A Slow Spring

Spring is taking its time. It seems in no hurry this year, as if it knows that winter still has a bite - so we've only now found the first dog violets growing on a sunny bank and....

....this morning we found, in the pine plantation, the first two wood sorrel flowers of the year.

With the flowers out the bees are appearing, though still in very small numbers even though we've been enjoying some brighter and warmer weather.

This is the queue for breakfast in our back garden, mostly chaffinches but we also have siskins and goldfinches, all rather wary because....

....Harry the sparrowhawk is back, often to be found lying in wait in his favourite location, where he can see the small birds but they can't see him.

It's always good to see the local gang of long-tailed tits, always cheerful, always chatty, but it's so sad to find only three again, when they should be going round in flocks of eight and more.

At least this was a cheering sight - the first rabbit we've seen out in the fields in in ages, and it was in the big Rabbit Field where we saw dozens playing last summer. 

A Hut Circle

After Sunday's 'adventure' I realised that our walk had passed very close to one of the Golspie area's hut circles - and it was easy to find it on a satellite view. It's marked here as SC, B being the burn pictured in the previous post.

So, in this morning's beautiful spring weather, I set off up Adder Track - named for the adder we'd seen twice just beyond this gate last summer - to find the circle which was...,

....once I was looking for it, staring me in the face.

The circle is covered in dead bracken at this time of year but it's clearly visible in this picture with the two gorse bushes on its far side. The circular wall is 1.5m thick and the internal diameter about 10m, making the hut's total diameter about 13m. Considering it may be two to three millennia old, it's in very good condition.

One thing that's remarkable about these iron-age houses is that their builders made no attempt to conceal them, preferring to choose a site with a good view. It would, therefore, have been visible from miles away. This suggests that, at the time they were built, the world was an unusually peaceful place.

Not only did the dwelling have superb views, it also had clean running water not 20m from its front door and, in the hillside behind it, plenty of space for fields.

As I was leaving, the site's present owner appeared, hanging around long enough to make sure I had gone. 

I have written about our previous visit to the site here.

Tiger Country

The sun has been out again today, making it quite warm enough on my walk this morning to sit for some time on a rock by the side of a path and think about important things - like, how successful the local gorse has been in recolonising the area of coniferous plantation that was burnt out by a fire in 2018, and....

....how, at first sight, it seems to form as much of a monoculture as a field of farmer's wheat, when a sudden movement caught my eye.

We don't see many tiger beetles but when one does turn up I'm reminded of the first time I saw one, on a similar rough track that runs along the coastline of Ardnamurchan to the east of Ockle. I remember it because of the startling metallic beauty of the insect, and because I recall looking it up on the internet and learning that it is a remarkable hunter, exceptionally fast on its long legs and ruthless in its ability to catch its prey - spiders, caterpillars and ants.

I often bemoan the increasing scarcity of our larger wildlife, such as deer, foxes, pine martens, badgers and, now, rabbits, so this beetle was a timely reminded that there's plenty of excitement still to be found amongst the multitude of much smaller species which inhabit even gorse heathland - like this beautiful insect.

An Adventure

Ever since we've lived at this end of Golspie we've wanted to join up the further ends of two tracks which rise into the hills at the back our house. We haven't managed to do it as the OS maps of this area are pretty useless, and the ground we would have to cover is perhaps a bit rough for people of our tender age....

....particularly as, in several places, any hint of the ancient path we were supposed to be following has long disappeared.

However, having turned back on several previous occasions, we persisted today because there were landmarks around us which reduced the chances of getting totally lost, the weather was perfect, and the view....

....helped both to distract and to locate us.

After some fairly tough walking we finally saw the feature we were looking for....

....the signpost on the Golspie-Loch Lunndaidh track which we have passed many times before, leaving us with....

....a gentle downhill walk home.

It's some time since we last set off into the hills with a sense of adventure, knowing that what we were doing did have some risks but that, if we managed them and were careful, we could do it.

We walked two-and-a-half miles this morning, a fraction of the distances we used to walk on a typical Sunday on Ardnamurchan, but some of it was fairly taxing, and we felt, at a personal level, we had achieved something.

The Dark Woods

I don't like walking in the woods, particularly coniferous plantations. They're dark, dank, oppressive places where, at this time of year, the ground-level plants are still in winter mode, there being precious little in the way of spring flowers to see, the exception being....

....along the edges of the forestry where some of the gorse is in flower, as it has been for much of the winter. In the woods themselves I spotted just one dandelion in bloom. One.

That said, the forestry was, despite a bitingly cold wind, full of the songs of small birds but....

....seeing them, let alone taking a picture of them, was difficult: in this photo there is a very excited male goldcrest but please don't ask me exactly where.

So there had to be something important to draw us in to the unwelcoming environment of these woods and that was, of course....

....the annual return of the ospreys, there being four nests around the shores of Loch Fleet.

From meeting acquaintances on recent walks who have seen them we know that some are back from western Africa. The occupants of this nest, the one that's most accessible to us, have been seen but they weren't at home today, though we thought we heard them calling.

So we'll have to return to the dark woods....

The Boiled Frog

When change happens very slowly one sometimes doesn't notice it. This is true of the frog which, if dropped into boiling water, will hop straight out again but which, if put into cooler water which is heated up very slowly, will stay in the water until it boils to death. Well.... Maybe!

It's certainly true of the local starlings. They used to move around in large, chattering flocks making their presence felt by their greed and very poor table manners at the bird feeders.

Yesterday I realise I hadn't seen one in ages; perhaps not even this winter. What makes things worse is that the numbers in the UK are supposed to increase in the winter due to immigration of birds from northern Europe.

You'd have thought I would have noticed their decline from the way they haven't been wrecking the bird feeders: I didn't.

According to the BTO, British starlings declined in numbers by 57% in the years between 1995 and 2023, such a drop that the species is now on the UK red list as a bird of 'conservation concern'. However, as far as continental Europe is concerned, they are not threatened - in fact they are classified as amongst the birds of 'least concern'.

I don't want starlings to disappear completely but I do hope that those that survive will bring up their children with good table manners.

Roe Encounter

Roe Corner is the point where the path we usually follow down to the village leaves the Scots pine plantation and passes between an area of more recently planted deciduous trees and a large, open field. From their hoof prints left in the path's mud we've known all winter that deer have been using the gap in the wall to get from the field into the woodland probably in the early morning, when they've finished grazing and wish to return to the cover of the woodland for the day.

A couple of weeks back we saw three roe deer moving up through the bracken under the trees but they were in too much of a hurry for a photograph but I was thrilled today when....

....this roe deer seemed in no hurry to hide, giving me plenty of opportunity to capture the first pictures of one of these delicate animals since August last year.

When we first came to Golspie we used to see red deer on the moorland above the forestry but they were culled when the estate fenced the area and planted trees, so the roe deer are now the largest mammal in these woodlands and a symbol of Scotland's shrinking wilderness.