Big Garden Birdwatch

Each year we take part in the RSPB's 'Big Garden Birdwatch', which took place this weekend. The rules are simple: spend an hour counting the birds which land in your garden, recording the largest number of each species visible at any one time. So we started with a pair of blue tits but by the end of the hour we had seen a, fairly expected, total of eight, all in the rowan tree and at the feeders at the one time. The number of coal tits has, very sadly, declined through the winter, so the two we saw were pretty representative, as was the single great tit.

We often see as many as five robins in the garden but today we only saw three, two of which, as usual, were having a fight. We also recorded two dunnocks.

Sparrows come and go in large chattering groups. The largest group today was six. By comparison, the finches are having a thin time so recording only one chaffinch and.... 

....one greenfinch was about right. Finally, two jackdaws appeared which again, is fairly representative, though I would prefer it if there were always zero.

So we thought we were doing pretty well until a blizzard of....

....long-tailed tits appeared, with as many as five of them crowding onto the sad remains of one of the fat balls and....

....almost as many feeding on this peanut feeder. This threw any sense of 'representation' out of the window: we've never seen long-tailed tits in the garden before and suspect that this merry little band have  heard that the Big Green Birdwatch is on and are putting in an appearance as many Golspie gardens as possible to mess up the local bird count.

Blue Skies and High Seas

The view inland this morning offered a peaceful still life of blue sky across fresh-lain snow. Turning towards the sea however....

....and the energy of two days of stiff northerlies was evident.

We walked the sea wall south of Golspie in a chill wind, mourning the sandy beach which, other....

....than along one 150m section, has been lost to the sea. Just how much has gone over the last few weeks is evident in.....

...this picture, where only the last vestiges of the old sandy beach remain. We miss it so much. There is something wonderfully liberating about stepping out briskly along flat sands - not least, at our age, in the knowledge that one is unlikely to trip or slip, thoughts which, in this winter weather, have considerably constrained our recent perambulations.

With the sea so high the shoreline birds, other than one small flock of waders and the usual gulls, were absent but the sun brought out several small birds along the golf course, including the usual pair of stonechats and a pair of song thrushes.

Late January Fungi

While there's still plenty of snow in the hills a cloudy night and an onshore breeze has....

....cleared most of the ice from the paths at lower levels, except in stubborn spots, usually clearings, where the ground is exposed to the sky.

Over the last few days on our walks through Dunrobin woods we've seen a number of funguses. This one, hair ice, was 'blooming' cheerfully while the overnight temperatures were low, and we found some of the longest 'hairs' yet, but today it has disappeared. 

We also found this, growing on a large, downed beech tree, which I've been unable to identify.

We've seen this one before, in the Beinn Bhraggie woods above Golspie Tower. It's yellow brain fungus Tremella mesenterica, which around here seems to prefer the brighter orange version.

Red Kite

Winter is the season when we accept that we may take one of our walks and see nothing of great note so when, on today's visit to Backies to see if any eggs were available - which....

....there weren't as all the hens seemed to be too busy chatting up the cockerel under a tree - Mrs MW spotted....

....a raptor wheeling high above the forestry, we were thrilled.

We spent several minutes watching it, hoping all the time that it would come close enough for us to be able to identify it with some certainty - it definitely wasn't a buzzard, and too small and the wrong shape to be an eagle - but it was probably watching us and quite determined to keep its distance.

From its silhouette and from this picture, which does show some of its markings, we're fairly certain it's a red kite, a bird we've seen from the car a couple of times when driving south of the Dornoch Firth on our way to and from Tain.

Walking still isn't much fun along some of the paths where the relatively warmer daytime temperatures have melted some of the snow, the resulting water then freezing at night to turn them into toboggan runs. It's been cold these last few days but....

....not cold enough to ice over the skating pond, not deep enough for it to be put to use.

Gone Fishin' - 1

I was always a fisherman. In her photograph album this picture, taken by my mother while we were still in Dar-es-Salaam, is captioned 'The Fisherman'. I suppose the urge to fish must be in the genes, and that I have those genes isn't surprising since my Haylett forebears were....

....fishermen on the Norfolk coast for generations as well as, in turn, being wreckers and....

....lifeboatmen, this picture being of the Caister lifeboat 'Beauchamp' in which several of the Haylett family were drowned in the 1901 disaster. Yet my father had no interest in fishing, his only enjoyment being in the fish themselves, for he loved herring, particularly in the form of kippers and Yarmouth bloaters.

I might have been a fisherman at heart but I don't recall having actually caught anything until 1952, when the family travelled to England on leave on board the 'Durban Castle'. In her autobiography, my mother wrote, "From Ascension, where Jonathan had a busy time fishing off the stern of the ship with a tin on a long string - and caught a fish which he insisted on keeping in their cabin overnight and about which the stewardess who brought our tea complained loudly next day - we sailed to the Canary Islands where we stopped for another day." I was seven at the time and vividly recall both the fish, which was small and black, and the gigantic shark which was spotted by excited passengers under the ship where I was fishing but which later turned out to be the propellor.

The first time I did any serious fishing was in 1958 when my mother, brother and I spent a summer holiday at 'Round About Friday', a cottage in Appledore, Kent. Richard and I made friends with some of the lads in the village and spent many happy hours catching roach, rudd and perch on the Royal Military Canal. Unfortunately, the largest things we caught were eels, which wrapped themselves in and destroyed great lengths of our precious lines.

First Snowdrops

Yesterday evening it rained, then the sky cleared and the temperature plummeted.

This morning, a passing Tesco delivery driver stopped to warn Mrs MW to take care as there was black ice everywhere: he had already seen one large truck on its side at the Dornoch bridge and several cars sliding around on the A9, which appeared not to have been gritted.

So we didn't set off for our walk until after eleven, taking the coast path north past Dunrobin Castle and stopping occasionally to watch....

....the shore birds feeding along the tideline - mostly gulls with some oystercatchers and the small flock of turnstones which seems to have taken residence for the winter.

Paths where the rain had puddled and which hadn't been touched by the sun were lethally dangerous - we met one lady walking her shih tzu puppy who confessed that she had just sat down very hard on her bottom, and we were only prevented from doing the same by our ice grippers.

Paths wander all over Dunrobin woods so we keep finding new ones to explore. This one, quite close to the castle, led up to what might be described as a stone igloo, with a small porch leading in to a round mound of earth and rocks....

....seen here from the other side. At a guess, this is an old ice house from the days before refrigerators.

We loved the bath, made from the same sort of heavy glazed earthenware as old butler sinks. One wonders which lords and ladies sat in it while their personal servants ran back and forth to the kitchens for pitchers of hot water.

The new path also gave us this very welcome pleasure - the first snowdrops of the year.

Saved by the Woods

I have always said that I don't like walking in woodland but the fact that we have a network of paths in the adjacent Dunrobin woods has made a huge difference to our existence. With light snow falling daily, followed each night by a sharp frost, the narrow roads, along which we need to pass in order to access our more open walks, have become dangerous underfoot. We're also unhappy about sharing them with vehicles which are, not infrequently, driven too fast for the safety of pedestrians.  So we have been forced into the woodland.

I've enjoyed it, particularly when the sun appears and its low-angled light picks out the muted winter colours, mainly russets and browns and forest greens. The lack of leaves also means that the views are much more open so we can see further, not that this has helped us....

....spot any of the shier inhabitants of the woods.

We've also been able to enjoy the lochans - not that this is a word used locally - some of which have turned out to be far bigger than we had expected. We've been surprised that nothing has broken the ice on them, particularly this one which usually has mallard on it.

On today's walk we passed the entrance of Dunrobin Castle with its weird collection of turrets and spires. The only car in the car park had snow on its roof suggesting it had been there since yesterday. I wonder what it cost to turn the castle's heating on, or did the residents just draw the heavy curtains, huddle around an open fire, and keep warm with a dram?

Witch's Butter

It really is astonishing how blind one can be to something which is evidently and fully and very brightly visible, well exemplified on our walk today when, for the first time in weeks, we returned to Golspie Glen.

My attention was caught by a group of very small but rather fine bracket fungi growing on the living branch of a silver birch but I was so intent on these that Mrs MW had to draw my attention to what was right next to them....

....a bright yellow jelly fungus which goes by the name of witch's butter - the namers of fungi do have fun! 

I was amazed that I hadn't notice it but it's a lesson in the blindness that comes with focusing on something which is absorbing. So I can quite see myself engrossed in a dead red squirrel on the railway track not noticing the express which bears down on me.

I haven't managed to identify the small white fungus even though it has a very characteristic scalloped edge which, as always, is frustrating.

Our walk took us from the glen into Dunrobin Castle's upper woods through which a beautiful maintained trail bike track wanders. It passes ancient walls - this one immediately below a broch - but then dives into a horribly dark and closely-packed spruce plantation which has been, and continues to be very good for...

....fungi even though one needs a torch to find them.

Our route took us steadily up hill until we joined a rather slippery road through Backies where Mrs MW had hoped to replenish our supply of beautiful, big, brown croft eggs, to be disappointed. The hens obviously don't like this weather either.

The Town Walk

When the weather turns filthy, and now that we no longer trek into the hills whatever it's throwing at us, we have a town walk which is a healthy two miles long. We start at our local Spar store, where the young lady who owns it puts our paper out in a box each morning so we don't have to go in to the shop. We then walk along what is appropriately called Back Road, which runs along the back of the village, cross the A9 (above), and....

....follow the road round to the coast, coming out just to the south of the harbour arm. The walk then takes us the full length of Golspie's 'promenade' but, if the tide allows, we veer off onto....

....the beach that fronts the main part of the town. It it's deserted it's quite good for birds - we saw redshank, oystercatcher, curlew and cormorant today. At the far end of the beach we return to the promenade which takes us round to....

....the point where the Golspie Burn, swollen today with whisky-brown water - meets the sea. A small group of mallard live there and make it very clear each time we pass that we are expected to bring a few crusts of bread with us.

The last part of the walk follows the burn, before we cut back to the A9, cross it, and climb the small hill to our house.

Wherever we walk in Golspie, George stares down at us from his plinth on top of Beinn Bhraggie. It must be pretty miserable for him up there today.