A Golden Sea

It is as if a golden sea is breaking against the rocky island of Bheinn Bhraggie, a sea in which....

....the ordinary creatures seem lost, overwhelmed by the magnificent flowering of this year's gorse. It has even attracted a bird we feared we might have lost, as we've not seen....

....a stonechat in several months, and they're usually a feature of our winters, often found in pairs on the links at places like Littleferry.

One species is making a vain attempt to match the gorse: this is the first tormentil of the season, an unusual flower in that it has only four petals but also because we often find it in exposed places high in the hills, places where gorse doesn't venture.

The Same Old....

We keep going to the same old places. We could take the car to somewhere different, somewhere to explore, somewhere that has some new varieties of wildlife, but we don't. We keep going to places like Littleferry, finding our enjoyment less in spotting what is new than in welcoming back old friends, some of which we may not have seen in a long time, like....

....this wader which is, I think, a turnstone. It was one of a small flock, but I don't think that either of the two species....

....performing aerobatics at the mouth of Loch Fleet were turnstones. The five in the foreground are oystercatchers and the larger group may be ringed plovers.

It was good to see more birds than we've seen in some time, and particularly heartening to spot these two oystercatchers which ran along the beach in front of us, then stopped and looked back, and then ran some more.... a sure sign that they had a nest at the top of the beach.

Seeing a dead fish washed up by the tide may not sound very exciting but we haven't seen one in a very long time, concluding that the Dornoch Firth must be almost depleted of fish, so we took this corpse as a positive sign.

Walking back along the links we spotted a couple of large caterpillars and, in the same old place as last year....

....the same old pink and white bluebells.

Rabbits, Rabbits, Rabbits

Almost every time we walk up the forestry track that passes our house we see rabbits in the lowest of the farmer's fields. Usually it's two or three sitting rather warily at the main entrance to the warren that's out in the middle of the field but the other evening we counted....

....no less than ten.

While I'm sure the farmer isn't too thrilled, as he keeps this field for the benefit of his sheep, we're very happy to see one warren, at least, returning to something approaching old population numbers - by which I mean before myxomatosis.

Birdsong

The lands around our house are filled with bird song, the greatest concentrations of noise being where woodland meets open space, where we're hearing....

....yellowhammers perched on spruce shoots which protrude above the flower-covered gorse patches this bird so favours.

The most common birdsong is that of the robin, the wren, the chaffinch and the warblers. This is a chiffchaff, and this is the same bird seen....

....from an even more undignified angle.

I confess that I can only easily tell the difference between chiffchaff and....

....willow warbler by their song. While this willow warbler was on the margins of the forestry....

....this one was singing from a tree immediately opposite our front door.

While it is wonderful to be able to see these birds, the explosion of leaves in the deciduous trees makes finding them increasingly difficult, and this is where the Merlin app has been a game changer because now, if we can't see the bird, at least we can identify it by its song.

The New Boss

No self-respecting garden should be without one.

I'm referring, of course, to a resident robin, a boss robin, of which, recently, we've been lacking. Time was, in a previous house, we had more robins squabbling in the garden than we could cope with but, in our new house, while the front garden did seem to have visits from an occasional robin, the back didn't have one at all.

Happily, the other day the situation was rectified by the arrival of this chap. He quickly made himself at home and, within a day or two, was seen chasing a rival out of his property.

He's a bit odd in some ways. For a start, he seems to spend most of his time on the ground, crouching. I thought that one explanation might be that he only had one leg but he's definitely got two. And he moves around on the ground a bit like a dunnock, quite fast, skulking under bushes and behind rocks, and seeming to avoid flying. A bad experience with a sparrowhawk might explain this.

He has one weakness: he loves the fat cakes we put out. The only other birds that like them as much as he does are Mr and Mrs Blackbird, whom we suspect are nesting in the gorse bush at the bottom of the garden.

It's such a relief that we have our own robin. A garden without one is.... unthinkable.

Loch Lunndhaidh

Despite the miserable weather being brought in by a stiff and cold easterly wind I walked up the track towards Loch Lunndhaidh this morning in the vain hope of seeing an osprey fishing its grey waters but instead had the pleasure of hearing the first cuckoo of the year calling in the forestry below the Bheinn Bhraggie summit. Appropriately, the next 'first' of this walk was....

....a lone cuckoo flower growing in a ditch but....

....as the sky cleared a little I was soon finding more 'firsts', including....

....lousewort....

....the first flowers of a bird's-foot trefoil....

....round-leaved sundew....

....heath milkwort....

....and masses more dog violets.

I was amazed, but thrilled, at finding so many wildflowers in bloom so early on high moorland and in such a grey, cold environment, far more of a variety than are currently appearing along the coastline.

I found the loch deserted of ospreys and, after the recent mini-drought, very low but, having been a little wary of taking on a relatively long walk, pleased that I had made it this far feeling I could have gone further.

More 'Firsts'

In Speckled Wood on a sunny walk down to the village this morning we came across the first....

....speckled woods of the year, active only when the sun was out. There were more, later, when we passed....

....Roe Corner, which lived up to its name as a young roe deer dashed across the path and into the forestry. The speckled woods were joined by several white butterflies, some of which may have been orange tips as we saw one male skipping around above the dead bracken.

There were other 'firsts' today, which included this campion and, as we were sitting up in bed this morning enjoying our tea, a swallow which swooped just in front of the house. I've had other sightings in the last ten days which might have been swallows or martins but this was the first where there was absolutely no doubt.

The Rooks' Party

Over the winter we've hardly seen a rook in the garden, though we could hear them in the large rookery they've built high in the pines on the north side of the village. Then, as spring came along, they began to appear at our bird bath - which was fine by me as no animal should be refused water. However, things began to get a bit out-of-control when....

....the first rook invited his friends over to play a game - "Who Can Get The Coconut" - the coconut being a half shell filled with highly-nutritious fat hung in a tree for the small birds, particularly the tit family.

Several times, in their efforts to reach it, the rooks knocked it down, and I put it up again, employing more and more devious ways of preventing them reaching it - but they kept trying, and I kept thinking I'd won.

I hadn't, of course. In the end one of them got to it and succeeded in detaching it so it fell to the ground, unfortunately when I wasn't around. By the time I rescued it, it was empty.

Watching them made me appreciate what intelligent birds they are, and how persistent they can be. I had to admire them - but that doesn't mean I have to like them.

Rabbit News

The farmer keeps some rather good-looking sheep in the field just up the track from us, grazing quite unconcernedly with an increasingly large number of rabbits. Surprisingly, while some of the rabbits' burrows are around the edges of the fields under cover of the hedges, some are right out in the middle. Even more surprisingly, several of the rabbits occupying them....

....have patches of white fur around the front part of their bodies. This can't be a helpful evolutionary development when, high above, there are....

....buzzards wheeling but maybe the rabbits are getting away with it because, at the moment, there seems only to be one pair of the raptors in our skies.

There are definitely more rabbits in the fields these days but, unfortunately, this means that more of them are venturing into our road and eating our garden plants. One neighbour has just laid a very fine turf lawn which is much appreciated by the rabbits.

The Smallest Things

Sometimes the smallest things can give great pleasure. For example, our current hunt for Nature's 'firsts' of the year - first primrose in flower, first chiffchaff song, and so on - has produced some memorably joyous moments, as today at Littleferry when we found, on the links, the first....

....wild pansy flower, a tiny splash of colour in an otherwise drab landscape. Soon, there will be thousands in flower and we'll hardly take any notice of them.

It was just as well we found the pansy because, despite some impressively grey cumulus just inland, a pleasant walk in the sun produced nothing else new, though....

....the local eider had gathered just offshore from the mouth of Loch Fleet to perform their annual mating rituals.

Elsewhere there was another 'first' when we spotted cowslips in flower below the path from the village up to the Council offices, a plant which we've found nowhere else locally so suspect that it was introduced.

Otherwise, Spring creeps up on us slowly. Of the butterfly world we have seen only three species so far, tortoiseshell, peacock - seen here on a cultivated heather in flower in our garden today - and a white of indeterminate species.

Three Deserts

At first glance this must seem one of the most Godforsaken places on our planet. It's near Hentie's Bay in Namibia, and it's one of those rare interfaces of a searingly hot land desert with a marine desert, beneath a desert sky.

By 'desert' here I mean a deserted place, a place where there are no, or very, very few humans. However, if one were to include all living creatures, one of the three, the South Atlantic Ocean, is....

....far from deserted, for there is an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich waters from the Benguela current which support a wealth of life, including the seals which come ashore to breed along its beaches.

A few creatures are at home in this land desert, including the tok-tokkie beetle and the Namib sand-diver lizard (above), the latter surviving the heat by burrowing under the sand to cooler depths or, if it has to stand on hot sand, alternating feet, holding two up to cool in the air.

Humans have few reasons to venture into this barren wasteland but the quest for minerals has been one, the coast becoming famous for its diamonds, and another is to exploit.... 

....the abundant marine life found in its rich Atlantic waters.

There is another sort of human which visits - the modern tourist. We passed through on our way from Etendeka to Swakopmund in 2009, and stopped to look in awe at such an apparently lifeless but strangely beautiful place.