Professional Services

I have about fifty short stories sitting on my computer which are 'finished'. Not all of them are very good but some are - though I say it myself - because they won competitions in which the name of the writer was not available to the judges, so they were judged 'blind'.

Most of my good stories start off with a place. This picture is of Palisados, the long shingle spit which separates Kingston Jamaica's harbour from the open sea.  This is the sea side, with the waves of the blue Caribbean beating against it. I used to go down there often, usually in the very early morning, to fish for jackfish and snook, and was often warned that there were nasty Rastas there who might attack and kill me: the ones I met were fine.

One short story I wrote was set there. I have no idea where the story itself came from, which is true of almost all of my better stories. They simple appeared on the computer screen. It's a creativity which used to both alarm and fascinate me, and it's a creativity which, with advancing age, I am losing: and I mourn its loss.

I don't know what to do with these stories as, although many were published in a magazine because they were prize-winners, no-one is likely to publish them now. So it seems sensible to make them available to you, the readers of this blog. This one is called 'Professional Services', and you can download it here

Time with the Birds

Other than two brief encounters with dog walkers I had this long stretch of beach all to myself this morning, with a falling tide exposing the sort of seaweed-encrusted boulders which should have been crowded with waders, but weren't. So, as I enjoyed the warmth of the sunshine and a faint breeze, I relaxed as I searched for birds, the only tension being in trying to approach as close as possible to....

....what birds there were without slipping and falling. This was one of four redshanks that were feeding as far out from the beach as possible and....

....this was a turnstone, the first of this species I've seen in some months. It was in the company of two others unlike....

....this lone grey heron - but then herons are rarely anything but solitary birds.

Walking the beach with the entirely voluntary stress of trying to coax a camera into taking good pictures at the extreme of its range is a perfect combination, relaxation but with a pleasant challenge. Add to that the urge to compose the pictures, for example so....

....one can catch two species both together and artistically arranged: this curlew and oystercatchers refused to oblige. So, it was a gentle wander which, right at the end, was made a little more exciting by....

....seeing this parade of red-breasted mergansers passing offshore, the males very busy displaying to the females.

Big Garden Bird Flop

I like to take part in the RSPB's bird surveys even though I have some reservations about the society. The Big Garden Birdwatch, carried out over this weekend, produces data which gives a snapshot of the state of Britain's garden birds, done in such a way that the many people who take part obtain both some satisfaction and a sense of achievement at having done something which might help to save some of our best-known birds.

I intended to do the survey - which simply consists of watching the birds in the garden for an hour, and counting up the largest number of each species seen at any one time - yesterday but ended up leaving it to today - and running into all sorts of problems as we have winds of 20mph gusting to over 40, conditions which the small birds do not enjoy. As a result, my count - 3 blue tits, 1 coal tit, 5 house sparrows, 1 dunnock, 1 robin, 4 chaffinches and 3 greenfinches - was totally under-representative of what is normal in in our garden.

At one point the greenfinches, a bird of which, recently, we've seen few, were well in the lead, and the house sparrows only caught up at the last minute. To have seen only one robin, very briefly, is also misleading: normally there are at least two in the garden, usually arguing, and we think we have at least four visiting us. Some birds common in our garden didn't appear at all: the blackbirds seem to have gone to bed for the day, 

We usually have a constant flow of coal tits onto the feeders but throughout the hour I only saw one, fairly briefly, and it was sheltering in the lee of a tree trunk even though I had just recharged the special small-tit sunflower seed dispenser in readiness for the count. As for only seeing three blue tits.... we often have that many hanging off one peanut feeder.

The chaffinches, at four, were over-represented relative to the others, though this was a bit of a miracle as this male spent much of his time chasing all the other chaffinches away.

Never mind. I've done my bit for citizen science. Now, please would this wretched wind die down and give us some peace.

Sanderling Dancing

On Dornoch beach yesterday afternoon I watched nine sanderlings practise their line dancing which was, of course, of no interest whatsoever to the local oystercatchers. As each wave came in, they scampered up the beach. As each wave slid back down the sand, they followed it.

We haven't seen any sanderling, the smallest of our local waders, for some weeks and, in this grim world of bird flu, were beginning to worry about them. They're my favourite wader, a joy watch, as full of energy as small children, never still for a moment, and the least shy, so one can often walk up to within a few metres of them without them worrying.

Monsieur Maselin

This is, for several reasons, a very special photograph. It was taken at the Mombasa Swimming Club by my father, someone who, to the best of my knowledge, never touched a camera, yet this shot, taken using a Brownie 127, which usually produced terrible pictures, is rather good. It may have been a fluke but I like to think that my father had an innate ability to compose a picture, something which has been passed down in our family.

I'm wearing my favourite clothes, khaki shorts and a matching bush jacket with plenty of pockets to keep things in. I guess I'm about ten, and I look as if I'm enjoying myself, which isn't surprising as I both liked and admired the man on the right. He's a Monsieur Maselin, who was the East Africa representative of the French national shipping line, Messageries Maritimes, for which my father's company was agents. M. Maselin was great fun, using his charms both on me and the ladies. Which rises a question, to which I have no answer: where are the ladies - because my mother, at least, must have been there - and where is my brother?

The location, at the Swimming Club, a place which we frequented because it was the nearest beach to our house, is one that my father did not like, so I think he took Monsieur Maselin there so he, as a fine athlete, could enjoy a swim.

I hugely admired M. Maselin, for he told some wonderful stories of his adventures. The one which sticks in my mind is of his journey out to East Africa from France. In those days, Messageries Maritimes ran three fine ocean liners, the Pierre Loti, Jean Laborde and Ferdinand de Lesseps, on the France to Madagascar, Mauritius and Reunion route, and one would have expected him to take passage on one of them. He didn't. He drove himself out to East Africa in a Citroen Deux Chevaux, crossing the Sahara and the jungles of Central Africa.

Vertebra

One of the joys of having time to wander along the beach, as we did this morning, is spotting interesting things which have been washed up - like this large vertebra found in the mess of seaweed and other flotsam on the upper beach. It's large, about 3" across, and it's soft, so not solid bone.

It seems likely that it's from the spine of the juvenile basking shark which was washed up a couple of hundred metres further up the beach, below Dunrobin Castle, last September. The picture shows it in mid-October when decomposition was advanced - much, I'm sure, to the enjoyment of the tourists visiting the castle.

Rock Doves

A flock of about a hundred 'rock doves' arrived on the coast just to the north of us in mid-October and, while there are definitely fewer of them today, they're still here. At first we assumed the attraction was the loose barley left after the field at the back of the beach was harvested but they now seem to spend less time in the field, preferring the rocks of the lower shore or, if they're disturbed....

....the rocks further out which are usually the exclusive domain of a group of cormorants, gulls and grey herons.

Rock doves are the ancestors of the city pigeon and most so-called 'rock doves' are hybridised with these but there are said to be some flocks in northern Scotland and the western and northern isles which are genetically pretty close to the original. The only way for an amateur to judge is that true rock dove flocks don't have much variation in colour from grey with the two-barred black wing marking - and the Dunrobin flock fits that bill.

So our population of what look like 'pigeons' might be something a little special.

Deserts

A desert, I used to tell my geography students, is a place which is deserted of humans, so the Earth's greatest desert is its five oceans, taken together, with the Antarctic and Sahara left far behind. Yet, when we think of deserts, what comes to mind is extreme heat and dryness and sand dunes....

....yet most of the hot desert areas I have seen - mainly in North Africa and Namibia - are almost sand-less rock deserts like the one above - and they're far fiercer, far more awe-inspiring, far more frightening than their sandy cousins.

In a sand desert, the 'erg' of the Sahara, there are lots of sand grains being blown around and rippled and sculpted into often magnificent dunes. In a rock desert, the Saharan 'reg', it's as if a giant has gone berserk, picking up great lumps of rock and throwing them around and, in so doing....

....carving the landscape into strange shapes which often look as if they've been sandpapered.

My most vivid experience of being close and intimate with a desert comes from the long hitch-hike I did from Algeria along the north coast of Africa to Egypt and then up the Nile to Luxor, and then back again. There were times when my companion and I were dumped at the roadside in the middle of the desert, sometimes to sit for many hours waiting for the next lift to come along. From this, I learned to love the desert, to be very afraid of it, and very respectful, but I was totally enamoured.

I doubt whether I'll ever experience a place like this again but I'm so, so glad I have.

All pictures in Namibia.

Littleferry Waders

The tide was coming in strongly when we arrived at Littleferry this morning, rapidly inundating the shingle banks which are the favoured retreat of Loch Fleet's wading birds. One end of the main bank appeared mainly to be populated by....

....a flock of perhaps sixty oystercatchers but a closer look revealed a few of two other species, the slightly larger ones being redshanks. Further along the same bank....

....we could see a group which was exclusively redshanks while....

...on the next bank the main species....

....was ring-necked plovers. However, again, they were mixed in with at least two other species. One was more redshanks but the other, much the same size as the redshanks, had a black beak so might, possibly, be dunlin.

I don't think we've ever before observed such a mixing of wader species, nor had I expected that, when it came to 'abandoning the sinking ship', each species didn't act together but left it to the individual to decide when to move to drier land.

There were other birds on the loch including merganser and, on the far side, a flock of eider, and we also had....

....a close encounter with a separate flock of oystercatchers, so Loch Fleet was a bit of a treat today.

Eagle or Buzzard?

We've been watching buzzards and eagles - both golden and white-tailed - for a quarter of a century and I still have trouble telling them apart when they're in silhouette high above, unless they flap their wings - buzzards have a faster wing-flap - or unless there's something up there with them to give a sense of scale, like a gull.

So when these two raptors wheeled above us for ten minutes this morning, didn't flap their wings once, and were ignored by the local crow and gull population....

....I didn't know whether we were looking at one of our increasingly rare local buzzard pairs, or whether we were enjoying the first good sighting of Sutherland golden eagles.

When I looked at the above image I think they were golden eagles but....

....this image looks more like a buzzard, an image which....

....I've managed to enhance so the under-wing pattern is visible.

I think they're buzzards but I'm still far from certain. Is there anyone out there who can help?

Thaw, Freeze, Freeze....

Yesterday's thaw produced compacted snow which froze last night to create sheets of 1"-thick ice in places like the graveyard car park and black ice anywhere that was wet. Conditions were so horrid that few ventured out this morning, the side roads in the village empty, and only one of the usual dog-walkers passing our door. Other than popping out to pick up a newspaper we stayed at home, not venturing out....

....for a walk along the coast until mid-afternoon when, even though the sun had been out all day and pushed the air temperature up to 4C, the paths were still solid blocks of ice. However, the low sun's warmth enabled us to....

....sit for a quarter of an hour on our favourite bench, look out across the calm waters of the Moray Firth and....

....watch the waders go about their daily business relatively unaffected by the cold - though I don't think I've ever seen an oystercatcher pushing its head quite so far under water to get its beak deep into the sand.

Inevitably there are casualties in this bitter weather. This little bird, probably a yellowhammer, was sitting on the path as we approached and made no real attempt to fly away, preferring to try to escape by hiding in the grass.

Snow, Thaw, Freeze, Ice, Rain, Sleet, Slush, Sun....

I think we're being punished for something as the weather is throwing everything at us. Tuesday's 3" of snow became yesterday's ice and slush, which then froze again before further snow arrived yesterday early evening, after which, overnight, we enjoyed sleet and rain and clear, frosty intervals - but not enough warm rain to melt the underlying ice. So slushy surfaces this morning often conceal a sheet of slick ice, ideal walking for the elderly. In fact, the safest place to walk....

....is along the beach where the sea has done what the rain cannot yet manage - melt the snow and ice.

The UK and, despite its position so far north, Scotland, is very bad at dealing with cold weather. We do have gritters - trucks which spray salt and grit across the roads - but there are too few to cope with our road network. So highways like the A9, above, get gritted, which means the slush collects in the gutters from where it's sprayed across pedestrians by the traffic which won't slow down, even when passing through a wee village like this one.

Off the main roads the surfaces are like ice rinks, and the pavements even worse. I wear metals studs in the soles of a pair of walking boots but I still slipped, and some of the people I spoke to who are far more infirm that I were not enjoying having to brave the conditions.

Wildlife is having to adapt too. The rooks are clearing snow from the rugby field then turning over the moss in a search for bugs to eat. They're so intent on their work that it's possible to approach quite close before they, grudgingly, move.

Somebody else doing some gardening was this redwing. They're usually out in the grassy fields probing for food but the snow and ice cover has driven them to try other things - like a bit of leaf-moving in our flowerbeds.

The rain and snow is forecast to clear overnight after which, just to add to the fun, we're promised a clear night with a frost.

Colourful Birds

The robins are very visible in the garden at the moment, partly because there are at least four of them and they spend more time chasing each other than feeding off the rich selection of food we offer, and partly because of their red bibs.

Few of the other birds, with the possible exception of the male chaffinches, are as colourful, and they don't compare with....

....many of the birds we encountered in Tanzania, the country boasting somewhere around 1,200 species including this little bee eater.

The bee eater and this brown hooded kingfisher were both near the swimming pool at one of the lodges where we stayed - the kingfisher is perched on the shower. They were waiting for us to go away so they could access the pool of muddy water under the shower. So many birds came to it....

....including this weaver bird, that I suggested to the managers that, if they made a proper bird bath, easily done with a barrow-load of concrete, they would probably attract a host of beautiful birds for the pleasure of their customers. They said they would but, sadly, we never returned so we don't know whether they did.

Startlingly coloured birds were everywhere. This lilac-breasted roller was in the middle of the bush and I was thrilled to see it as the species was one of the birds I remembered from my childhood.

It seems unfair that so many of Tanzania's small birds are brilliantly coloured while most of ours are rather.... dull.  Imagine repainting our birds, starting with our common house sparrows and doing them up in vibrant reds and yellows and oranges!