A Concentration of Corpses

We walked north along the beach towards Dunrobin Castle in late afternoon sunshine today, seeing little of note until we came to a line of seaweed left by the falling tide in which, along a stretch of barely five metres, we found....

....four dead birds - three razorbills and a cormorant - all small, so this year's young. This concentration may be to do with a mix of the recent easterly winds, local currents and the tide, because this is a section of beach where we've found other corpses, including basking shark and seals.

As we were heading home a skein of swans passed overhead, perhaps whooper swans, calling to each other and all heading firmly.... north.

Rain

Yesterday the sun and the bumblebees were out. Then....

....it rained all night and on into today, the temperature stuck firmly to its overnight 9C, and the burn below the footbridge became a mad rushing torrent.

Bradfield Letters

I continue to work my way through the letters I wrote home during my years at school in England while my parents were in Mombasa. Not all the letters are preserved but there is a full set for 1959, starting with....

....a letter written from the house near Fareham where Richard and I spent our Christmas and Easter holidays. Mrs Groom had up to four children staying with her and, in general, we were happy at Tanners particularly as she kept cocker spaniels for breeding, with which we spent a great deal of our time.

The first letter, like many of them, isn't dated but the postmark is for 4th January, two days after my birthday, and contains the typical sort of cheerful news which I was taught to send home in my letter-writing days at Glengorse.

I would have been fourteen at the time and, after five years of schooling in England, quite used to being a long way from both my parents and the place I loved, but my suppressed emotions do surface occasionally, as in....

....this letter, written on 19th July 1959.  "Here we are," it starts, "with those lovely five words on the tips of our tongues, only a week to go" before hastily moving on to topics of a less emotional sort, such as the exam results.

I find these letters rather upsetting, as the feelings of abandonment, of rejection, of exile I had all those years ago run close beneath their surface; and I remember how we suppressed those feelings, except as each precious summer holiday drew to a close when we begged our parents not to send us back to England.

Hospital Fungi

Walking past our local cottage hospital this morning on a cool, dank day I noticed a reception committee standing by the pedestrian entrance, consisting of....

....a cheerful group of young shaggy inkcaps and....

....a few of their elders.

It was almost as if they had gathered there as a fungal picket line, out in support of their NHS colleagues.

Beside them stood another small group which, I thought at first ,might be simply from a different hospital department. I now wonder, because I have tentatively identified them as ivory funnels, Clitocybe rivulosa, one of our most poisonous fungi.

A Taste of Winter

We must accustom ourselves to this again - grey skies, the cold, strong winds, the hard showers that sting the skin, the fleeting warmth of the sun and, being October, the sudden surprise of....

....rainbows cast across the skies.

We walked a near-empty beach this morning, just three other humans and two dogs and the occasional shore bird, oystercatchers, curlews, and....

....above, small skeins of geese, untidy in the gusting wind.

We came across these tracks at the end of the walk, almost certainly an otter following the top of the shore perhaps shortly after high tide last night, proceeding....

....in a series of leaps; a big otter too.

Wildlife

We're seeing a dipper almost every time we cross the footbridge over the Golspie Burn. We assume it's the same one each time though we know that, through the summer, a pair nested about a mile upstream. While it's wary of us, if we approach cautiously it will continue to go about its business, as it did....

....on Saturday morning when it appeared to be having a fight with an earthworm. A close look at the pictures proved that the long, wriggling beast it was beating against the rock was more likely to have been an elver.

Buzzards are becoming increasingly scarce in the skies above Golspie so it was with some joy that we watched three wheeling and calling above us as we walked north beyond Dunrobin Castle this morning.

The weather is a bit mixed at the moment but in its sunnier spells the red admirals are out and about. They're the only butterflies we're now seeing, and they're making do with some fairly slim pickings.

One of the few flowers that are still out is the bluebell - Scottish variety. They seem to like the calcerous soils of the links but many are small, as if, to cope with the lack of nutrients, they're a dwarf variety.

As autumn proceeds so more fungi appear, though it doesn't promise to be as good a season as last. We found this fly agaric in the grass just by the primary school gates, along with four others. Elsewhere in the local woods, the fly agaric season seems to be already over.

Compare to last year, the blackening waxcap is having a good season. They start as a vivid yellow, fade through orange into increasing dark shades of brown, and finish up....

....a rather sad and chewed-up black.

Littleferry Birds

We were amazed at the number of oystercatchers which were sitting peacefully on a sand bank near the entrance to Loch Fleet this morning: there must have been a good 200.

Mixed in amongst them were fewer than ten bar-tailed godwits. There's one at top centre of the picture, and they're most easily identified by their long but slightly upturned bill.

Just beyond the oystercatchers the gannets were doing brisk business where the rapidly rising tide was being funnelled through the narrow entrance to the loch. While a few of the dozen or so that were circling were adults, most were....

....dark-coloured juveniles.

The oystercatchers didn't last long on their sandbank. They were disturbed by a dog-walker, so they decamped to the opposite side of the entrance, from where they had been disturbed earlier.... by a dog-walker.