, where benches are provided where one can sit and enjoy the view across the Moray Firth.

Blackcaps

It's been another beautiful day today, hardly a cloud in the sky nor a breath of wind, so we took a gentle walk along the shore....

....below Dunrobin Castle where we passed a thicket mainly comprised of sea buckthorn. We've passed here many times before but today Mrs MW spotted a small bird which turned out to be our first sighting in Sutherland of....

....a male blackcap. The blackcap is a species of warbler which tends to migrate south for the winter but - so the internet tells me - blackcaps from NE Europe are increasingly spending their winters here. Their main food is insects and berries, and there are plenty of the latter still on the trees despite the attentions of other Scandinavian immigrants such as black-beaked blackbirds, redwings and fieldfares.

A little patience, and Mrs MW's sharp  eyes, produced a rather better picture of a female blackcap, whose cap is brown, feeding on elderberries. The orange berries are those of the sea buckthorn.

Calm Waters

Calm waters across Loch Fleet yesterday with a mass of widgeon feeding, the calm....

....extending out beyond the entrance to the loch, a deceptive calm as the outgoing current was very strong through the narrows, only the seals being able to swim against it.

An unhurried day, a day for standing on the water's edge, the sun low but warm, or sitting.... 

....at the top of the beach to watch the sand bars emerge and become steadily populated with sea birds.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Happy 118th birthday, Dad! Sadly, I don't have any pictures of you as a baby so this one - you're second from right - of you are home in Wanstead with one of your father's models will have to do. I don't know much about your early life except what Mum wrote in the biography you dictated to her. You were born on the 26th November, 1902, at home in Leytonstone, and the story goes you were one of twins, the other being lost when your mother fell down stairs soon after she became pregnant.

This is how I most like to remember you, in our days in Mombasa and, in particular, at our lovely house in Cliff Avenue, Mombasa, which overlooked the entrance to Kilindini harbour. You were in your late fifties in this picture. You're smoking your pipe and look very relaxed, but still very smart, in a pair of shorts, a sign that it's a weekend. 

I don't mind remembering you later in the various pubs in England where we had a pint or two together. This was probably your favourite pub, the Cinq Ports in Old Town Hastings, sitting next to your great friend Gordon Faulkner. You were able to relax in a good pub. It was a place where you were happy. However, I have the feeling that the retirement you had so looked forward to when working all those years along the east coast of Africa wasn't what you had dreamed of.

This is how I least want to remember you, in the last few years of your life when you were living in Fambridge Road, near us in Maldon. In some ways it was good, in that our family saw more of you than we had ever done before - for example, I used to pop along for a beer on Friday evenings after school - and the three children we then had came to know you better. But you didn't have many friends in Maldon and, although the bar staff in your local, the Blue Boar, were very good to you, it wasn't a wonderful pub.

It would have been so good if you had been alive today, so I could have asked you the many questions to which, now, there will never be answers. I would have liked to have had the chance to thank you for rearing me and to have told you that, now I am approaching the age you were in this picture, I see so much in myself which is just like you, mainly characteristics of which I am proud. I do hope that some of them, at least, have been passed on to my children.

Sun

A hard frost and clear skies greeted us when we woke this morning so we were off along the beach to enjoy the sun's warmth and to see what wildlife was moving along the Golspie end, not that we were quite expecting our first encounter which was with....

....a pair of snow-white doves feeding with the oystercatchers along the tide line - though the male seemed very intent on making amorous advances to his mate.

A small group of long-tailed ducks was foraging close in to the shore. For a minute or so they were all on the surface then, as if in a well-rehearsed routine, they all dived. Most were females but they were mixed with a few males - the one on the right is a male. A larger group of eider were diving in deeper water beyond them.

As the tide fell  so several groups of waders started working the newly-exposed beach. This is the first pair of ringed plovers we've seen at the Golspie end since the summer, when we were watching their attempts to nest. They flew on as we approached to mix with....

....a small flock of very busy sanderling. They like to feed almost in the waves as they wash through the stones, running back-and-forth to avoid being soaked. Note that the bird at bottom right of the picture is sporting no fewer than four rings on its legs.

The beach was, as usual, deserted of humanity except for one lady walking her border collie. I keep saying it - how fortunate we are to have a beach almost to ourselves.

Deserted Sands

With another of those grey Highland days in prospect we drove to a small car park which gives access to the beach about half way between Golspie and Littleferry, finding the tide falling and, looking back towards Golspie, not another soul on the beach, although....

....looking the other way there were two people - inevitably dog-walkers - approaching the mouth of Loch Fleet and two more on the other side, walking the beach by Coul Links.

We are so very lucky to have a four kilometre long beach almost entirely to ourselves mostly, it seems to me, because the majority of Golspie's many dog owners don't seem to bother themselves with taking their precious pooches for a good run along open sands, something which, in my perhaps limited experience, dogs adore.

Even the wildlife along the beach seem sparse. Oystercatchers predominated along the tide line, accompanied by the occasional curlew - how do they fly with that beak? - but when we left the beach near Littleferry and turned inland....

....we were met by a pair of stonechats which had staked out an extensive territory of rough grassland to keep them in insects and seeds through the winter.

On our way back to the car along the links we climbed the highest of the many mounds that are scattered across this area. I am not sure how they formed, whether by the action of the sea or by our human ancestors creating them, perhaps as tumuli to cover a burial - stone tools and other artefacts have been found in the area.

While some of the fungi are still 'flowering' most are blackened or mushy, except for this little branching fungus growing on the side of a mound of moss. It's a club fungus, perhaps the apricot club, Clavulinopsis luteoalba, which is found on grassland.

An Old Wall

 

These trees, seen yesterday as we followed the path through Balblair Wood which skirts the north side of Loch Fleet, have an unusual, linear root arrangement.

The trees have grown on top of an old stone wall - visible at left in the picture - much of which may have been earth which the roots exploited. At some stage the wall was eroded, possibly by an incursion of the sea at a point where the wall - visible as a straight black line on....

.... this ....this 1874 OS map - passes close to the loch. It may be that the wall was originally built as a flood defence.

It seems to me that the map suggests the wall is older than the plantation as the trees extend across it. The plantation dates back to the time when the clachan of Balblair, to which the track leads if followed eastwards, was cleared, after which the land was probably deemed to be too poor for 'modern' agriculture so it was put down to trees.

It still leaves the question of why the trees chose to grow on top of the wall, reaching out to each other as if they are holding hands.

A Dreich Loch Fleet

Anyone who dreams of living in the Scottish Highlands needs a regular reminder that a fair proportion of days look like this, grey, wet, windy, cold, miserable - the Scots word dreich describes them perfectly - except....

....the Highlands' saving grace is that, if you're prepared to go out in all weathers, there's almost always something of interest to find, as on today's walk along the north shore of Loch Fleet. There, with the tide falling, a hundred or so waders were working the mud along the tideline.

It's difficult to identify them as the pictures were taken against the light (such as there was) but the length and shape of the bill and the suggestion of colour in their legs leads me to think they were redshanks - which are a welcome sight as we've spotted very few of them along the shore in recent weeks.

We also found a couple of interesting fungi, this one noted for its sturdy stalk and pores instead of gills, which suggest that it's one of the boletes. Although I can't identify it any further, not with any certainty, it may be a penny bun.

More impressive in scale was this group, the largest being almost six inches across. Impressive it may be but I've been unable to identify it, though it may be one of the funnels.

We walked along the loch side for an hour or so, the wind and rain blowing into our faces. Stopping for a few moments at our furthest point and looking up the loch towards the Mound it seemed as if the sky might clear but the few minutes of watery sunshine were merely a brief reminder of how this place can, occasionally, be: the rain returned.

Fungal News

Yes, I know, 'Fungal News' is hardly going to have the dedicated and excited following that 'Small Bird News' has but fungi have the great advantage, for me, that they stay still while they have their portraits taken.

Walking through the cold, grey woods this morning there was hardly a fungus in sight except for....

....these blackened bracket fungi growing - or dead - on the trunk of a very ancient and rotten oak tree and....

....this fungus which we first found almost a month ago which seems to be thriving. I like it not only for its spectacular colour but also because I think I've identified it, something which is rather rare when there are 15,000 different species in Britain. Hopefully, it's yellow brain fungus, Tremella mesenterica.

The other day we were walking across the public open space next to our house when we spotted these small fungi. I have no idea what the neighbours thought as I kneeled beside them to take a picture, but I was thrilled to be able to identify them (maybe) as star pinkgill mushrooms.

That I'm managing to identify at least some fungi is partly down to this app on my phone, recommended by a good friend which, while being limited in the number of fungi it has, at least offers a simple way to identify them. I was so thrilled with it that I even spent a princely sum of £3.99 buying the full version.

I am also finding an increasing number of good fungal sites on the web, one of which enabled me to identify this (rather chewed) cup fungus, of which we've only seen four, all in the woodland by Littleferry. I'm even fairly certain I'm right with this one: it's Otidea onotica, the lemon-peel cup.

With some I am only able to get into the rough area of their identification. For example, these delicate little fungi are bonnets, possibly the clustered bonnet Mycena inclinata.

However, of all the fungi we've stumbled across recently, this one gave us some moments of huge excitement. It's tiny, no more that 10mm across, and more startlingly red than appears on the picture, and it was all by itself in the middle of a grassy path cutting across the links by Golspie caravan site. After taking several portraits, and hoping it was sufficiently unique to be named after me, I tried prodding it, and it fell over. It's a bit of rubber.

An Aggressive Sea

It was every bit as cold last night as the forecast had predicted, with a low of 1C, but the snow didn't materialise so we set out, as soon as the sun was warm, for the first walk along Golspie beach for some days, the tide having only just come round to giving us low water in the morning.

Only three other people were on the beach, hurrying, as we were, to get along it before the tide came in and cut us off from the few access points. The only other life....

....was a small flight of oystercatchers; nor was there anything washed up along the tide marks to interest us, other than a couple of gull-chewed crab carapaces.

I like the way the sea comes in each day, twice a day, and cleans the beach, erasing the memories of those that passed along it, re-setting it for newcomers, but the sea along Golspie beach does seem a wee bit aggressive at the moment, continually reaching up to the back of the beach to remove great swathes of sand and....

....expose more and more of the bank which separates the beach from the links, exposing the roots of the marram grass that binds it. Very likely the beach will be brought back but if it isn't, and we have easterly gales this winter, it does seem probable that the sea will break through, as it has done in the past.

We walked for about an hour and then sat on one of the boulders brought here to strengthen the beach defensives, enjoying the bright sun and the warmth and watching....

....the waves come in, each rising as the bottom shallowed, rising and rising and hesitating before curling over to collapse in an explosion of foam. Over the years we've done this on so many beaches, yet the pleasure never fades.