High Cloud

Random stretches of high cloud obscuring the rising sun painted the world in shades of orange, yellow and grey this morning. At the mouth of the Golspie Burn only the fat, bread-fed mallards were there to witness it, while along the....

....offshore bars built to protect Golspie's main beach in the days when it was still a fishing port a lone heron....

....and, at a respectful distant, an equally lone cormorant stood guard.

We walked Golspie's south beach for an hour, much of its sand stripped away by the recent easterlies, the only birds a couple of gulls, four oystercatchers, a half-dozen eider and....

....ten long-tailed ducks.

It's the sort of still winter scene to which we now have to adjust ourselves, following a clear night during which the mercury dropped below 2C so we woke to a hard ground frost. That even the gulls seem to have deserted Golspie beaches I cannot explain, except to mention that the local press are warning that bird flu is back in the Moray Firth, the main sufferers being the pink-footed geese and the gull population.

Small Birds Along the Shoreline

The recent, persistent and strong easterlies, along with high tides, have damaged some of the sea defences in front of Dunrobin Castle and piled....

....great mounds of seaweed at the top of the beaches. In places this rotting weed is close against the stands of....

....sea buckthorn which are now laden with ripe, orange berries. Some of the small birds....

....such as the robins, seem to favour the buckthorn less for its fruit and more for the depth of its tangled protection, from which they can venture out to feed on the flies and other small creatures growing in the weed, but others, such as the recently-arrived....

....blackcaps, are very happy to feast on its berries.

Waxwings

It's not that I'm a twitcher but I do like to know the identities of the birds I see so, having had a brief glimpse the other day only of only the second waxwing I've seen in Scotland, I wanted to find out if it was the same species as the much more numerous waxwings I've seen in comparatively much shorter times I've spent in Canada.

A little research tells me that there is only one species of waxwing in Europe, and that's Bombycilla garrulus, the Bohemian waxwing. However, it is also distributed across much of North America whereas....

....the cedar waxwing, Bombycilla cedrorum, is only found in North America. 

The two species are difficult to tell apart. The upper picture is of the lone waxwing we spotted some years ago in Kilchoan, so tame that I was able almost to walk right up to it to take the picture. The lower picture is of one of a small flock which we watched on the shores of Lake Okanagan in British Columbia, and I'm almost certain that it's a cedar waxwing as it has a much yellower tummy. Whichever species they are, they're stunningly beautiful birds.

The only other waxwing species is the Japanese variety, which is confined to eastern Russia, Japan and China and is, unlike the others, under some threat.

Armed with this information, I'm hoping this is going to be a bumper year here for Bohemian waxwings.

The Redshanks' Beach

The stormy weather has cleared giving us a still, bright morning and, at first sight, the sea seemed to have calmed along the coast to the north of us but....

....occasional heavy and quite vicious waves were still coming in to pound the beaches.

I have often wondered what the waders which normally work these beaches - oystercatchers, curlews, redshanks, ringed plovers and the like - do for a meal when the sea is so high and rough that their feeding grounds are unavailable, and today I had something of an answer because....

....in one place a small sliver of beach was left exposed, though the bigger waves kept shooting up it, and playing with those waves, just as we did as children, running up and down the sand and rather enjoying the danger....

....was a small flock of a dozen or so redshanks.

Another Memory Picture

This place suddenly leapt to mind again this morning, a vivid landscape stripped to the barest essentials of sand and sea and sky, a picture that was so immediate and real I might have been there. I don't understand these memory bursts, these images dug up from a dusty album in my brain and thrown at me for only a moment, like a rocket bursting. Why there? Why then? Why now? It's not for any reason I can find.

As is quite typical, it wasn't a particularly special place to deserve such treatment - we were only there for a few hours as part of an uncomfortable tourist trip - although it was quite unlike anywhere I have been before or since. It was a memorable place, without the baggage of commitment: we saw it, experienced it, photographed it, paid, and moved on: I think it was salt pans and flamingoes next.

The place was Sandwich Harbour on the coast of Namibia to the south of Swakopmund, the time was October 2009; and I wish I could wind back the clock and walk that beach again.

Recent Fungi

This may look as if someone's shopping bag has burst scattering rooster potatoes across the grass but it's a fungus which, judging by how many of them there are on the open, grassy links at Littleferry, is doing very well. However, as I mentioned in an earlier post, identifying it is a bit of a headache as....

....it ticks all the boxes for a wood blewit except, as the name suggests, wood blewits are most common on leaf litter in.... woods. A similar fungus, the bruising webcap, also ticks the boxes but... yes.... it too is most common in woodland.

Nothing is easy in the world of fungus identification. When I took the picture of these beautiful brackets - each is about 4" across - I thought the species would be easy to identify. It wasn't, and I'm still not sure whether this is, or is not a conifer mazegill.

This hardwood tree was felled some time ago - it's about 3' in diameter - giving it time to grow two rather smart....

....jellies. The dark one in the foreground may (or, of course, may not....) be black witch's butter and the lilac one may be purple jellydisc. Whatever, they are rather beautiful, and it seems a shame that, although they are on a well-used path in Golspie Glen, I doubt whether many people notice them.

The Buzzards are Back

The air temperature almost dropped to zero last night bringing a hard ground frost, the first of the year, and, this morning,...

....high cirrus skies over Dunrobin Castle. Then, above the treeline, we spotted....

....the first buzzard in weeks, wheeling against the blue....

....accompanied by a second.

Seeing them was a huge relief. The idea that this fine bird would no longer be patrolling our skies didn't bear thinking about. I only hope that these are 'our' buzzards, not new ones coming in to fill a gap left by the loss of the resident birds.

Perhaps our buzzards have been on holiday, maybe a cruise to visit relatives in Spain. Sounds ridiculous? Well, a Scottish osprey was tracked hitching a lift on not one but two ships on its journey south this year - look at the BBC News website story here.

Waxwings

Identifying small birds against a bright sky can be a problem so when, on our way up the hill towards Golspie Tower this morning, we saw a mass of small birds both on the power cables and in some of the bushes up the side of the road, I wasn't too excited though....

....when I returned home and began to go through the pictures I had bothered to take, I was very pleased to see that some of them were goldfinches, a species which still refuses to visit our garden even though there is a feeder stuffed full of nijer waiting for them.

However, this picture was even more interesting. The crests on these two birds had suggested they were chaffinches but they're far more exciting, as they are....

....waxwings. There must have been half-a-dozen or so of them, and I only took three pictures.... Oh dear! I have only once before seen a waxwing in Britain.

An Unusual Beach Visitor

This morning, in amongst the steadily increasing piles of mussel shells which litter the high-tide line at Littleferry we found....

....an octopus, a good hundred metres or so from the nearest water, and looking....

....very dead - except for an eye which seemed to watch us.

Then, slowly, with much writhing of its tentacles, it gathered itself and set off down the beach but the effort didn't last and we left it....

collapsed on some seaweed.

An Easterly Gale

We try to get out for a walk whatever the weather even when we're being warned that winds of thirty miles an hour will be gusting well into Storm force 8. At such times we head for the relative calm of the woods, today to admire the only tree species to still retain some leaves, the beech, first crossing the....

....Golspie Burn which is bank-full after a good inch of rain in the last twenty-four hours, and skirting....

....a tree which came down in the night, happily one that was already very dead but which kindly managed to miss demolishing an old stone wall.

The woods were full of the noise of the storm, the bird life silent and invisible except for a few wood pigeons. We've hardly had a small bird on the garden feeders all day.

We finished our walk leaning into the wind on the spume-flecked beach so we could look out across seas being whipped up by the east-southeasterly, a wind so vicious that none of the shore birds were in the air except for a few gulls - gulls always seem to enjoy a good gale - and two cormorants, one flying backwards as it fought into the wind, another travelling downwind at the speed of a North Korean missile.

Avian Flu is Back....

Hardly a breath of wind this morning as we walked Littleferry beach, the heavy surf a memory of the strong easterlies of the last few days. It was great to be out in the bracing fresh air, and great, too, not to find any sign of the seal pup, but, oh dear!...

....avian flu is back with a vengeance in the Moray Firth, with dozens of seabirds washed up along the tideline. Most now are gulls, with the occasional guillemot - I'm surprised there are any of this species left to die - and a single pink-footed goose. Some birds....

....like the ever-cheery oystercatchers, seem unaffected by the disease.

The number of eider swimming off the mouth of Loch Fleet seems to be down compared to last year, and we wondered whether....

....the thousands of mussel shells scattered along the beach meant that these ducks are feeding well or whether there's a problem with the local shellfish.

By the time we returned to the car a weak but surprisingly warm sun was out, shining low across Loch Fleet, so we sat on a bench kindly provided by NatureScot and watched....

....the seabirds making the most of the mudflats exposed by low tide. It was difficult at a distance to distinguish all the species but oystercatchers, curlews, redshanks and widgeon were there, with their attendant, lurking crows and gulls.

A Sea Wind

There's nothing to beat a brisk walk along the coast on a breezy day to blow away the mental cobwebs. Today an onshore wind stood ESE, gusting to force 7 but warm, the waves rolling in on a rising tide to....

....worry the cormorants lining up to dry their feathers on the offshore rocks.

Sadly, in amongst the wrack on the beach we found two distressed divers, one....

....a guillemot unable to move except to peck in frustration at the sand in front of it. We've been told not to report isolated birds which may be suffering from bird flu so all we felt we could do was to leave it until the tide rose, in the hope it might swim away.

The Ungrateful

Having responded to our call to the British Divers Marine Life Rescue group yesterday, 'Claire Mc' wrote on the Golspie Village Facebook page this morning, "Walkers in Golspie - please look out for an injured seal pup on the beach between Golspie and Littleferry. I went out to assess today on behalf of BDMLR and it has wounds requiring treatment. We were all set to uplift and take to Fishcross for rehabilitation and he shot off into the water. If anyone comes across an injured pup please contact BDMLR 01825 765546."

What a way to treat the seal version of the emergency services!