Tree Creeper

I'm not a great lover of forests and trees, preferring open skies and wide horizons, so on a beautiful morning like this morning I wouldn't normally have chosen to accompany Mrs MW on her favourite walk through the Bheinn Bhraggie forestry to the village shops - but I'm so glad I did, because....

....all the birds in the woodland seemed to be out singing. So we started with a song thrush which was far more worried about getting his song heard by the local females than how close we were. Then, above him, a....

....wood pigeon began calling. In our time we've seen far too many of the wood pigeons of East Anglia which congregate in vast numbers in the region's extensive grain fields while these ones actually do what they're supposed to - live in the woods and only occasionally venture into our garden to share the small birds' food.

Then, high above them, we had....

....skein after skien of geese, too high for me to identify them though I suspect, from the way they first flew north and then flew back again, that these are still the pink-footed geese which have been doing this sort of daily to-ing and fro-ing all winter.

Meanwhile, back towards ground level, we were identifying, either by seeing or, using the Merlin app, by hearing, a variety of small birds: robin, wren, great tit, coal tit, chaffinch, goldfinch, chiffchaff, blackbird, song thrush, goldcrest, collared dove, and, suddenly, a tree creeper.

We haven't seen a tree creeper in ages yet we saw four in the space of an hour. They're not easy to photograph, particularly with my camera which has a nasty habit of focusing on everything except the bird, but I did, in the end....

....manage one half decent picture.

More Signs of Spring

I'm a selfish person. I must be, as I like it when we arrive to find the car park at Littleferry empty so we have the reserve to ourselves. As it turned out, the place became quite busy, with half-a-dozen dog-walkers and one unusual couple, like us, without a dog.

It was a beautiful morning, plenty of sunshine but with a brisk southwesterly. We started from Loch Fleet, where the tide was coming in fast, and then progressed northwards along the beach in the direction of Golspie. As seems normal these days at Loch Fleet, there was precious little to see: two oystercatchers, four cormorants, what might have been the first sandwich tern of the season, two crows, two skeins totalling perhaps a hundred geese heading north, a few skylarks singing joyous songs for us and, to my considerable surprise, a butterfly being blown in across the beach, presumable having flown across from the loch's south shore.

We made our way back along the edge of the forestry where, in the more protected sunny spots, we saw a bumblebee and some flies, and then....

....the year's first caterpillar, a rather beautiful one which, despite some effort, I have failed to identify..

A Good Day

We set off for the village this morning to collect the daily paper, taking the 'scenic' route through the forestry, along paths which always offer chances of some interesting sightings - and today was exceptionally good, starting with....

....two roe deer, this young buck in velvet and what was probably his mother. These may well be the same pair I saw a week ago higher up in the forestry, except that this time the buck gave me....

....a few precious moments in which to grab some shots of him.

Then, as I tried, unsuccessfully, to get a shot of a squirrel in Squirrel Alley I noticed....

....a couple of very small birds darting around in the upper branches of a nearby tree, and realised that they were....

....goldcrests, a tiny bird which we've heard often enough but not had a chance to snap some good shots of them. This was rectified magnificently by this individual who came....

....closer and closer, finally moving into a spot unobscured by vegetation where there was good light for the camera.

For me, encounters like this, and the satisfaction of coming home with some promising pictures to play with, are tremendously therapeutic, particularly on a dismal, rainy morning. Yet Mrs MW and I appeared to be the only ones wandering the paths through the forestry.

So, thank you to the two squirrels, the two roe deer, and the two goldcrests for the pleasure they have given me today.

Servants - 2

By the time we left Mombasa in 1961 we had four household servants. They were, from left to right, Mlalo the garden boy, Saidi the head boy, Ouma the cook, and Kitetu the dhobi boy - there is a post about them here. The picture was taken on the day my brother and I left Mombasa, I think in 1960, to return to school in England, knowing we would not see them again for ten months.

I'm not sure how apparent it is from the picture that I am very upset. Although it was sad to say goodbye to my parents, I was almost more upset about saying my farewells to these four - after all, my parents were responsible for sending me away to school in a cold, wet, grey, far-away country.

I have great difficulty in describing my feelings for these men who took some pride in serving us, feelings which had evolved ever since Fatuma was my ayah, except to say that they were those one would have for very special friends. These men served me - in that they cooked my food, washed my clothes, made my bed and much, much more - but they did far more that was nothing to do with the master-servant contract. I liked their company. I respected their views. I learned their language, I ate their food with them. I had difficulty not crying when I said goodbye.

I liked to think that they liked me but I really have no idea what they thought of me. They had to be careful because I was, in a way, part of their employment package, so they didn't want to upset my parents as jobs locally were difficult to find. Yet they had to serve me, and sometimes my demands were probably quite unreasonable.

Read any book about a white child growing up in Africa, and it will probably include description of the relationship he/she had with their domestic servants - Peter Godwin's autobiography Mukiwa, is a good example. It is a relationship forged by thousands of children across the tropical lands of the then British Empire. I know that I benefitted hugely from it.

Oystercatchers

This morning's walk took me along the old coast track to the north of Dunrobin Castle, the weather grey with a light southwesterly and the tide high, but the air must have been exceptionally....

....clear because the wind turbines out in the Beatrice field were easily visible.

Any shingle beach not covered by the tide has been broken up into sections, each of which belongs to....

....a pair of oystercatchers. These will be building a nest at the top of the beach, above the high-tide line, little more than a scoop in a patch of gravel, and will start the heavy task of protecting the eggs from the hoards of local crows and the dogs that are walked along the path just up from the beach.

I counted four pairs, all of them already looking pretty exhausted, though some had the good sense to take their nap on a rock offshore.

All this was good to see as I've been worried about the lack of oystercatchers in the places where they are usually plentiful. Now all I can do is wish them luck in bringing up their families.

Servants - 1

From birth I was quite used to having household servants around me and, often, very close to me; and later Mrs MW and I employed servants ourselves. In my younger years my relationships with them varied hugely, and changed with time; and they influenced me tremendously. So, for example, the young woman in this photograph ensured that I spoke KiSwahili as well as I spoke English.

Fatuma was engaged as my 'ayah' shortly before I was born in Dar-es-Salaam in January 1945. Her job was to look after me through most of the day. My parents placed considerable trust in her, including allowing her to take me down to the nearby beach to meet the other local ayahs with their charges. Fatuma also looked after Richard when he was born, and stayed with us until 1950 when we moved to Mombasa. There were other servants at the big Upanga Road bungalow and at the new house at Oyster Bay but I don't remember them and my mother doesn't mention them in her 'Life'.

I know we had two servants in our first house in Mombasa, a cook - whom my mother sacked when he made a mess of Christmas lunch because he was drunk - and Ouma (left), who started as our house boy but persuaded my mother to train him as our cook - which she did, with great success.

Early on, I think Richard and I must have been a considerable nuisances to 'the boys' who worked for us. For example, I remember using my catapult to lob stones into the soup Ouma was cooking for dinner which, inevitably, came to my mother's attention and caused me to be given a severe dressing down as well as an explanation of how important, how invaluable they were to us - my mother couldn't go out to work without them.

They did more than cook and clean and wash and iron and look after the garden. I vividly remember Richard and I being left in Ouma's charge when my parents went out for an evening. He cooked and fed us supper, put us to bed, and kept an eye on us until our parent came home, often in the early hours of the morning. I don't know what modern society would make of two small boys being cared for by a man with filed teeth and scars across his cheeks - but my parents obviously trusted him absolutely.

Lochs, Forest, Links and Beach

This was Loch Fleet this morning, sunny but with a strong northwesterly blowing and the tide falling fast, not that either of these bothered....

....the small flock of shelduck feeding on the muddy bottom of the loch.

We walked through Ferry Woods, past Loch Unes where, hopefully, the summer will bring us some damsel- and dragonflies, and then....

....out onto the links where NatureScot has, for reasons I can't fathom, decided to grub up some of the many thickets of gorse on the reserve, and on....

....to a beach deserted of life except for a couple of waders, perhaps redshanks, some gulls, and....

....a dead oystercatcher.

The sense of desertedness extended to the human race. On a one-and-a-half hour walk we saw no other humans, though from the prints along the tideline someone had already been there, in the company of two dogs.

Retracing our steps to the car we spotted a red kite and a common lizard, the fact that the latter was active testament to the growing warmth of the earth which, hopefully, will speed spring upon its way.