Small Birds

This morning, in order to escape the bitter east-southeasterly which has been blowing for days, I walked as much as possible through the woods where I was reasonably protected, though the wind was causing the tops of the trees to thrash around so much that, if any birds were singing - which I doubt, though it won't be long before the crossbills will be nesting - I wouldn't have heard them.

Inevitably, I had to walk some distance out of the protection of the trees and under a dismally grey sky which, later in the morning, began to give us the first flakes of the promised snow.

The pink-footed geese that pass over each day around 9am were flying low to get out of the wind but still struggled to maintain their V-shaped skeins.

With little to be seen or heard in the woods I came home and spent some time watching the small birds at their feeders at the front of the house. 

The main visitors to the sunflower kernel feeders were the siskins and goldfinches, which were, as always, heavily outnumbers by chaffinches.

However, it was good to see that the siskins were coming to the feeders in some numbers, which they haven't been in the recent past, and....

....that some of them are already very brightly dressed ready for the mating season.

On the far side of the road the peanut feeders were doing brisk business with coal and great tits; but one conspicuous and slightly worrying absentee were the blue tits.

A New Shop for Kilchoan

Following the very sudden closure of the village shop in Kilchoan, which we owned and ran for ten years - see earlier post here - the West Ardnamurchan community has decided to build a new shop near the Community Centre. This would, along with the normal goods found at any small shop, provide many vital services for such as remote area - fuels, Calor Gas, post office and newspapers. The projected cost is in the region of £500,000.

To finance this, they have set up a Crowdfunding site. It's at https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/kilchoan-shop

High Tide & High Seas

We drove to Littleferry this morning to walk in the forestry - the wind remains unpleasantly strong in exposed areas - stopping off in the village for some milk and to look at the high tide breaking on the sea defences along the front.

At Ferry Woods we walked through the pine plantation to the sea, to find that the sand along this section of the shore has completely disappeared, leaving the gently shelving pebble beach to do a very good job of soaking up the energy of the breakers.

We then spent some time following the paths through parts of the plantation we hadn't visited in some time, remembering that parts of this forestry have trees, several now dead or dying, which are much older than the planted Scots pines.

Crossing the road to the Loch Fleet shore, we found the loch a picture of grey tranquility.

Up until that point we'd hardly seen a bird other than a few gulls and crows, but on the narrow shingle bank in the right, middle distance we spotted....

....a mixture of species, ducks and waders, standing miserably while waiting for the tide to fall so they could resume their feeding. Across the wide expanse of the rest of the loch there wasn't a bird to be seen other than....

....this one little diver, identified as a juvenile goldeneye.

Where Have They Gone? - 1

Where have all the children gone, the ones I knew so long ago when, as a boy, I lived in East Africa?

They have spread across the world as, with the peripatetic lifestyle that was common to so many of them in their upbringing, I think I would have expected. So they are in Australia, in the US, in South Africa and Zimbabwe as well as in the UK and other European countries. They have scattered in the winds of change. 

Yet, despite the decades that have passed, I am still in touch, on a regular basis, with three of them, and on a more occasional basis with two more.

Of the many others, I know where some are but do not hear from or of them, and some - more and more - I know have died.

Wherever they are, and whether they are alive or dead, I am deeply indebted to them because many had such a strong influence in moulding my life; and I do hope, therefore, that they all lived long, happy and fulfilling lives.

View & Sound of the Sea

For the second half of January the sea, pressed on by an at times vicious east-southeasterly, has been breaking across the sand-bar running parallel to the Golspie shore. At night, lying awake, I can hear the sound of the breakers, this despite living in a house a good half-mile back from the coast, a house with full triple glazing.

I have lived in other houses blessed with both a view and the sound of the sea. At the Hoey House, a magnificent bungalow to the north of Mombasa set back from a coral-sand beach by fifty metres of mown lawn and palm trees, there were times when....

...the sea seemed to be washing up against the long veranda at the front of the house. Sadly, we had only one summer holiday there before we moved back into Mombasa to another house where we could both see and hear the sea....

....a house built at the top of a low scarp overlooking the golf course and the entrance to Kilindini harbour. One of my most abiding memories of that house is the ubiquitous roar of the ocean waves destroying themselves against the coral reefs that skirted the land edges.

Our house in Kilchoan was as close to the sea but it had been built in a fold in the hill and faced out onto the relatively protected waters of the Sound of Mull so, while we could sit and enjoy the magnificent view, we never really heard an angry sea.

KiSwahili

Because my mother went back to working for the Tanganyika government as soon as possible after I was born, I was entrusted during her working hours to an ayah, Fatuma, who, in due course, was also given my younger brother to look after.

There seemed to be an unwritten rule in East Africa that one communicated with the servants in KiSwahili, the lingua franca of Eastern Africa. The use of the local language wasn't general in British colonies: in Rhodesia we communicated with our servant, Titus, in English.

As a result, my brother and I learnt the language very quickly, and I do wonder whether, at times, because we spent so much of our waking hours with Fatuma, our KiSwahili was better than our English.

As I grew up, and after we left Fatuma in Dar-es-Salaam when we moved to Kenya, I kept up my KiSwahili through conversations with our servants, but things started to deteriorate when I was sent 'home' to school in England, with the result that I only used the language in the eight week summer holidays. 

That said, KiSwahili did pop up at odd moments, the worst being in French lessons where I was constantly inserting KiSwahili words where I meant a French word.

KiSwahili has in common with English an ability to be flexible and to absorb new words, but its main strength is in the simplicity - certainly compared to English - of its grammar. Not that we bothered too much about KiSwahili's grammar when we were using it: the language we spoke day-to-day was called Kitchen Swahili which, while mangling the rules of its grammar, was nevertheless a very effective means of communication. 

The only person who spoke grammatically correct Kiswahili was my father, who attended KiSwahili classes when he first moved to East Africa. We always maintained that his KiSwahili was so perfect that no-one understood it.

The last time I spoke KiSwahili was on our three visits, as tourists, to Tanzania in the early 2010s. Before I went, I bought books and worked hard to repair the damage the decades had done.

I did have some conversations in KiSwahili but I struggled - and of course many of the guides and waiters and others one came across preferred to speak English.

First Daffodils

The air temperature is 5C but it feels much colder outdoors as the persistent east-southeastly wind is still blowing - and promises to wind itself up to gale force again through tomorrow.

Walking through the pine plantations near the house it's noticeable that an unusually large number of branches are down, perhaps because the trees on the eastern side of the forestry aren't accustomed to this sort of prolonged battering.

There are, however, more signs that we're beginning to crawl out of the coldest part of the year. The sunrises are now much earlier - this was the view across the Firth at ten past nine this morning with the sun well up - and today I found....

....the first of the daffodils poking through the leaf litter.

It would be nice to think that these pink-footed geese passing over us each morning are migrating north but they aren't, as they come south again each evening to their roosts around Loch Fleet.

The squirrels along Squirrel Alley are doing fine, thanks to the generosity of the householders on the other side of the fence. These are being fed by humans, but it was good the other day to see that the squirrel which harvested and buried cob nuts along the verges of our road in the autumn is coming back to find them - even though our neighbours have been putting out plenty for it to eat.