Neap Tide at Littleferry

This is the entrance to Loch Fleet, seen this morning at low tide with the tides at neaps - that is, there is the smallest height difference between low and high tides in the cycle; and....

....this is a view from the beach looking back towards the Loch Fleet entrance, with shingle exposed where the waves have removed the sand.

There were relatively few birds working the exposed beach, calm, shallow waters, and seaweed-covered rocks: a few redshanks (pictured), a good number of oystercatchers, cormorants and eider, a handful of guillemots - always a relief to see some of them - various seagulls, and....

....a dozen of my favourite wader, the always-busy little sanderling.

At the back of the beach, just above the highest tide line, we had the pleasure of finding, in amongst the last hangers-on from summer, several sea rocket plants in full bloom.

Sunrise & Snow

The sunrise this morning, as seen from our bedroom window, was just after 7.31, the first time this autumn we've seen the sun break the horizon rather than rise behind the trees. As we move into winter the sun will be rising progressively further to the south, to the right in this picture.

Meanwhile, in Lochaber, on the other side of the Highlands, the snow which first began to lie on Saturday is beginning to accumulate. This is Aonach Mor, seen from Roy Bridge.

Many thanks to RLH for the Lochaber picture.

Jamaica Thoughts

Our thoughts are with the Jamaicans who are facing the wrath of a warming world in the form of vicious hurricane Melissa. Just over fifty years ago we were living in Jamaica on a two-year contract, enjoying its beaches if not the teaching. In the brief time we were there we had a few....

....tropical storms but only one serious hurricane alert, when we cut short a holiday along the coast to the east of Kingston to hurry home and make preparations - picture shows a heavy sea coming onto the elongated spit on which Kingston's international airport and the old town of Port Royal stand, an area which is right in the path of Melissa.

Spurred on by a national broadcast by the prime minister Michael Manley in which he urged us to make full preparations for the emergency, these being published once a year in the Gleaner, Jamaica's main newspaper. So we filled the bath with water, managed to manoeuvre our Morris 1100 car onto our small veranda, and secured everything that might move - like the dustbin in the picture which looks innocent enough here but is no fun if travelling at a hundred miles an hour.

In the event the hurricane was downgraded to a tropical storm, so we endured some strong winds and heavy rain and enjoyed three days off school.

We pray that Melissa isn't as bad as forecast and that the country manages to survive without a disaster; and is then given as much assistance as possible in its recovery.

Late Bloomers

Winter, in the form of Thursday's first hard ground frost and some bitterly cold northerly winds yesterday, may have arrived but everywhere there are still plenty of reminders of a fading  summer. This self heal was growing quite happily in the coarse gravel at the side of one of the forestry tracks with no companion to keep it company.

The heathers are hanging on grimly, it seems to me, much later in the year than usual, and this is particularly true of the cross-leaved heaths which - according to my memory anyway - are usually the first of the heathers to disappear.

Some devil's-bit scabious are still in flower but all of them are the usual lilac colour, so this will have been the first year I've not seen either of the pink or white variants.

In the places I wander there's been a significant lack of blueberries. There's an area in the coniferous plantation at the back of our house which is usually good for collecting these berries but this year they are absent - it took some minutes' searching to find this one, wizened berry.

The best evidence of a prolonged warm summer comes from the four sunflowers Mrs MW insisted on planting in the spring - each year I regularly tell her she's wasting her time - which have withstood the recent gales and the first frost to continue cheerfully flowering against our fence.

Then, in amongst all the many flowering species which are giving up for the winter, we find this, a gorse which is just coming into flower. I love the idea that this prickly and otherwise generally unlikeable and very invasive plant will be giving us brilliant splashes of egg-yolk yellow in our hedgerows throughout the bitter months to come.

Ships in the Firth

Almost every morning recently we've been able to sit up in bed drinking our tea while we enjoy a colourful sunrise across the Moray Firth. Sadly, the regular gap in the clouds to the southeast which has allowed this doesn't last long.

This is today''s sunrise. It's a bit different from the others in that there are the lights of a ship visible which, along with another....

....further out, is sheltering from Storm Benjamin - not that this storm, the second of the winter, seems too bad.

The nearer of the two ships is the Esvagt Alba, a Danish 'work vessel' which we've seen sheltering here a couple of times before while....

....the more distant ship is the Gaastborg, a Dutch general cargo boat.

I love watching ships. They call to mind the many ships I have travelled on and the many places, each with their new and exciting opportunities, to which they have borne me.

Washed Up

One of the joys of a good beach is wandering along its tideline looking for interesting things that have been washed up. The beaches to the north and south of Golspie aren't great for this as they tend to have very little for the beachcomber outside a fairly limited range of common casualties: jellyfish - though we've had few of those this summer - mussel and cockle shells, Arctica, otter and razor shells are examples. However, every now and then we find something which....

....even some time searching on the internet fails to identify. This object - ladies' size 7 boot for scale - looked at first glance to be a starfish, but there are plenty of its features which make that identification unlikely. On finding it we concluded that it must either be something common which has been chewed up by something else - for example, kelp with its brown 'skin' removed - or something rather unusual - but then, a couple of hundred metres further along the beach, we found another, almost identical specimen. Can anyone help me here?

Littleferry Fungi

Thursday's walk, in clear conditions but with the temperature hovering around 5C which felt even colder in a chill wind, took us to the beach at Littleferry where a good proportion of the sand which usually forms the main beach had been removed by the recent easterlies. 

The links - extensive areas of rough grassland which lie between the beach and the coniferous plantation - provided us with some interesting fungi, including....

....one which looked remarkably like a pitta bread that someone had dropped and....

....some of the largest puffballs we've seen, probably a giant puffball..

For a bit of colour we had plenty of these small fungi which I think are blackening waxcaps, the name deriving from their habit, as they develop, of turning from rich yellows and reds though oranges to brown and then a rather sad black.

Returning through the forestry the path leads over this elongated mound which is part of an old storm beach composed of sand on a substructure of cobbles. This seems to suit some fungi because, along the top....

....there were masses of a rich brown bolete fungus which....

....specialised in developing unusual contortions.

Also pushing up through the pine needles are what may be the first brittlegills, fungi of which we have, in the past, found large numbers.

Finally, we found the first slime mould in ages, this one going by the lovely name of wolf's milk slime.

Late Season Butterflies

When I took this photo in Monday morning's sunshine this was the only red admiral left visiting our garden, their numbers having fallen from five over the previous few days; and when we woke this morning to find that we'd suffered a sharp overnight frost in temperatures down to 3C I certainly didn't expect that....

....by early afternoon, even though the temperature had risen to 13C, there would be two red admirals feeding on the verbena.

This seems to me to be very late indeed for butterflies to be on the wing in the north of Scotland - but then this has been a very peculiar summer - in the sense that we really have had a summer, which is now progressing in to days of alternately warm and cold conditions.

However, imagine my further surprise when....

....I found a tortoiseshell feeding with the red admirals, for we haven't seen a tortoiseshell in weeks.

A Worrying Rabbit Decline

Back in the summer this field used to be hopping with rabbits. Walking up the track which runs along the lower side of it, one could count fifteen or more, some....

....feeding out in the middle of the field as if buzzards didn't exist. Some of the rabbits were exotic, like....

....this one, one of several which had a rogue gene which made them even more visible to predators.

Since July, there has been an almost catastrophic decline in rabbit numbers. Now, the field never has a rabbit in it, not in the daytime, and the only ones we see are....

....those that live in our road. We see them in the early morning - hence, with apologies, the poor quality of this picture taken from beside the kitchen sink as I was making the early morning cup of tea - and, unfortunately, sometimes in our back garden where we grow our vegetables.

I don't know what's happened to them but we've seen this before, and each time they bounce back, but the current numbers are worryingly low if the rabbit population is going to survive the winter.

The Ferry Stores, Kilchoan

It was with deep, deep sadness that we read this notice on The Ferry's Stores' Facebook page, here, for we owned and ran that shop from 1997 to 2006.

The Ferry Stores is in the small crofting community of Ormsaigbeg, just by Kilchoan at the end of the Ardnamurchan peninsula, some two-hour drive to the west of Fort William. It's remote. Life is tough. Distances are large. Running any shop is hard, sometimes thankless work. Suppliers weren't always keen to serve us, and those who did were expensive, prices which had to be passed on to the customer. But we loved Ardnamurchan, and our 21 years there were happy times. After we sold the shop I kept a blog, which gives a good idea of the area - it's here.

We were very conscious that, as well as being a business which had to support our family, the Stores played a vital part in keeping the community going. For example, as well as serving the general public, our petrol station, which we completely rebuilt, served the fire engine, the Coastguard truck, and the nurses' ambulance. The shop also housed the Post Office, and sold a wide range of goods which included the daily papers.

I can't imagine Kilchoan without its shop. For many of the permanent residents, it won't make much difference - even in our time they shopped in Tobermory or Fort William, and now home delivery will have put further pressure on the business. I hope the shop can be saved: after our successor died the community looked at running it as a community shop but, I think wisely at the time, decided against it.

I'm hoping that the community will rally round and find a way forward - as it has done so often before. However, if the shop does close, it will be the most vulnerable members of the community who will miss it most.

Meeting the Wildlife

Most of us who, as tourists, have been 'on safari' in Africa have probably met the wildlife we've come so far to see from a vehicle like this - or perhaps a minibus with zebra stripes all over it. Because wild animals appear unable to 'see' humans in a vehicle, even in an open truck, we're fairly safe, but our guides generally only let us in places where they're fairly confident there's nothing nasty around. This safari was in Namibia, and we've stopped for sundowners.

The guides at this reserve were always armed - the guide in this picture has a pistol on his hip - even if we weren't getting out, and in most reserves, if one takes a walk, one is usually accompanied by....

....a man with a rather larger gun. Only in one reserve....

....Etendeka in Namibia, did we find someone who, as a matter of principle, never carried a weapon. I have to say, I felt far more confident in Dennis' care than in the care of a men packing a pistol or an ancient and pretty useless Kalashnikov.

Only once did we walk in the bush without supervision, and that was at Okonjima in Namibia where, when we asked if we could, the management seemed quite happy. The most exciting thing we saw up close was a young male kudu (above) but I was far more worried about the baboons which started calling in the kopjes not far from where we were wandering.

Walking in the bush, and particularly walking in the bush without supervision, is a wonderful if rather intimidating experience. It makes one feel alive, but also makes one appreciate how difficult life must be for those who live permanently in areas where dangerous animals roam. In the UK we've killed all our natural predators and seem very against reintroducing them; yet we'd be shocked if we heard that Kenya had just shot its last lion.

Dead Calm

There's not much I like about winter but one of its few advantages is that we see the sunrises. They say that a red sky in the morning is the shepherd's warning but today's opened a beautiful day, with only a little high cloud....

....to mar the morning which, almost inevitably, we spent at Littleferry.

The tide was high while we were there and in the mouth of the loch we found....

....masses of oystercatchers which, unfortunately, we disturbed, though they were....

....back quick enough, this time settling on a shingle bank where they were much less likely to be disturbed.

In all, there must have been upward of two hundred of them, which suggests they've had a good breeding season. Also on display in numbers were....

....eider, patrolling the entrance to the loch in formations. At this time of year the....

....males are very smart.

On our way home we stopped for a few minutes to sit on a bench and look out across the inner pool of Loch Fleet where some duck had collected - in this picture they're just visible along the waterline in front of the house. We couldn't get close to them but we were able to distinguish mallard as well as....

....the first widgeon we've seen this season. It was also good to see....

....a small flock of redshanks, a species which hasn't been around for some time.