Helmeted Guineafowl

A couple of these helmeted guineafowl are occasionally to be seen in the road by Golspie Tower Farm. They never look very happy - which isn't surprising as their natural home is sub-saharan Africa, where we've seen them in the wild, for example....

....on one of our trips to Tanzania when a large and very noisy flock crossed the track, holding up our tourist-filled Land Rover whose passengers were hoping to see something rather more exciting.

These seemed very at home in some beautiful, open savanna woodland, going about their late afternoon business of foraging for seeds and insects in their customary chatty fashion. I have always been amazed that they survive as their noise is audible for miles and would, one imagines, attract any predator which might fancy a nice meal of game bird.

I can only conclude that, although they always seem so relaxed and sociable, they manage to keep a very watchful eye on their surroundings, and are pretty sharp at taking avoiding action if they feel threatened. This photo was taken in Saadani National Park where the local predator list starts with lions, leopards and hyenas. I wouldn't have been too happy wandering around these woodlands at that time of day but then I can't fly.

The Monkeys' Wedding Day

This morning we woke to bright sunshine through which snowflakes fell. The temperature was a fraction above freezing so....

....the flakes settled quite happily on the roof of our car.

Now rain through sunshine is often referred to as a 'monkeys' wedding', though a search on the internet finds little to explain where the term comes from or its derivation. Its use is widespread, including in Africa and the Caribbean, but a quick trawl through my African books provided the source of the version I know, in....

....one of Geraldine Elliot's lovely volumes of Nyasaland (Malawi) folk lore - see earlier post here.

It is the last story in her fourth and last book, The Singing Chameleon, and it describes how a dreadful drought threatened to spoil the festivities at the monkeys' wedding. They had no food for the feast but Tandaubwe the spider, noticing that, unlike all the other animals, Mkango the lion was still very fat, had crept into his cave and seen that, by putting a single bean into a cooking pot in which he kept a magic bone, the lion made a pot full of beans.

Kalulu the rabbit was sent to ask the lion if the monkeys could borrow the bone for the wedding but the mean lion refused - unless, he said, it rained within the next three days. Surprisingly, rain it did, on a beautifully sunny day, but the rain came from a plan hatched by Kalulu and the monkeys. They organised hundreds of their friends and relatives to form a chain to pass up gourds full of water from the river and poured them across the entrance to the lion's cave.

The bone, the monkeys found, worked for everything so, for example, one banana made hundreds, and they had a magnificent feast, much to the fury of Mkango when he discovered how he had been tricked.

I love these African folk tales and the sketches, by Sheila Hawkins, which accompany them, and can remember my mother reading them to us when we lived in Mombasa.

However, this does leave us with a problem. If rain falling through sunshine makes it a monkeys' wedding, what do we call a day when snow falls through sunshine?

McBride

At one time we talked quite seriously about emigrating to Canada. Our son was in Alberta, so he could sponsor us, and we had been to the country a couple of times and liked so much about it - not least, the spectacular scenery but also the easy way of life and the pleasant people. It struck us as a country which, with its immense natural resources and relatively small population, had a very promising future.

So when we took our road trips with our son and we stopped off in various towns, particularly in the mountains of British Columbia, we sometimes asked ourselves whether this was the sort of place we could settle. This is one of them. It's a small town not quite on the Fraser River, sandwiched between Highway 16 and the railway, a town with all the facilities one would expect to find in a typical small Canadian town like a hospital, library, shops and hotels, and schools.

I recall walking down the road shown in the picture and thinking that McBride was exactly the sort of place where we could settle and live happily, despite the harsh winters and the fact that it was many miles from the nearest city.

We talked of emigrating but the talk came to nothing. In retrospect, it was probably a wise move not to make an attempt to build a new life in our late years, and we might not have found a small Canadian town quite the idyll we had expected. So this particular adventure never happened.... sadly.

Back to Winter

Anxious not to be out-done by our resident red admiral, two more of the early butterfly species have put in a first appearance today, starting with this very fine peacock and followed by....

....an equally smart tortoiseshell, both attracted by the aubretia which is bursting into flower in the front garden.

I worry for all of them. The forecast suggests that tonight's low of 4C will be followed by a day which will struggle to reach 5C and will be followed by three nights when the temperature will plunge to -3C, with wintery showers promised.

So it isn't only we foolish humans who allow a few days of fine weather to trick us into thinking that winter is behind us. We are fortunate to be able to turn the central heating back up again. I do hope that these beautiful butterflies can find a warm place to shelter through the next few days.

Wilderness Walking

Only a few years ago a truly exceptionally warm and sunny spring Sunday like today would have seen us walking miles from the beaten track, often out of range of a mobile signal and even further from the nearest human help. Perhaps, in all our years of walking in the Highlands, we were lucky but we never needed rescuing and had few falls or injuries. We took a calculated risk each time we set out but these days, at our age, much as we would dearly love to embark on similar wonderful adventures, we would be foolish to do so, so our walks are along fairly safe tracks in areas which have reasonable mobile coverage and for distances with which our ageing anatomies can cope.

We mourn the loss of those wilderness walks but this doesn't mean we can't still get well away from civilisation, as long as we discount the wind farm tracks we now use, but these lead us into all sorts of wild areas, from extensive moorland to....

....varied woodland and....

....past secluded lochans, and we still see interesting wildlife even though they are no longer the spectacular birds and beasts with which we once rubbed shoulders.

Today's walk was the Farlary, a crofting area a few miles inland from Golspie, in the hope of a first sighting of an osprey - I think it's still a little early for them - and to find some lapwings to photograph. The latter obliged but they kept their distance, which is a shame as the males' plumage at this time of year is spectacular.

We had also hoped to see our first wheatear of the year but, as with the ospreys, it may be a couple of weeks too early for them. Never mind, instead we saw a number of these, which I take to be meadow pipits:  I hope they are as we found them in good numbers and this is yet another species which has, over the last few years, seen a dire decline.

Spring Walk

The bright, warm spring weather continues so when we set off on our morning walk the red admiral was already out and about, sunning himself on one of the garden walls - but he was the only butterfly we saw in a two hour wander.

This took us up to Backies to collect a dozen croft eggs and then back down through pine and spruce forestry and some ancient oak woodland where we saw the next great marker of oncoming spring....

....the first wild primrose flowers.

However, what we most noticed were the birds and their song, with the first chiffchaffs calling and....

....two bluetit males having about as close to a fight as these lovely little birds could come. The confrontation was contactless and started....

....on the ground, with the two cocks taking turns in flying up into the air over the other and then dropping back, alternating with gymnastic face-offs....

....in the lower branches, followed by aerial acrobatics in....

....the uppermost twigs.

The object of their rivalry, a female, appeared occasionally to check on how the boys were getting on but, when we left, after watching them for about ten minutes and taking about eighty photographs in an attempt to record their behaviour, the two males were still at it.

Our walk took us home along a section of Golspie Glen where the burn runs below some huge fallen blocks of the local red sandstone. There we spotted our dipper pair, usually seen a half-mile further downstream by the footbridge. One is at bottom centre of the picture, the other at bottom right - but what interested us was that one of them kept flying up to explore the horizontal crack between the masonry blocks, exactly the sort of place that dippers favour for a nest.

The Year's First Butterfly

There's always something very special indeed about the sighting of the year's first butterfly. In 2021 it was of a tortoiseshell, and we saw it on 2nd April, so it wasn't particularly surprising that, with the midday temperature soaring to a giddy 16C, we spotted this year's on Tuesday, a good week earlier.

However, this time it was a red admiral, a very shy but exceedingly smart red admiral who didn't at all went his picture taken but....

....like any good papparazzo, I persisted and managed my scoop in yesterday's warm afternoon sunshine.

What is so special, I suppose, is the startling colours of these first butterflies after the drab shades of winter; the way these colours are suddenly in the air, moving erratically, catching the sunlight; and the fact that this small beast has managed to survive a bitterly cold winter.

So it's a joy to see it, but here's hoping these bright and very precious insects have a good year in 2022.

King Eider at Littleferry

We found rather more people than usual at Littleferry when we arrived there this morning, the locals out for a walk in fine if rather cloudy weather supplemented by half-a-dozen twitchers attracted by the presence, in amongst....

....the masses of common eider, of a single king eider. Not having the fancy telephoto lenses and high-power binoculars which they had, I resorted to group photographs of the eight hundred or so eider swimming back and forth, in the hope that, in amongst the pictures, I might find....

....this very spectacular bird - image courtesy Ron Knight of Seaford, E. Sussex, on Wikimedia Commons.

I ended up with about forty of these groups through which I have carefully worked, without success.

King eider are not uncommon further north, in places like Norway, but are unusual here, hence the twitcher interest.

While we walked skeins of geese kept passing over - I think these are pink-footed geese - but....

....these sad remains reminded us that there is now a warning out from NatureScot that avian flu has been identified at Loch Fleet and that we should report if we find many dead birds.

To add to the rafts of eider we saw widgeon and this lone goldeneye.

The Gramophone

Of all the objects that have traipsed round the world with me this is possibly the most unlikely. It's made of a slightly rubbery plastic and used to sit in the front of the polished wooden box that housed my father's HMV gramophone, the first imported into Kenya that had stereophonic capability.

This is a machine very similar to the one my father had. The orange plastic thing is clearly visible, and it lit up when the gramophone was turned on. To go with the gramophone he bought the two large, floor-standing speakers which, while the gramophone was rapidly outmoded, we continued to use until we left Maldon in 1997.

I know when he bought the gramophone because its arrival coincided with the move from the Hoey house at Nyali to the African Mercantile's manager's house on Mombasa island. Richard and I had spent almost every moment of the summer holiday of 1958 on the Hoey house beach and did not take kindly to the idea of living in the house at the end of Cliff Avenue. Our mother was pleased, as she did not approve of our happy isolation at Nyali and felt we ought to be socialising with other young people, so one of the first things she did when we arrived for our 1959 holiday was to organise ballroom dancing classes in our sitting room - and the music for quickstep and foxtrot was played on my father's wonderful new gramophone.

I hated the dancing classes as they involved girls, and at the tender age of fourteen they terrified me, particularly as the dance teacher told us that, for some dances, we had to hold them close against us. However, the young people who danced with us became great friends, and a holiday which had threatened to be disappointing turned into one of the best we ever had as we spent so much time in their company, riding round Mombasa on our bicycles, being taken to game parks and beaches, and playing records - though they were the Everly Brothers, Elvis and Connie Francis rather than Victor Silvester.

So I have kept this little piece of plastic as a memento of a holiday long ago.

First Migrants Return

The beach to the north of us, between the village and Dunrobin Castle, is now seeing the return of the first migrants. Earliest were the....

....skylarks, the males arriving before the females to stake out their territories and then fly above them, their glorious song their way of informing rivals that they already own the patch of rough pasture below them.

Next came the pied wagtails, chasing each other around the fields and foreshore so fast that it's taken a couple of days to find them still enough to capture their portrait. At about the same time as they arrived we were told that their cousins....

....the grey wagtails were back and we duly found a pair in their favourite spot, hopping from stone to stone in the Golspie burn.

Along the shore, birds that until recently went around in chattering groups - one thinks of the gulls and oystercatchers in particular - are beginning to pair up ready for the serious business of rearing this year's broods. These are, I think, kittiwakes.

The Glen Crofter

This was the maximum/minimum thermometer when it was read at around nine this morning. While nineteen for yesterday's maximum is a little unlikely - the machine isn't sited in an ideal position - the true maximum must have been around fifteen/sixteen, impressive enough for a pre-equinox day in Scotland's far north, and certainly warm enough....

....to bring out both the first bumblebee of the year and a few other, smaller, flying insects.

With the weather set fair for another, if slightly cooler and breezier day today, we walked up the road to Backies and then, instead of turning back through the Dunrobin woodlands as we usually do, we kept going, which took us out on the Farlary road, up through sadly neglected croft land.

Not all of it is unused, however. I asked the crofter who works the land which includes the ancient clachan settlement of Glen - seen at bottom left in the picture - if I could visit the ruins without disturbing his animals, and spent some time with him listening to a tale which must be so common to crofters, of a landlord who is anxious to clear the land further of its human occupants, just as his ancestor did at the beginning of the 19th century. Today's purpose is not to put vacated land down to sheep but to the modern equivalent, forestry, for which there are big grants and, therefore, far more money to be made than from tenants.

The man was justifiably bitter about his circumstances but he also mourned the potential loss, because young people are dissuaded from looking to crofting for a lifetime career, of a whole way of life.

I felt deeply for him. We have seen first-hand the mess that crofting is in, not helped by the ineffectiveness of the body that is supposed to nurture crofting, the Crofting Commission.

It's.... Crossbill Time

A temperature of -2C through much of last night left a white frost and frozen puddles along the track up into the woods below Beinn Bhraggie summit this morning, which couldn't have been good for....

....those optimistic frogs which had decided to start their families early this year; we wondered whether the paler eggs were those which had been most damaged by the cold.

We were particularly on the lookout for crossbills, a small colony of which seem to occupy the Scots pine plantation around the crossroads where the Golspie Tower track meets Queen's Drive. It's a good time to find them as they mate early in the year so are often to be seen calling from the tops of pine trees, which is exactly how....

....we spotted a bird that might have been one, though it was too far away for us to be certain of the identification.

Fortunately, we were able to get much closer to the next one, close enough to identify it as a crossbill and to see that it was a female.

We spent a good ten minutes watching it as it moved from one high vantage point to another but, sadly, at no point did we see another bird and, in particular, not the male which is a splendid russet red at this time of year. However, it did call constantly so, as soon as we were home, we listened to recordings of both the common and Scottish species - one of the few ways of telling them apart - and are quite convinced that this was a Scottish crossbill.