Coast Path

It was some weeks since we last walked along the coast path north of Golspie so we decided yesterday to return to what is one of our favourite walks.

Over the years we have been visiting it the beach has changed considerably. For example, along this section there used to be sand, which made for pleasant walking, but the sea kept taking it away so there's very little left now.

We had the pleasure of encountering some shore birds, like this superbly camouflaged ringed plover....

....this juvenile black-headed gull, and....

....a dozen or so redshanks.

Out in the firth gannets were diving - an adult in the foreground and two juveniles further out.

While walking north to the castle with the wind behind us was fairly easy, it was gusting so strongly that we had to return through the protection of the woods where....

....we found this rather fine fungus, perhaps a parasol mushroom.

Wildlife News

We're being subjected to a constant and rather depressing west to northwesterly wind which gusts to almost gale force, along with grey skies and occasional showers. While the air temperature struggles to reach 18C, it feels cold outdoors.

This weather is having a miserable affect on the wildlife. The meadow between our development and the A9 is a mass of wildflowers yet the only butterfly I saw despite sitting, looking for a quarter of an hour, was a white. It's the same in our garden where....

....this tortoiseshell has put in a regular appearance, while a white and....

 ....this rather battered painted lady have been the only other butterflies seen over the last few days.

The one place where one can find butterflies in any numbers is in Speckled Wood where the speckled woods are doing their best to fly in challenging conditions.

The sound of birdsong continues in the woods, though not at the same exuberant volume as a few weeks ago, most of the birds concentrating on feeding their young. As well as contending with the weather they also have to worry about.... 

....the resident female sparrowhawk. She killed a small bird yesterday morning on the roadway in front of our house and then flew off with the pathetic little corpse before I could take a picture. Then she was back in the late afternoon....

....hunting for more.

We haven't seen a male replacing the one that killed itself in our garden a few weeks ago so can only hope that her activity indicates that, despite the loss of her mate, she has been able to rear a brood.

Privileged

I feel very privileged to live in a place where I can walk out of my front door, as I did this morning, and, within a couple of minutes, be watching....

....a wild animal such as this roe buck in the Upper Rabbit Field next to our house. 

In some ways he isn't really 'wild' in that he lives here for his commercial value to the owners of the fields as sportsmen will pay for the privilege of shooting him; and he isn't really 'wild' because he is quite accustomed to people like me being fairly close; and he knows how to deal with the dogs which accompany the humans.

I had the feeling that he wasn't worried by me standing fifty metres away watching him; he was more irritated that I disturbed him. So, after he'd stared at me for some time he....

....turned away and stalked off along the edge of the field before disappearing into the undergrowth.

Buddleia Visitors

On Friday we welcomed the first butterfly to come in to our garden since the previous Friday, a tortoiseshell which spent its time contending with the bees that were massed on the marjoram flowers.

Then ,yesterday, we had the pleasure of seeing the first butterfly on one of the many buddleia which are bursting into flower, where it was joined by....

....the tortoiseshell, which was the one butterfly I was able to submit in my entry for the Big Butterfly Count.

Today is grey again and there's a gusty north-westerly wind blowing so, sadly, we're unlikely to see much in the way of butterfly visitors.

An Explosion of Creeping Lady's Tresses

We drove out to Littleferry this morning to follow one of our favourite walks. It goes from the Golspie-Littleferry road to the beach through several different habitats, starting with a mature pine plantation which has a ground cover predominately of grasses and heathers. We usually walk through this quite quickly but we were stopped, first by....

....three roe deer - one of them this young buck feeding in the farmer's field - and then when we noticed that, pushing up in and between the heathers....

...there were.hundreds of creeping lady's tresses.

Previously, we've regularly found a few of these delicate little orchids in one particular place which is close to where the path reaches the beach, but we have never seen anything like....

.... the abundance of this, in our experience, rather rare flower.

We are absolutely certain that this explosion hasn't occurred in previous years as we walk through these woods often if iregularly, so something has encouraged these orchids which have been dormant for years to leap into exuberant life. It may be the weather, which remains cold - 15C when we set off on our walk - and dry.

When we came out onto the links we were quickly cold, as a fresh north wind was blowing and the sun had yet to put in an appearance. Consequently, we saw just one butterfly, a small heath, and the only other one we saw was....

....a ringlet when we came back through the woods.

In this peculiar. weather there are other winners and losers on the links. The Scottish bluebells are doing well but the northern marsh orchids have all begun to die back, so the landscape is dotted with their dead flower heads.

What we hadn't realised until we came out onto the beach was that we had chosen to arrive at the lowest point of an exceptionally low tide. As a consequence, the few birds we could see were far out on the exposed sands and weed beds.

We didn't stay long. The wind was too cold and, although we walked for about a quarter of an hour along last night's high-tide line, we found nothing of interest except a single dead bird.

The Seep Again

Yesterday we had another day of rainless grey skies caused by a persistent haar brought in from the sea, but with the weather today at last showing some improvement I was up at the seep again looking, mostly, for the butterflies which still refuse to visit our garden, despite the buddleia and verbena which are just coming into flower.

There were several species of butterfly on the wing, though few of each - including small heath, painted lady (above, drinking at the seep)....

....this fritillary, which I think may be a dark green....

....a meadow brown....

....and a specked wood. However, the find of the day was...

....this golden-ringed dragonfly which was busy laying her eggs in the shallow water of the seep.

We've seen this species at the seep doing the same thing once before.

For her sake, as well as for our gardens, I hope we have some rain soon, and then some good sunshine.

The Seep

There's an aggregate quarry just off the track half a mile or so above our house which, at one time, boasted a small pond which was good for tadpoles and palmate newts. Since then, the pond has been filled in to provide a parking space for heavy vehicles but a small seep of water....

....rises in the middle of it and runs away to join....

....a ditch by the side of the track. Along this there are a couple of small, muddy and algae-filled puddles which offer a home to....

....a few remaining tadpoles - at one stage in the spring the pools were crowded with them -
and....

....a handful of pond skaters. 

In sunny weather some weeks ago it was also host to some large red damselflies but it hasn't been warm enough since for them to take to the air.

I'm guessing, but the seep - what a lovely word - is caused by rainwater moving down through the rock pictured here, a very coarse conglomerate of Devonian age, and meeting an impermeable layer, possibly of compacted red clay, which causes it to drain sideways until it surfaces in the quarry. There's probably enough water in the conglomerate for the seep to continue to flow, though it will be interesting to see what happens if the current dry weather continues for much longer.