Calm After a Storm

A westerly wind blew mightily yesterday kicking up a dust storm on land and white horses across the Moray Firth and, towards evening, tearing enough holes in the clouds for some sunshine to break through. However, this was too late for the small birds, of which we saw precious few through the day, though....

....they made up for it by turning out in numbers this morning, the chaffinches arriving first followed by greenfinches, goldfinches....

....and siskins.

We walked up into forestry which was full of bird song. At one point we stood and heard dunnock, wren, chaffinch and robin all singing together. Soon we'll be listening for the song of the first returning migrants.

Golspie's Front

It's some time since I last walked along Golspie's seafront. This runs round a wide bay, with the village, and the A9 trunk road which passes through it, squeezed between the sea and the heights of Beinn Bhraggie. The northern end of the front is accessed by a grassy path while....

....the village frontage is a concrete breakwater. This is in a parlous state, with the sea frequently overtopping it - which must have happened again in the last few days judging by the piles of weed thrown up by the recent high winds.

It's a pleasant walk along the promenade and the grass path from the village to the mouth of the Golspie Burn. Considering this is a settlement of some 2,500 residents it never ceases to surprise me how few people I meet, today just one, a lady walking - or, rather, being dragged along by - her rather plump terrier.

The tide was low, the exposed seaweed-covered boulders being a gathering place for various birds including three species of gull, oystercatchers and crows. The bird swimming just offshore in this picture is a lone male eider.

One of gulls, perhaps a black-backed gull, lay washed up on the beach. Happily, there's still no sign of bird flu here so I assume this is a victim of a long winter.

Capturing the Moment

This post is another one written in praise of, and thanksgiving for, that wonderful invention called a digital camera. I have never had any interest in the complications of photography - I really don't know what an f-number is - I just want a machine that I can point, press a button, and know I've recorded a visual moment in time - and nowhere is the ability to record something very, very quickly more important than when one is 'on safari' in places like Tanzania.

I'm rather proud of this first picture as the hippo had seemed quite happy watching from the bank as we passed in a very fragile small boat. However, it suddenly decided to launch itself into the water. I was quite convinced that it was going to attack our boat and turn it over. Happily, it didn't.

This sparring between two gazelle happened in moments but the camera was ready so all I did was press a button. I don't think it was a serious fight but, whereas the gazelle would normally have fled the approach of a Land Rover full of camera-swinging tourists, these were too engrossed to notice us.

This wart hog boar had been warily watching our approach and I had him lined up for a nice photograph, when he transformed it by rearing away just as I pressed the button. Wart hogs aren't particularly beautiful animals but I have a soft spot for them, knowing that they are the favourite prey of lions - yet, somehow, they survive and thrive.

I had seconds in which to turn my camera on and grab a shot of this, a bush pig. Considering the success of wart hogs as a species, bush pigs are surprisingly rare - I had never seen one before - and yet it walked past within ten metres of me as I watched from a hide which overlooked the water hole at the lodge in Sadaani National Park.

Finally, this is an unbelievable photo - again, taken from the hide at Saadani - because when I showed it to the lady who ran the lodge she couldn't believe that an old, male Cape buffalo, one of the most respected of Africa's range of dangerous creatures, had come for a drink not a hundred metres from where her clients were relaxing in the lodge's restaurant and bar.

The Field

A large field near our house has been the home of a small herd of cows through the winter. They had a pretty hard time with the snow, and the farmer had considerable problems in bringing supplementary feed up when, in the heavy rain of a few weeks ago, the access track was largely washed away. Despite this, the animals seem....

....to have survived remarkably well, and we rather enjoy meeting the calves which now accompany their mothers.

However, in the last few days we have noticed some additional users of the field, a small flock of....

....redwings. I tend to think of redwings as arriving early in the winter to gorge on berries, particularly those of the ubiquitous rowan and of the sea buckthorn, of which there are large numbers along the coast path near Dunrobin Castle. However, this year the berries, despite looking like a good crop, disappeared very quickly, so the redwings seem to have taken instead to feeding in the cows' field, presumably on worms. 

The field is also being exploited by a close relative of the redwing, the song thrush. There appear to be a large number of these birds this year: we even have one in the trees at the front of our house, a bird which, like the others, seems to be working himself up into the crescendo of song which comes with the breeding season.

Garden Birds

I would never have believed that I would report that there are almost as many goldfinches visiting us as there are chaffinches, but it's true. The two species are often found together, probably because they both have an insatiable hunger for sunflower seed kernels, though....

....the goldfinches are much more adept at landing on the feeders than the chaffinches, which seem rather clumsy - the one pictured here is a bit of an exception.

We have two main feeding points on our property. One is on the other side of the road at the front of the property, and it consists of....

....hanging feeders containing peanuts and fat balls, these being most used by the tit family - blue, coal, great and, occasionally, long-tailed - and the occasional greenfinch, and one sunflower feeder that the chaffinches and goldfinches monopolise.

There's a much greater assortment of foods in the back garden but this has less visitors than the front, though one of the visitors here is the occasional and very welcome siskin.

Blackbirds - and we have several - only visit the back garden, as do....

....the wood pigeons from the nearby forestry. The pigeons are a quarrelsome bunch, this one being top bully.

The back garden is also the haunt of our resident robin and one or two dunnocks, and more chaffinches and goldfinches, while some species are totally absent. We never see a house sparrow, though there is a whole bunch of them in a thicket not a hundred metres from our plot, thrushes are absent, and we've only had the very occasional visit from starlings and, happily, crows.

We've been in this house for just over a year so I suppose we should be quite pleased with the number of small birds visiting us, but I'm never satisfied. What the back garden needs is trees for the birds to sit in while contemplating the feast we've laid out for them - but unfortunately trees take time to grow.

Birds Along the Seashore

The ancient coast track which runs from Golspie village northwards towards Dunrobin Castle and thence to John-o'-Groats crosses the Golspie Burn by a substantial footbridge from which we've often watched a pair of dippers. No more. Sadly, we haven't seen any sign of them for well over a year.

Once across the bridge on this morning's walk I disturbed a large mixed flock of gulls, crows and rock doves all feeding in the harvested barley field. It was a beautiful morning, the sky almost cloudless, with not a breath of wind so....

....the sea hardly moved, just the occasional dark wave, leftover from the recent winds, lifting lazily to slop out onto the beach.

This  bird, I think a pipit, was making good use of one of the many wooden structures which are testament to past human activity along this section of coast. It, with two hooded crows, decided to join....

....a cormorant which was drying its wings in the sunshine.

This was one of a pair of oystercatchers feeding along the seaweed line, along with a small flock of redshanks. The flock of curlews we saw a few days ago was still there, but feeding in the barley field.

Three song thrushes were singing from treetops between the bridge and the castle, with others feeding on ground still white from the overnight frost. Only one of the three singers had developed a full range of those beautiful, repeated calls, the other two being much less full-throated. The one calling properly was easy to spot, high on a tree by the burn. Perhaps because of their lack of confidence, the other two, one of which was in a tree right by the castle....

....weren't in sight.

Buzzards

When we lived on Ardnamurchan buzzards were always the most common of the raptors and, to our surprise, when we moved to Felixstowe we found that they were almost as common there. These days, in this part of Sutherland, we have a problem because, although we occasionally hear....

....a buzzard's plaintive cry high above the forested slopes of Bheinn Bhraggie, we only occasionally....

....see one.

One reason for their decline may well be the increasing scarcity of a quite different species, the humble....

....rabbit, of which we see precious few these days - this one was spotted enjoying the grass in a neighbour's garden. Rabbits are top of the menu for buzzards and the worrying drop-off in rabbit numbers seems to have occurred over this winter.

I don't know what the problem is with our rabbits. It may be disease, though we haven't, thank goodness, come across any distressed rabbits. It may be that, since the pandemic, more and more dogs are being walked through the areas they used to favour. It may simply be that the balance between predators and prey has been unbalanced. However, it isn't just these two species which seem to be struggling - for example, we're seeing precious few red kites these days.

One just has the feeling that Nature is struggling in a world more and more dominated by man.