Small (and Larger) Bird News

It's so good when a 'different' bird appears in the garden, different, that is, from the usual gang fighting over the vast quantities of food we put out. This female siskin was one of a pair that passed through all too quickly, probably deterred from staying by the squabbling house sparrow hoards. Her mate was in full spring plumage and was quite beautiful.

At the opposite end of the beauty line-up is the dunnock, a drab little bird but one I love for its low-key personality and gentle persistence. It's almost a cross between a bird and a mouse, scurrying into the undergrowth rather than taking off when disturbed.

We continue to experiment with feeders. This is the latest, which delivers sunflower kernels through a small hole. For ages no-one could work out how to get on to it but the puzzle - and the very rich rewards - was finally cracked by a great tit, followed soon after by a blue tit. Of course one doesn't have to do the hard work as this....

....robin discovered: the kernels are awkward to extract so I would guess that 50% fall to the ground.

We are rarely honoured by a visit from a collared dove, another bird I love for its gentleness but also because they almost always go around in affectionate pairs.

There seem to be even more jackdaws around at the end of winter than there were at the beginning, and they get into everything - except, perhaps, the new sunflower feeder. They irritate me intensely but I can't help feeling a sneaking respect for their intelligence and persistence.

Finally, I'm sure readers will be thrilled to hear that our plastic owl, purchased at huge expense as a crow and gull deterrent, is now great friends with the local gulls, who are back to doing their 5am dance on the rather thin roof above our bedroom and, perhaps, teaching the owl how to do it.

What Have We Done?

Today's walk along the beach to the southwest of Golspie started well - to begin with, the forecast rain was holding off and, as the morning progressed, the sun showed his face - and it was also good to find that the sea had kindly returned most of the beach sand which it borrowed for the winter. However, from there on it became an increasingly depressing perambulation, because for me one of the great pleasures of walking is observing....

....the wildlife, and from this perspective Golspie beach and the sea off it are, at the moment, a desert. One guillemot, one merganser, one cormorant, two oystercatchers and a scattering of common gulls were all that we saw out to sea, while along the line of the....

....rising tide we found a few shells, the broken carapaces of some crabs, some egg cases from the common whelk, scattered strands of weed, a few tree branches, and two of those wretched throw-away plastic water bottles.

We used to think the beach at Felixstowe was pretty barren but I never believed I would walk a Scottish beach as destitute as this one. What's going on? What have we done to our world?

Collapse of the Beit al Ajaib

Yesterday evening we had just watched the BBC 24-hour news when a trailer for the Travel Show, the programme to follow, came on. Its main item, about Zanzibar, mentioned the collapse of....

....part of the Beit al Ajaib, the House of Wonders, the building which had been used by the British administration of Zanzibar in my mother's time. I was deeply shocked - I had heard nothing about it. It happened some time ago, on Christmas Day 2020. Half of each of two sides of the building fell, killing two people and injuring others.

This is the Beit as we saw it when we visited Stone Town in 2012. My mother's office was behind the window below the tower....

....which housed the lookout for ships approaching the harbour. Tragically, the tower and, presumably....

....my mother's office, with its lovely wood-panelled walls, was part of the collapse.

I am not surprised part of the palace fell down. This was the state of the balcony outside my mother's office in 2012 and, although the government of Oman had become involved in restoration work at the time of the tragedy, it was probably already too late.

Ach na Corra

This grey heron is whiling away the hours of high tide in Ford Park, the glebe for the Church of Scotland manse which stands at the northeast end of Main Street. A glebe is an area of farmland reserved for the use of the minister who, while usually being paid a stipend by the church, was expected to grow some crops and, perhaps, keep a cow or two.

This glebe is a substantial field which runs from the manse almost to the sea and is a favourite place for both herons and curlews. That it's called Ford Park may be a reference to the ford across the Golspie Burn which is located by the turreted building at bottom right.

The name Ford Park interests me only in that it is typical of this area of Sutherland, an English name in a place where, a hundred years ago and more, the vast majority, and certainly the ordinary workpeople, would have spoken Gaelic. So I shall think of this field as Ach na Corra, the field of the heron.

Greens

Unless buried under snow, the winter woods around here are always green from the mosses that cover not only every piece of dead and fallen wood but also the living, sometimes extending almost to the canopy of quite tall trees. However, today a new and much brighter green, the green of newly-growing grass, was very evident.

For some, like this roe deer, any new green growth of grass, tree or shrub is too late. In the last few months we have only seen two living deer, a mother with last summer's young, and we've seen two dead, while through the previous winter we were seeing them regularly. It's been a hard winter.

As the season changes so the fungi have disappeared, with the exception of the birch polyphores which are visible year-round, so we were quite surprised to see this one growing in leaf mould at the side of the path. I've tried to identify it - as usual, without success.

However, here is a real sign of spring, the first grey wagtail of the year which Mrs MW spotted on Wednesday in the burn in Golspie glen. While some British grey wagtails stay local throughout the winter, the ones in northern areas such as this tend to migrate to lowland areas further south. Welcome back!

Losing More Moorland

Here's that lovely moment when one approaches the gate that leads onto....

....open moorland, when the artificial trees fall away and one can see the whole sky, even though, today, it was a cold, grey sky.

We had walked straight uphill from the house, through Golspie Tower and the Beinn Bhraggie woods, following the track which, if pursued to its end, reaches the summit of the ben.

By the side of the track we noticed a collection of similar bags to those we'd seen at Lochlundaidh, where they were tree planting, but all of these contained....

....non-coniferous trees, holly, blackthorn, alder, downy birch, aspen, hazel and sessile oak.

We've known for some time, from the new fences marching across the landscape, that this lovely open land was going to disappear under trees but it seems odd that the only trees delivered are deciduous. Are these the 10% deciduous trees which the Sutherland Estate was supposed to plant at Lochlundaidh, because we noticed few trees there which weren't coniferous? Perhaps I'm being overly suspicious; perhaps the estate is only going to plant native trees here; perhaps pigs will fly. I just wish I could at least believe that the big landowners are planting these forests for the good of the planet and not their pockets.

Never mind, on the way down through the forestry we saw a crossbill. These birds do appreciate a bit of coniferous woodland.

Bawe Island

I do enjoy browsing through the photographs I have of the holidays we took in Tanzania in the early 2010s. They remind me of three very enjoyable visits to the country of my birth but, occasionally, the enjoyment throws up a question - which is what happened this afternoon.

This is a picture of an island we saw out of the window of a light aeroplane on our flight from Saadani to Zanzibar in 2012. It lies in the Zanzibar Channel, nearer Zanzibar than the coast of Tanganyika. What island is it?

These days such questions are easily answered - it's Bawe Island, and I have marked in orange the approximate flight path of our 'plane. Bawe is one of a little archipelago of beautiful coral islands off Zanzibar's capital, Stone Town.

Today it's the site of the Bawe Tropical Island Resort, the accommodation being for 30 people in 15 luxurious cottages strung out along the white-sand beach. It's a 30-minute boat ride from Stone Town, so it's easily accessible.... at which point another thought came to me. My mother and father met and married and lived in Zanzibar, and my mother loved beaches.  Did they ever go out to Bawe?

My mother's biographies are the only way of knowing, and she doesn't mention it. However....

....they did go to Changu Island, in their day called Prison Island, on several occasions, one of which is recorded in this photo captioned 'Picnic on Prison Islaand'. My father is on the left, the only person not in swimwear - he did not like beaches, swimming or picnics - and my mother is next to him.

The chances are that they did visit Bawe.

Woodpeckers

We spent the morning in a cold and windy Balblair woods in the off-chance of a sighting of an early-returned osprey, without luck, but the woods vibrated to the....

....hammering of woodpeckers. The noise is impressively loud, created by choosing dead trees, such as the two in the centre of this picture, but although we could hear the male's frantic drumming in them we couldn't see him. While woodpeckers feed on grubs and other invertebrates they prise from under the bark of trees, the noise at this time of year is to attract a mate.

We walked until the path ran out on the little peninsula which we associate with our first and only sighting of ospreys last summer, where we watched these five swans - too far away for me to identify.

A little patience on the way back enabled us to see two woodpeckers, a pair, one of which was drumming and then chasing its mate around the canopy. They didn't seem too worried by our close approach though they were very difficult to spot in the high pines.

Sadly the camera was determined to focus on the tree trunk rather than the bird but we see enough to identify this as one of the spotted woodpeckers and, since it was definitely bigger than a sparrow, it's a greater spotted. The woodpecker didn't co-operate enough to show us the top of its head but there's no sign of a red crown so this is probably a female.

We counted three separate drummings so there is no shortage of woodpeckers in these woods, further evidence coming from the large number of possible nest holes.

Living with a View - 6

I have written elsewhere on this blog (search 'Living with a View') about how fortunate I consider myself to have lived in several houses which had spectacular views.  When we first bought the house we now inhabit, we didn't think it had a view - not until we had moved in and realised that there is a view, a sea view almost due south across the Dornoch and Moray Firths to the Nairn-Lossiemouth coastline to the east of Inverness.

Like all good views it's a view which changes with the time of day, the season and....

....the weather but it does have its limitations. For a start, it's a very distant view, squeezed between trees and over a neighbour's garage, and it has two street lights which rather spoil it. There is a more serious limitation, in that, when we first bought the house, the only place it could be seen was from the landing on the stairs. We're working on developing the view so it can be enjoyed in rather more comfort but this morning I realised something which must, surely, enhance its value: it includes a glimpse of....

....the Cairngorms., though they're probably best seen through....

....a telescope.

Wildfowl Along the Shore

We were on the beach below the town in time for low tide just after ten this morning, for a walk which provided us with a rare wealth of wildfowl. This included....

....a raft of about fifty eider swimming just offshore. When we saw them on Friday they were diving, all going down together and reappearing together but today....

....they were moving slowly in the same direction with both sexes occasionally stretching out their necks and raising there heads, all to a low but melodious grunting sound - presumably, this is some sort of courting ritual.

A little further along we saw, in close succession, a red-breasted merganser, as far as we could see, all on his own...,

....a goldeneye pair and....

....three guillemots.

Along the beach we found a pair of ringed plovers and then stopped to watch....

....as a flock of a dozen redshanks came in to land and start feeding on the seaweed but our presence worried them so, sadly, they....

....took off, the first to go demonstrating their capacity to take off almost vertically. We watched as they flew along the shore, passing....

....the eider before, at a safe distance from us, landing to resume their interrupted meal.