Along the Village Beach

From the bottom of the hill below our house a track on the other side of the A9 follows the Golspie Burn downstream to the sea, from which point it's possible to watch the birds which gather round its mouth. This morning, other than a few gulls, the usual hopeful semi-tame mallards, and some oystercatchers, there wasn't much to excite although this is one place where people say that the local otters can sometimes be seen.

From there the track leads on to a point where the beach in front of the village is accessible. Today, as usual, there was hardly a soul out on the sands and those that were all had a dog or two to exercise.

This morning I walked gently along the beach to the jetty at the far end, a structure which has seen better days and which will probably be replaced if and when the government gets round to re-developing Golspie's storm defences, which badly needs doing as a breach would result in the A9 being cut, with dire consequences for traffic trying to access Caithness and Orkney.

I walked almost to the end of the jetty but was stopped by two black-backed gulls and a juvenile shag, none of which wished to give way for me. I didn't mind: it was a beautiful warm, calm morning and I was in no hurry, so I leant against the rail with the sun on my face and relaxed.

A Lichen

Patches of this bright orange-yellow lichen are common on the small rocks and cobbles along the back of local beaches, above the high-tide line of winter storms. Perhaps because there are so few other bright colours at this time of year, they stand out.

I always hesitate to venture into the world of lichens as there are so many and they're so complex but this one appears to be Xanthoria parietina. According to Wikipedia, it has wide distribution and common names such as 'common orange lichen', 'yellow scale', 'maritime sunburst lichen' and 'shore lichen'.

While admiring its bright colours I had never bothered to pick up a specimen and take a close look at it but, last week, I did - and I was in for a surprise.

The lichen may look as if it has a uniform structure across its surface but a close look by the camera reveals something rather spectacular.

At this point I'm going to stop and marvel rather that go any further as I fear that I will stray into areas which are too complex for my ageing brain. All I would add is that I'm glad I looked: this lichen is simply and stunningly beautiful.

Mangoes

I may not be able to start a day without a banana but it isn't my favourite fruit. I think that for any child brought up in the tropics, that accolade must go to the mango. The trouble with mangoes is that there are hundreds of varieties and some are very much better than others. The mangoes in this picture came from the tree in our back garden in Jamaica but my memory of them is that, while the tree produced plenty of fruit, they weren't that good to eat.

A good mango should be juicy with a firm but not hard flesh, as little in the way of stringiness around its pip as possible - otherwise one spends hours afterwards getting the strings out of one's teeth - and a rich, full flavour.

My memory of East African mangoes is that the sweetest were the Lamu mango, but that the Bombay mango was also good. Mango trees grew everywhere: this picture shows me in the front garden of our house in Upanga Road, Dar-es-Salaam, where the drive to the front door circled round a magnificent, shady mango tree under which the ayahs would sit with their little white charges talking and laughing while the children played.

Eating a mango could be a messy business. If we had one for breakfast Ouma, our cook, would have diced the accessible flesh up so we could eat it using a spoon but the only way of dealing with the pip was to pick it up in our fingers and suck it - with mango juice running down our chins and onto our nice, clean tee-shirts. My mother, who was brought up in India and Burma, the home of the mango, always maintained that the best place to eat a mango was in the bath.

The tree itself has many uses. Being slow-growing it produces a heavy, hard wood one of whose uses is in making the hulls of the ngalowas that are the elegant local fishing boats along the East African coast.

Turnstone Migrations

We see turnstones along the shore at odd times of the year and late March to April is one of them. It appears therefore that all 'our' turnstones are migrating but this is complicated by our seeing two quite distinct populations. Those breeding in Greenland and arctic Canada winter in Britain and Ireland and fly north for the summer while the Scandinavian population passes through Britain on its way south to winter along the coast of West Africa.

The ones we saw on Saturday are therefore most probably the Canadian/Greenland population as they are on the move earlier, in April/May, while the Scandinavian turnstones, which have to come up from Africa, won't reach here on their way north until July/August. There's a map which clarifies these movements on the BTO website here.

When we see them they are usually in small flocks of half-a-dozen or so. Saturday's group numbered five, which is rather fewer than the nine we saw on 1st April 2022.

British 'Summer' Time

We woke on the first day of British 'Summer' Time to find ice on the birdbaths following a night during which the air temperature fell below zero and, as we set off to buy some eggs....

....the snow came, big, 1" diameter flakes drifting down as we worked our way up the side of the Golspie Burn to the crofting community of Backies where, to our delight, the weather....

....hadn't put the hens off the lay. We love these eggs: they're a warm brown on the outside, a good size - there's a pound coin to the right for scale - they have gloriously yellow yokes, the boxes are re-used ones and, at £1.80 a half-dozen, they seem good value for genuinely very widely free-range eggs.

It continues to snow and the forecast is for sub-zero temperatures again overnight.

Solitude

Yesterday we spent a couple of hours wandering along this beach, which is a ten-minute drive from our house. In that time we saw two other people and four dogs, and managed to find two places where we could sit quietly and enjoy listening to the silence and the wash of the waves.

In this busy, crowded land we are very aware of our good fortune in having access to such solitude.

Aurora

We were given plenty of warning - this is from the aurora info.eu website here - and....

....the heavens duly performed through the night, but by the time I saw it....

....the sky was broken up by lozenges of low, dark cloud and the aurora's colours were muted by high haze.

I also have to face the fact that my camera struggles with this sort of photography: it's a great all-rounder but night photography does rather defeat it.

That said, the aurora was the best we've seen since coming to Golspie, with searchlights of green light reaching high into the sky and various pinks visible to the naked eye. And more is forecast over the next couple of days.

Waders' Nesting

Most of the waders which have remained along our shores though the winter gathered in small flocks which, as spring comes towards us, have begun to break up into pairs - though who goes with whom is a matter of hot, and in the case of the oystercatchers, very noisy debate.

While some waders change their plumage with the seasons, birds like the oystercatchers don't, though there is a noticeable brightening of the colours in beak and legs, and a fresh sharpness about the black and white of their feathers.

Another of the waders I watched along the beach to the north of Golspie this morning were pairs of ringed plovers.  Like the oystercatchers, they've been here all winter but not in as large numbers. 

Oystercatchers and ringed plovers share a determination to breed along the back of the beaches both to north and south of the village and....

....I don't look forward to watching these nesting efforts. The nests are usually in the pebbles and coarse vegetation just above the high-tide mark, and over the past three summers we've seen nest after nest abandoned, despite huge efforts by the parents, because of disturbance by humans and, in particular, their dogs, and because there is a very active collection of crows which scavenge the tideline.

The other common waders along the beaches, the curlews and redshanks, nest inland, the former in rough grasslands, moorlands or bogs and the latter in saltmarshes, flood meadows and lake margins. They may not suffer as much from disturbance by walkers and dogs but agricultural improvement of upland farmland and moorland, and widespread drainage, have caused some catastrophic population declines.

A Human World

It's very noticeable when we walk in the woods that surround Golspie that, the closer we come to buildings where people live, the greater the level and variety of bird song, so it wasn't with any surprise that I read in a recent New Scientist that New York contains more species than Yosemite National Park and that Australian cities shelter more endangered species per square kilometre than non-urban areas. It's partly that many inhabitants of our built environment like seeing wildlife in their midst so encourage them, and partly because some species of wildlife, whether we like them or not, have learned to exploit an opportunity - foxes are an example - and so fare far better in inclement weather.

Our garden is probably a good example of the consequences of what's happening. We put out seeds, peanuts and fat throughout the year with the result that those species which are prepared to risk close encounters with the resident humans benefit the most. In our case this is three species of tit, house sparrows, chaffinches, dunnocks, blackbirds and jackdaws. Of these, the one which has done best must be the blue tit, of which we can have upwards of half-a-dozen on the feeders at any one time.

Birds that are less confident about risking proximity with humans therefore suffer so, for example, song thrushes are losing out to blackbirds. As a result, humans are influencing the balance of species in and around their habitation, with wider consequences. For example, at this time of year the herring gulls are beginning to nest on the town's roofs, and can become very aggressive both in finding food - such as tourists' fish-and-chips - and in defending their young when they leave the nest. However, what the gulls have exploited has made them hugely successful - residents admit that we have far too many gulls so weren't too sad when they read that they were suffering from bird flu.

As we develop more and more of our environment to our needs so more and more wild species have to make a choice: learn to live with humans or risk a drastic drop in the survival chances of your species.

Wagtails

We woke this morning to a clearing sky and a temperature already over 10C, a dizzy height we haven't seen in ages, and by the time we set out on our walk along the coast path towards Dunrobin Castle....

....the sun was so hot on the ploughed field in the Dairy Park that it was steaming.

The sea was as still as the proverbial millpond, the sun coming and going....

....as high clouds moved across the sky. The disturbance in the water towards the bottom left of this picture is....

....a flock of over fifty eider, at times diving to feed, at times quarrelling amongst themselves as they sorted out their mates.

Spring should come quickly now with the lengthening days, and we'll see more and more of the annual returners from their winter quarters. This morning we had a first sighting of a grey wagtail in its usual place along the Golspie Burn and we also spotted....

....a pair of pied wagtails along the shore, though we did see a lone one of these a few weeks ago.

Raptors at Balblair Woods

We drove to Balblair Woods this morning on the outside chance of seeing an osprey. Our earliest sighting in past years has been around 6th April so we were being optimistic, and certainly the one nest which we've found - of the three reputed to be in the woods - looked very empty, so....

....we walked on to the NatureScot bird hide overlooking Loch Fleet where a high tide had pushed the waders and ducks close enough to identify most of the species.

Shelduck - left foreground - are on Loch Fleet in bigger numbers than we've seen before, and there's no shortage of oystercatchers, redshanks and curlew - the larger, grey bird in this picture.  In addition to the shelduck, there were four other species of duck: teal, widgeon, goldeneye and a single pair of mallard. However, what I was really anxious to find were the bar-tailed godwits which are very like curlews but smaller, and....

....have a slightly up-curved bill. They were difficult to identify because most of the birds were sleeping with their heads tucked into the feathers but the three birds at left in this picture are almost certainly godwits, with one of them having its bill on show.

The noticeboard in the hide recorded the recent sighting of a hen harrier, a bird we've not seen here, so as we walked back to the car we were watching out for it and the ospreys when we heard a raptor calling above us.

Momentarily I thought it might be an osprey but it turned out to be a red kite, soaring over the fields between the woods and Beinn Bhraggie with its last remnants of the recent snow.

The Waves

I sit on the bench that overlooks the winter-grey waters of the Moray Firth watching an endless procession of waves break upon a shingle beach, each one in its way....

....unique, each bouncing and rearing as if urgent to throw itself to destruction upon the beach. I watch and hear the roar and bubble as they break and the hiss and rattle of their retreat, and wonder how many waves over the years I have seen break onto how many beaches, remembering....

....the best - like here, Nyali beach in the summer of 1957, a fleeting moment of happiness captured in a photograph.

Vole

This is our main bird seed feeding area, designed to offer protection from the weather and prevent larger birds stealing the food, and good visibility for us as it's only a few feet from the kitchen. It's designed for birds but recently....

....something else has been enjoying the almost unlimited food supply.

When I spotted it I thought it was a mouse but now I'm certain it's a vole, perhaps a field vole rather than a bank vole.

At first it used to scamper out from under the feeder, dash to where the food lay, grab something, and retreat back under the feeder. Now it's become much bolder, spending....

....long, leisurely minutes working its way through a hearty meal.

Loch Fleet and Snow

The sun rose this morning on a landscape transformed by blue skies and lingering snow: this is Loch Fleet at low tide with Beinn Bhraggie rising behind it. While I would have preferred temperatures overnight which would have cleared the snow, these really are....

....the sort of scenes for which one lives in Scotland. However, like everything in this country, there's a darker side as....

....high cloud obscured the sun and turned the entrance to the loch into shades of creamy-ochre and grey.

On the beach the level of the last high tide was clearly delineated, the area below it utterly devoid of anything washed up other than knots of seaweed, bivalve shells - mostly mussels from the eiders' feeding activities - and the remains of a few sea potatoes.

On the living side, we saw two seals, a small flock of what might have been sanderlings flying in close formation, a dozen oystercatchers, two curlews, a few gulls, a shag, and, out to sea, a couple of dozen eider.

I worry about this dearth of wildlife. I know we've only been here three years or so but in that time we've seen a dire fall-off in the wildlife numbers along the coastlines. Yes, we know that some species have been devastated by avian flu but why have the numbers of almost all species dropped off - with a few notable exceptions like the oystercatchers?

March Snow

Winter is loath to loose its grip, with a hard frost in the early part of last night followed by a steady dump of snow, so we woke to a transformed landscape. By the time we were out there was somewhere over an inch of very powdery snow which made walking not unpleasant as long as we wore our snow grips, so we wandered gently along the front through occasional further flurries.

The snow's very pretty but, to be honest, I think we're ready for a change. Nature certainly is, with green shoots appearing from the bulbs and along the branches of shrubs, and the birds noisy with their songs in the mornings - even if it is snowing.

For some, the snow is a bit of a nuisance. The dipper pair were active along the burn but struggled to claim their usual vantage points on top of the boulders.

Temperatures are forecast to rise over the next few days and the next precipitation is supposed to be rain. We'll be complaining about that too when it comes.