Grey Day Walk

On another grey morning with hardly a breath of wind we were walking along the coast track to the northeast of the village, passing Dunrobin Castle and enjoying....

....distant views across the Dornoch Firth to the lighthouse at Tarbat Ness, when we noticed, sitting on the rocks exposed by low tide....

....four grey seals. This is the first time we've seen them hauled up to the north of the town though there's no shortage of them in Loch Fleet.

Walking up through the woods we came across this fungus, the largest part of it almost a foot across. It may be another dryad's saddle.

This is monkey flower, Mimulus guttatus, hiding amongst the buttercups.

We passed two sites within the castle grounds where northern marsh orchids are thriving but along a damp track we found a new site, its sole orchid....

....at first glance appearing to be another northern marsh but I think it's either a rather brightly coloured common spotted orchid or a marsh/common spotted hybrid. If so, this is the first site we've identified locally with this hybrid species.

Golspie Dolphins

We walked along Golspie's beach this morning, the sea almost dead calm, the sky grey, and the tide low. There seemed to be less sand than ever, and very little washed up on it to interest us except....

....a lone blue jellyfish and small quantities of seaweed, but the walk was brought alive by the sight of....

....a dolphin sounding.

We had been told that dolphins could be seen off Golspie but with so little evidence of prey species and, this year, not a sign of bait fish, we didn't expect to see them.

They were far out in the firth, at the absolute limit of my camera's capabilities, so it was difficult to tell how many there were. The most we saw at any one time was two but I would guess there were half a dozen. They didn't seem in any hurry to go anywhere as we saw them, on an off, over a period of about an hour.

So.... thank you to a small pod of dolphins for making our day.

Orchid News

The local orchids do grow in the most unlikely of places. This is a rather damp clearing just beside one of the tracks running down through Golspie Glen and it is, to date, the only place we've found....

....the common spotted orchid, which is, therefore, locally rather uncommon. It's usually a denizen of open moorland not damp, shadowed glens. In a similar way, in the unlikely setting of....

....pine needles and fallen fir tree branches in Ferry Woods we have the one local occurrence of....

...creeping ladies' tresses, so-called because they spread by sending out shoots below the ground. It's early for them - last year we found them in late July - but some....

....are already close to coming in to flower.

Out on the links at Littleferry the northern marsh orchids are in full and spectacular bloom though....

....many, especially those in more exposed positions, show signs of having been burnt by the recent cold winds, and a few have been killed.

Today we went looking for orchids in a new place, the croft at Farlary. There we found plenty of heath spotted orchids, particularly in open ground in damp soils along the edges of any drainage. That this species is called 'heath' suggests that this is the sort of environment in which one would expect to find them, often in the company of the common spotted. We also found....

....just two of these. They're probably northern marsh orchids but they're a slightly different shade to those we find amongst the links.

Eider Ducklings

We had a pleasant surprise as we walked along the shores of Loch Fleet on Friday, a large number of ducks with young. However, it took us a moment or two to realise that they weren't mallard but eider.

I had assumed, wrongly, that all British eider flew north to breed and bring up their young in exotic places like Shetland and Iceland. My surprise at seeing eider still in the mouth of Loch Fleet a couple of weeks ago should have made me realise that some, at least, breed locally.

There was no sign of any males. Apparently they lose interest once the eggs are laid and the female begins to incubate them. As soon as the ducklings hatch the females take them out onto the water. Here the ducklings are reported to form large 'creches' supervised by a few females while the others go off to feed.

To find out where the 'missing males' have gone, we checked the mouth of Loch Fleet when we visited Littleferry this morning and found fifty or more eider resting on shingle bank. While most of them looked like....

....females, left, and some of these may have been immature ducks, but some, right, were definitely the missing males in their rather scruffy summer moult plumage.

After a while the whole flock took to the watering and began feeding, diving together to find shellfish on the bottom. We also saw some flying up the loch towards where we saw the ducklings so perhaps they were the females returning to do their shift at the creche.

Twinflower & Wintergreen

Twinflower & Wintergreen sounds like the name of a small, rather dodgy detective agency but they are the names of two quite rare plants which we found today in Balblair Woods. We don't usually visit the woods this often but their protection seemed a good idea in view of today's summery weather - a midday temperature of 10C, a cold northerly wind, and frequent showers.

The above picture of the woods doesn't look much different to most of the area near the road but it is, for it is home to a small colony of....

....the little pink twinflower, so-called for the unusual manner in which....

....the stalk bifurcates just below the two, bell-shaped flowers. It's an Arctic-Alpine plant, a relic of the ice age, which used to be much more widespread in Britain but is now only found in about fifty sites, exclusively in Scotland and many in the Cairngorms.

The species has suffered grievously from the clearance of the native Caledonian woodland, to the extent that these sites are now isolated, with consequences for the plant's genetic diversity. Changes in woodland management, and grazing by sheep and deer, now threaten it further. Despite a search, we only found one site in Balblair Woods, no more than 10mx10m in extent.

This is one-flowered wintergreen, a difficult little plant to photograph on a dull day as its flowers are on short stalks and face the ground. It's exclusive to the northeast of Scotland and is the county flower of Moray. We found it to be much more widespread in Balblair Woods than twinflower but in smaller colonies. It is less endangered, having healthy populations in some parts of the country.

In the middle of the area of the woods populated by twinflower and wintergreen we found a lone colony of half a dozen heath spotted orchids. It may be because they are so isolated that their shapes are exactly as this species is described - quite short, and rather conical - and this may be because they haven't had the opportunity to hybridise with common spotted orchids.

Something we noticed as we tramped around searching for small flowers was the amount of cuckoo spit attached to the heather.

While we were in the woods we couldn't resist a quick visit to the osprey nest. One of the parents was there but we didn't see any sign of the chicks.

Out with the Old?

There are times when I get very frustrated with my camera, particularly when the auto-focus throws a wobbly and refuses to work, and I keep thinking I really ought to get rid of it and buy something more up-to-date, but then I look at some of the pictures which, despite its limitations, the camera manages to produce, and I think I'd be an idiot to try something new, untested, the mechanics of which might well defeat me.

The camera is very good at taking pictures quickly, often when there are only only a few precious moments before the subject moves out of range. It isn't just that the camera turns on and then focuses quickly, it's also that, like some Wild West gunslinger, I've become good at drawing it from its case, pointing it, and pulling the trigger.

It's also very versatile. Its macro setting allows me to take some very good close-ups while the zoom feature, which gives me a 25x optical magnification, enables some very adequate distant shots - as, the other day, when we were watching the osprey on its nest in Balblair Wood.

There's also a matter of principle. The camera may be old, there may be more recent, fancier models, but that's not a good reason for consigning it to the bin - or, more likely, the bottom drawer of my desk where it can fade into obscurity along with other older models like my iPhone 4. Like me, with a bit of luck, it still has some mileage in it.

From top: meadow lark, oystercatcher with young, two-banded longhorn beetle,

and male large red damselfly.

North of Dunrobin

We walked north through Dunrobin Woods for about two miles this morning, emerging into fields of wildflowers and grass which haven't been grazed since early winter, before turning back....

....to follow the old coast track back towards Dunrobin Castle. Flying rather haphazardly amongst the grasses we spotted....

....a painted lady. These butterflies are reported not to breed in Britain but spread northwards from North Africa each year. I struggle to believe that this individual has managed to make it this far north....

....in a year when hardly any other butterflies have been on the wing - in the last few days we've seen....

....one speckled wood....

....a couple of common blues and....

....one of the whites.

Back in the woods we found several fungi. They seem so out-of-place amongst the bright greens of summer but a least I was able to identify this one, growing out of a tree stump. It's a dryad's saddle, otherwise known as a pheasant's back as the patterns resemble those of a female pheasant. While we were admiring this specimen, Mrs MW spotted....

....another, much larger one, up a nearby tree, growing out of a dead branch. It's big, as can be seen....

....in this close-up picture, the largest being about 9" across.

A Wildflower Explosion

With a late winter delaying spring and the sudden change to sunny, if not warm weather - the air temperature last night dropped to 3C - the wildflowers are running hard to catch up. It may be a result of the severe winter but it does seem to me that they are unusually good this year.

This is the first thrift we've found here. We're accustomed to seeing it clinging along the tide line below steep cliffs but....

....here we found it growing along the banks of the Culmaily Burn for a couple of hundred yards above where it reaches Loch Fleet. At high tides the flat, grassy areas on either side of the burn will be flooded by salty water, creating the conditions which thrift enjoys - much to the enjoyment, too, of the local bees.

On the same 'flood plain' we found this plant. We've seen it before but have not been able to identify it, which is surprising as it's pretty obvious what it is - sea campion. It grows along the shores of Loch Fleet, in amongst the drying seaweed along the high tide line.

Masses of yellow rattle are coming into flower in the grassy meadows below Dunrobin Castle. However, we also found....

....something very similar in Balblair Woods. The flowers on this are smaller, the leaves narrower, so I indentified it as greater yellow rattle, an odd name as it's smaller and more delicate. I find identifying wildflowers extremely difficult as there seem often to be a wide range of very minor variations, and this certainly applies to the yellow rattle family. For example....

....in amongst the more common, pale green variants below Dunrobin there were these slightly reddish plants.

It is very rare to be able to identify a specific wildflower from one year to the next but this is an example. It's a northern marsh orchid and it's growing all alone behind a section of shingle beach just to the south of the castle, just as it did last year - see post here.