Panasonic DMC-FZ200

The camera I use, a Panasonic DMC-FZ200, must now be over ten years old and has taken thousands of pictures in environments from the heat and humidity of Tanzania to the chill of Alaska. 

To be honest, if it stopped working tomorrow I would probably go out and buy the same machine again, though it does, for my needs, have some limitations. The worst is evident in this picture, where a couple of days ago I was trying to capture the first greenfinch I'd seen at our new house - and the camera simply wouldn't quite focus on it, preferring to focus on the twigs. The camera does have a manual focus feature but it's very clumsy. The only way of getting round this is to have a bridge camera like mine but with a manual focus - and I don't think such a machine exists.

The joy of the camera is that it's almost totally automatic. I know nothing about exposure settings so it does them for me, and it also focuses automatically, though I have various tricks to help me choose my focus. It takes a burst of about 12 pictures per second - used for example when I had only moments to catch these geese as the flew south.... yes, south.... past the house yesterday morning.

The great thing about a bridge camera is that it takes a wide range of types of picture, and can be adjusted to whatever setting I want extremely quickly - as is exemplified by this shot, taken the day before yesterday when I saw a bird, which I suspected was a red kite, soaring near a passenger jet contrail, and even more so when, walking home from the village this morning through the woods I had seconds in which to 'shoot'....

....this red squirrel which had just jumped through the low branches across the path in front of me. 

The camera has become almost an extension to my body, fitting in to my hand and bouncing happily in its case against my hips - and I can draw it faster then Roy Rogers pulled a six-gun. I seems to me to be a perfect example of a machine making easily accessible to amateurs like me a great deal of very complicated technology.

So Many Homes

Upanga Road bungalow

The other day I spent a few minutes counting up the number of places I have called 'home'. Before I started I tried to to define exactly what the term meant as a proper 'home' is more than simply a building in which one lives; there has to be a sense of belonging and, perhaps, of family living there too. I also excluded places where I had only stayed for a relatively short time, temporary residences where I hadn't developed a sense of belonging.

For the purposes of the count I divided my homes into those where the family element of it being a 'home' was that my parents lived there, and those in which Mrs MW made it 'home'. The first group started with the bungalow in Upanga Road which was home after my birth in the European Hospital, Dar-es-Salaam, and, via Mombasa and Sussex, ended with Gawthorpe, a big semi-detached house in the village of Guestling, near Hastings, which my parents had for a few years in the mid 1960s.

Excluded from this list were the two schools in England at which I was a boarder and various places I stayed during Christmas and Easter school holidays while my parents were in East Africa.

The flat in Stone, Staffordshire

Homes made with Mrs MW started with the flat in Stone, Staffordshire, where we lived while I finished my degree and while Mrs MW taught at the local girls' Catholic school, an experience which she did not enjoy. These homes included the bungalow at Bernard Mizeki College, Rhodesia, where we lived for the three years we taught at the school; a chalet-dormer-bungalow in Ludlow, Shropshire; a bungalow in the grounds of Excelsior School in Kingston, Jamaica; a terraced house in a council estate in Basildon New Town, Essex; a big semi-detached house in Maldon, Essex; The Ferry Stores, in the village of Kilchoan, Argyllshire; two houses which we had built for us, Matenderere in Kilchoan and a bungalow in Golspie, Sutherland.

There were various other places in which we lived which I might have called 'home', but at all these the stays were of brief duration.

Matenderere is the left of the two houses.

The list comes to a total of 22 places in which I have felt 'at home'. We only lived for a few months in a couple of them, and the longest we lived in any of them was Matenderere, where we spent over ten happy years.

When I first reached this total I was amazed.... and then horrified. How could I have allowed this peripatetic lifestyle to have happened? And, what effects has it had on my life and on the lives of those I hold dear? 

More Spring Firsts

This photo may not look anything particularly exciting but, for us, it's a significant moment, for this is the first insect we've seen to visit a plant which we have put into the garden at our new house, in which the aim is to make it as bird and insect friendly as possible. We've started with a blank canvas, a rocky subsoil with poor Highland soil above, and ten heathers were amongst the first plants to go in. 

We were at Littleferry this morning and came across these, the first wild pansies, Viola tricolour, of the year, while in the woodland at the back of the links we heard....

....half a dozen or more willow warblers, again, the first of the year. The trouble was that I simply could not get a picture of them, despite some careful stalking, but at least I now have a second best, a recording of their song made on the Merlin app.

Also at Littleferry, at the mouth of Loch Fleet, we were pleased to see fifty or so eider displaying themselves in their best mating plumage, as were....

....a pair of shelduck on Loch Fleet itself.

We also had a distressing moment when we realised that....

....this oystercatcher wasn't dragging a wing to lead us away from a nest but had broken it.

A Wet Spring Walk

Today has been wet; not heavily wet nor windily wet so much as steadily, coldly and persistently wet made worse by the memory of the few gloriously sunshiny intervals we had a couple of days ago. Undaunted, I set off for a walk into the grounds of Dunrobin Castle not expecting much on such a day - but, as often happens, something intervened to cheer me - in the shape of a song thrush.

I stood in this damp, unexceptional clearing, with cold fingers of rain making their way down the back of my neck, and listened to the thrush's glorious song until a growing chill drove me on.

Despite Spring plodding along and the temperature staying well below 10C, there are a few interesting things to find though this part of Scotland must be far behind the rest of the country. The last of the scarlet elfcups are 'in flower' and we have a new spring flower to enjoy....

....as a few wood sorrel blooms are now visible, most nestling on comfy beds of moss.

Then, as I came to the end of my walk, there were a couple of bonuses; a fleeting glimpse of the pale rump of a roe deer as it bounded away into the forestry and....

....when I reached home, a pair of goldfinches enjoying a meal of sunflower seeds.

A Walk to the Shops

We've found a much more pleasant walking route from our new house into the centre of the village which, unlike the present one which takes us on a pavement beside the busy A9, runs through the lower slopes of the forestry below Beinn Bhraggie. At the point where the path emerges from the trees there's a large field which, on today's very wet day, had two occupants....

....visible in the bottom left hand corner of this picture, two....

...roe deer which, at first, stopped eating to watch me but, when I didn't go away, decided....

....that it was prudent to move to the far side of the field, not in any great hurry as they were obviously....

....rather enjoying their breakfast and very annoyed at my interrupting it.

Merlin

Wherever we walk now, be it in the village, along the beaches, across the links, or up into the forestry, the air is full of bird song. In the plantations above our house the most active areas for birds are the margins between the coniferous forestry, which has been largely silent through the winter, and the open scrub-land or land with scattered deciduous cover.

Too often, the birds aren't seen but heard. I say 'too often' because I have never been very good at identifying a bird by its song, and sometimes it's even more frustrating when I find a bird because it's singing, manage to photograph it, but still can't identify it.

Recently, a lady we meet quite frequently on our walks who is also a keen bird-watcher suggested I try an app called Merlin, created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. One of the features of the app is to recognise birds by their song. As long as it can clearly pick up the song, the app will produce a record:

....and identify the birds. This particular record identified seven species, including....

....a siskin, in the space of thirty seconds.

Since the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, established in 1915 and based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, covers both Europe and North America, it's equally useful on both sides of the 'pond'.

I'm often amazed by modern technology and what people are capable of creating but I have to say that the Merlin app is outstanding.

Loch Lunndhaidh

This morning we walked up the track that runs northwest from Golspie to Loch Lunndaidh, a steady and, for us, fairly exhausting four kilometres but well worth the effort so we could spend....

....a few minutes sitting by the side of the loch listening to a silence broken only by the lap of the wavelets driven by a chilly wind.

To provide water for Golspie the loch's level has been steadily raised over the years by a dam at its southeast end which has recently seen....

....the addition of a footbridge and what appears to be parking areas. I'm not at all sure of the purpose of these as they're on Sutherland Estate land but it may be to offer improved access to the local fishing club which has the rights on the loch.

We had hoped to see an osprey and, perhaps, the year's first wheatear but had to be satisfied with a rather smart meadow pipit and the songs of the skylarks hovering high above us.