Africa's Game

My experience of game parks started young, in the early 1950s, when our family would drive up from Mombasa to Tsavo East national park and spend a day watching herds of elephants and buffalo, and cantankerous rhinos and many other species, roaming across miles of African bush.

I didn't return to an African game park until 2009 when, with some trepidation, for we had such good memories of Africa and didn't want them spoiled, we decided to take a touristy holiday in Namibia. Our first stop was a shock, for the animals....

....were, effectively, caged. Our first sight was of a pair of cheetah pacing up and down high wire barriers. The last cheetah I had seen were a pair in Nairobi national park.

Photos such as this one were only possible because this leopard, like the cheetah, was caged; more, look closely and a radio tag is visible round his neck so he could be easily found and shown off to the tourists.

Happily, the next camp we visited, Etendeka, was everything we'd hoped for and more. Here we walked through the bush in close proximity to big game - this picture shows us looking for a rhino which, from the freshness of its dung, had passed through this little valley only a few minutes before.

The game in many of the parks in Africa has been depleted by poaching. Where there is still game to be watched, it is pressurised by masses of tourist minibuses jostling to give their passengers a good photographic angle. I feel privileged to have seen Africa's game at a time when, despite already huge losses to indiscriminate hunting, it could still be seen in large numbers, roaming free.

Redshanks Return

The forecasters promised us a hard frost and the night's clear skies and breathless winds duly delivered, with temperatures in the centre of the village dropping to -6C. Happily, conditions underfoot weren't too bad so I managed to walk....

....along the ancient trackway which follows the coast northwards to Wick, passing between Dunrobin Castle and the sea a mile from the village.

Usually this section of beach is busy with birds but something - perhaps the temperature - kept them away so, other than a few gulls, a crow or two, the usual flock of rock doves, a flock of about twenty eider half-a-mile offshore, and....

....this lone cormorant, the only birds of interest were....

....a half-a-dozen redshanks.

We haven't seen redshanks for weeks so this sighting was welcome, even though they didn't hang around long enough for me to be able to practise my stalking skills.

The Signpost

This signpost stands in the hills beyond our house, at the intersection of two old trackways. From it there are wide views south across Loch Fleet and the Moray Firth towards Easter Ross.

It looks as if it has long belonged there, as if it has stood there for ever but....

....a closer inspection proves that it is of relatively recent origin, with a strange mixture of distances in kilometres and miles - though the latter might be read as metres.

The hills around it used to be wild moorland where a herd of red deer grazed but this is now....

....fenced and mainly coniferous forestry with some token plantings of deciduous trees.

Despite this loss of wilderness, I love being in high places like this, places where the wind blows free and the views are for miles. The trouble is that my energy levels have fallen to the extent that I can now only just reach that signpost before I have to turn back. Gone are the days when we used to walk on far enough to reach open moorland, and to the abandoned clachan of Loch Lunndaidh.

A Decision

Most people can point to moments in their life when they made a decisions which deeply affected their future, but it's not often that there is a picture of such an occasion. This is one of the exceptions.

Early in our time in Rhodesia, in 1967, we were driven out to St Faith's, a very small secondary school in the bush, the nearest big town being Rusape. The school had only recently come in to existence, very much against the wishes of the Rhodesia government, and was located in what was called a 'reserve', an area of, usually very poor, very overcrowded agricultural land designated for the exclusive use of Africans.

Very soon after arriving in Rhodesia, where we had a three-year contract to teach at a much bigger African secondary school, we realised that our school was a very unhappy place, and we were keen to escape. Hearing of this, the headmaster of St Faith's, Blair Murray (second from right) invited us to visit his school, where we were shown this house, under construction, which would be ours if we moved school at the end of that first term.

We loved the place.  I also knew Blair from my time at Bernard Mizeki in 1963, and liked and respected him. There was someone else there I knew and loved from '63, Wilf Stringer, standing in front of Mrs MW's blue umbrella.

We wrestled with the decision. We desperately wanted to move but, in the end, decided to stay at Bernard Mizeki because we had signed a three-year contract, and it was against our principles to break it.

We did, however, come away from that first visit to St Faith's with two mementos of that rather wet day....

....two kittens. This one is Nangatanga, relaxing in Mrs MW's sewing basket.

Birds in the Snow

The snow fell in instalments over the past five days, partially thawing during the day but then freezing again overnight, no fun at all....

....for the birds, a few of which are beginning to return to our back garden. We've seen....

....chaffinches, blackbirds and....

....coal tits, but only a very few, a pale shadow of the squabbling masses we had feeding during the spring and early summer. One of the problems may be a sparrowhawk which zooms along the line of gardens in the hope of catching the birds off guard.

That the birds are returning is good news but we have to be very grateful to this character, our resident robin, for sticking with us and giving us endless amusement. Today he was at the pond for a drink, we assumed....

....but wrongly. He was there for a bath.  Brrrr!

More Snow

Before sunrise we could see that the Cefas Endeavour, which has been anchored out in the Firth since Sunday - see earlier post here - had been joined by another ship, possibly the one we saw on Sunday and couldn't identify as this one also did not show on the AIS/MT website. I think it's one of the Scottish Fisheries Protection vessels, very likely the Jura.

When the sun finally broke through the low cloud over the sea we could see that the rooftops of the houses below us had a new accumulation of snow, somewhere between one and two inches deep; and when we went out we could see that.... 

....Highland Council's limited fleet of gritters was struggling to clear the roads - this one is usually gritted quite early as it leads to the Council's offices.

One of the joys of a good fall of snow is walking away from human habitation until one comes to the less-frequented areas, listening to the crunch, crunch of each step and finding....

....the tracks of the animals which have passed since the last snow fell, some easy to identify - like this one, which is a rabbit - and some....

....much more difficult. These tiny tracks may be a stoat.

I was enjoying the scenery and the quiet when I was passed by a young man who asked whether this track would take him up to the summit of Beinn Bhraggie. I told him it would but warned him that the last section, up a steep and very rough path, would be very difficult in these conditions.

The Year's First Snow

I spent most of Thursday lunchtime sitting on this veranda in the sun, watching bumblebees visit the verbena, which is still in boisterous flower, and enjoying a leisurely lunch - not expecting the extent to which the temperature would plummet over the weekend, and the northwesterly wind which would bring us the first light snowshowers of the coming winter.

Snow is very pretty when it first falls, particularly when the sun shines low across it, but struggling into several layers of clothing to walk down to the village shops brings home the realities of winter life, not least the need to....

....wear our boots into which we've screwed metal studs to give us some grip on icy pavements.

I've always maintained that humankind was never designed for life in high latitudes, that we are a savanna animal which used beaches to expand around the Earth, and that we should have confined that expansion to the warm places, like this gentle beach in Tanzania.

There's so much in this picture which I love. The man riding his bicycle along the bottom of the beach where the sand is hard. The ngalowa fishing boats anchored just offshore. The fisherfolk's houses nestling in the shadowed shade of coconut palm and casuarina. The high tide lines along the beach which I once walked each morning to see what had been washed ashore overnight. The blue skies and - though you can't see them - the light breeze and balmy temperatures.

I'd love to go back, if only for one more time.

Three Ships in the Firth

I've been around ships all my life - in fact, one of the most important events of my early existence was that the kitten I was given at the age of about three was the son of the ship's cat on the Clan MacKeller - so one of the joys of living in Kilchoan, looking out across the Sound of Mull, was the wealth of ships of all sorts that sailed past.

By comparison, where we now live, despite its panoramic view out across the North Sea, is very limited in sightings of ships so....

....I am always quite excited when a ship does appear, as this one did yesterday evening. A quick check on the AIS/MT website revealed that she was the Cefas Endeavour, a UK-registered fisheries research vessel operated by the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas), a British government agency. She's based in Lowestoft and was built in Scotland, at the Ferguson shipyard on the Clyde.

It was good to see her but the morning was made even more remarkable when two other ships emerged with the dawn light. On the left is a ship I'd seen before, the Esvagt Alba, but the one on the horizon remains a mystery - she was not marked on the AIS/MT map.

The Esvagt Alba left first, the Cefas Endeavour seemingly in no hurry to move, still being at anchor at ten this morning.

A Selection of Fungi

It's been a poor year here for fungi so the occasional 'special' has been very welcome - up to a point, that point being my aversion to spending hours trying to identify them. The best I can do with this one, found on the banks of Loch Lochy, is that it's a bracket, a polypore, possibly a birch polypore.

This little collection looks like one of the amanitas, a family which includes fly agaric and the panthercap. To get a better identification I would have had to look at their stems but the fungi were high up on an inaccessible bank.

It's a pleasure when, out for a walk, one stumbles across something which has such rich colour. I have no idea what it is, other than it's a gill, but I'm grateful to it for cheering up an otherwise dull walk.

On the subject of cheering up, this one wins the prize. It was found in a Scots pine plantation, all by itself, happily growing on pine needles - but Mrs MW had passed the spot only two days before, and noticed nothing, so this is a fast grower.

It's a pore of some sort, a bolete, perhaps a bay bolete, the 'bay' referring to its colour rather than a geographical feature.

What is interesting is the strange growth to the upper right in this picture. The only explanation I can think of is that the fungus had to grow round a stick which has subsequently broken away.

A Snowy Forecast

This was the view from our balcony at a quarter to eight this morning looking out across the Moray Firth, a classic 'red sky warning' for those shepherds who don't have the internet. And it looks as if it's right, because while by ten this morning it was warm enough for me to sit on one of my benches and watch the traffic hurtle down the A9, that is all set to change....

....the weather getting colder and colder from lunch time today, so by Tuesday lunchtime we're forecast a maximum of 3C with the wind round in the north bringing snow showers from the Arctic into our part of Scotland.

As if to ensure that the point had been well made, this morning's sunrise process went on for some time - the picture above was taken at ten to eight, the sun finally breaking the horizon....

....at a quarter past eight.

It really has been a remarkably warm November, so I suppose we now have to pay for it.

Molehill with a View

I remember as a boy at my prep school, Glengorse, very much disapproving of one of the jobs the school groundsman had to do - trap the moles whose molehills spoiled the extensive ornamental lawns round the main buildings. This he did with rather vicious steel spring traps. On the other hand, I did approve of the fact that he kept his victims' skins and made them into waistcoats.

The molehill in this picture has just appeared in an area of strimmed grass by the road up to the Council offices, and it intrigues me, because, as far as I can see, there are no other molehills in the area, so the mole who made it must have travelled some distance with his very poor eyesight and short legs to find a....

....new territory.

He's chosen his new home well, for it has a fine view out across the A9 and the Inverness to Wick railway to the Moray Firth, much the same view as we have.

I do hope he's happy in his new home, and that no-one from the Council comes after him with a steel mole trap.

Leaves

For the last few days we've been enjoying some of the UK's best weather, clear days of sunshine followed by cool, starry nights, with only occasional cloudy spells - inevitably some when an aurora is visible! Most of the leaves of the deciduous trees have now fallen, accumulating....

....in brittle piles along the paths and roadsides, in places to some depth. I'm not too old to enjoy doing what I well remember from when I was a schoolboy - deliberately wading through them, kicking the leaves aside, enjoying both the feel of it and the sound.

With the branches now much barer it's easier to see the birds. This, if you can find it, is a tree creeper, a bird which must win first prize for camouflage. I was fortunate to see it, and able to spend a few minutes as it....

 ....worked its way up a Scot's pine.

In the sunshine it's warm enough for me to enjoy my favourite pastime, sitting on a bench watching the world go by. I consider this to be one of the few perks of being old, though it is a bit depressing when, after having sat on this bench overlooking the A9 for almost half an hour, I realised I hadn't seen a single bird in the uncut areas between the paths and the road, even though there were masses of seeds available from a variety of plants.

A Damp Morning at Loch Fleet

The falling tide at the mouth of Loch Fleet this morning should have attracted plenty of waders but all we saw was a....

....single curlew, irritated by our approach, and, on the far side of the channel, a line of cormorants drying and preening themselves. 

We walked northeast along the beach which borders the National Nature Reserve, again seeing very little except discarded mollusc shells and balls of weed. The days when we would find dead fish and rays, jellyfish and starfish, seem to be over. And it wasn't much better when we returned to the car along one of the many paths that criss-cross the links, where all we could find was....

....a few fungi - blackening wax caps are doing well - and the last of....

....summer's flowers, including this lonely Scottish bluebell.