Where Have They Gone? - 4

Our retreat from Rhodesia to the UK, and the knowledge that we could not return as it was spiralling downwards into a bitter civil war, was a huge setback for us, for we had hoped to make our lives with its beautiful people in a country which had huge potential.

It was good to see the family. While my parents had been out to visit us in Rhodesia, Mrs MW had seen none of her relatives.

To re-set my 'career', we spent three years in England, the first....

in Bristol where we lived in a damp, pokey ground floor flat. It wasn't ideal as our eldest daughter was born during our time there, while I completed my teacher qualifications at the university.

We made friends in Bristol but we were there for too short a time for these friendships to endure, so the most important were those we had formed before our Rhodesian expedition, in particular....

....Brian and Val Jones whom we had first met while we were students at the University of Keele. While we lost touch with Val, for many ears we heard irregularly from Brian: the last we heard of him he was happily settled in Spain.

In the next two years I gained teaching experience and a full teacher qualification in the UK system at the grammar school in Ludlow, Shropshire. There we met many good people to some of whom we extended a warm invitation to come and visit us in our next relocation - to the West Indies - but only one couple took us up on the offer.

So, out of the many friends we made during those three years, we remain in touch with only one couple. In some ways, I suppose, we could not expect to stay in touch with many as we chose a very peripatetic lifestyle - but that does not prevent us wondering what happened to all those we knew well.

Signs of Spring

With NatureScot's Instagram feed today reporting the year's first sightings of adders I set off this morning to walk up the track where, last summer, we had a resident adder, not with great expectations - but instead I found other signs of the changing season, like....

....lambs in the local farmer's fields near the house and, further up the track....

.....the first frogspawn of the year.

These frogs must be pretty optimistic as the weather has been very dry recently, there has been overnight ice on all the standing water, and the forecast for the next few days is for a considerable drop in temperature from the present giddy heights above 10C

My walk also gave me some good pictures of this stonechat. I don't think stonechats are migratory but we haven't seen any over the winter, not until we had a brief sighting of one at Littleferry the other morning.

The Merlin bird ID app produced a surprising result this morning....

....when it reported 'hearing' a chiffchaff. I didn't hear one,  and it seems very early for them, but maybe I was distracted by something else.

On my way home a very noisy running battle was being fought along this forest front between a pair of ravens and a pair of....

....red kites, a confrontation which the kites seemed to win - so perhaps we'll have them nesting near here this summer.

More Firsts

Much of the exterior of Dunrobin Castle has been shrouded in scaffolding through the winter, during which the facade has been renovated - and very good it looked in this morning's bright sunshine.

Below the castle we found the first of the day's 'firsts of the year', a dandelion sprouting out of the rich earth of a mole hill; and shortly afterwards we spotted the second 'first'....

....a very smart pied wagtail sitting, wagging his tail on a wall that forms part of the castle's sea defences.

We continued northwards along the ancient coast track beyond the castle and onwards to this point, where alternating strata of limestone and clay form an indented coast - the limestone forms the 'ribs', being much harder. There's a short section of coast here where Jurassic rocks have been faulted down next to much older Devonian sandstones; there are fossils in these rocks so it is designated as an SSSI, a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Close by we found the third 'first of the year'....

....a lesser celandine.

Judging by previous years, these 'firsts' will start coming at us thick and fast, though how fast will depend on the weather. At the moment the outlook is good.

Two Sides to Littleferry

With both the dawn sky and the weather forecast promising a fine day we drove, once again, to Littleferry, first for....

....a brisk walk along near-deserted sands, spoilt by finding the object at bottom left in this picture....

....a dead guillemot.

Sadly, within a few metres of this, we found two other corpses, both razorbills. To make matters worse, there was little in the way of living birds to see beyond a small flock of oystercatchers, some unidentifiable ducks, a single sanderling, and a carrion crow....

....so, in the hope of finding something to cheer us, we crossed the road to the western side of the Littleferry 'peninsula' where a walk through a coniferous plantation led to good views of the....

....inner pool of Loch Fleet where, along with a good number of ducks - too distant to be identified for certain - a couple of dozen gulls and some waders, we found....

....the Littleferry seals looking as fat as ever, basking on sandbanks which were being rapidly inundated by the rising tide.

Still Waiting for Spring

I walked this morning up one of the estate tracks until I was above the planted forestry and onto the open moorland on a morning with....

....the puddles in the vehicle tracks frozen solid after another night's hard frost.

I was hoping for more signs of spring but, despite the warm sunshine during the day, there was little to see beyond the....

....tracks which show that there are still some deer around, deer which are very determined not to be seen.

If spring refuses to perform I have little choice but to continue to enjoy the animals and birds that have been with us all winter, like.... 

....the red squirrels which have benefitted so much from the food put out for them and....

....the chaffinches which are doing fine on the strength of the peanuts and seed we've been feeding them...,

....and the dunnocks which, while usually the most retiring of birds, are surprisingly noisy at this time of year.

Not all are doing so well. This is, I think, a siskin, which almost made it through to spring, and then there are the....

....pink-footed geese which are being constantly disturbed by the fighter jets which are practising their killing skills out of the nearby Lossiemouth base.

Yellowhammers

With the skies clear blue and a light southwesterly breeze I was off up the hill this morning with, as always, a particular aim in mind, which was to see if the first....

....yellowhammers were active, their favourite singing sites being the tops of flowering gorse. The local gorse is increasingly in flower but, disappointingly and perhaps a bit worryingly, the yellowhammers were nowhere to be seen or heard - this is a 'library picture'.

There was no shortage of some species. The most abundant by far were the chaffinches, but there were plenty of tits, robins, blackbirds, crows....

....and even a couple of gulls but nothing of particular note until I was almost home when I spotted....

....two, but only two long-tailed tits.

Long-tailed tits usually go around in families of six or more, but the other day I saw only two, again near our house, suggesting that these are the only ones left as we head towards the end of winter,

Mozambique

We were digging around in the back of a little-visited cupboard the other day when we came across these two wooden bowls, each about 10" across but one slightly deeper than the other. They brought back a sudden flood of memories. We had bought the bowls on an expedition, probably in 1969, when we were staying with good friends in Umtali, the town which stood almost on the border between where we worked, in what was then Ian Smith's Rhodesia, and the Portuguese colonial possession of Mozambique.

Mozambique at the time was suffering in a bitter civil war between FRELIMO, which was fighting for an independent Mozambique, and the Portuguese colonial power, yet the strategic importance of the road and railway line linking Salisbury, the Rhodesian capital, with Beira, the major port on the Mozambique coast, was such that we felt quite happy to take a day trip from Umtali into Mozambique.

There was no purpose to our expedition, which took us to a Mozambique town not far from the border, other than to find a small hotel which had a swimming pool beside which we could enjoy a few beers or glasses of good Portuguese wine, and a pleasant meal. In this we were very successful, the Mozambique currency being weak against the Rhodesian dollar; and, while we were there, we bought the two bowls and some bottles of wine.

That wine was to rather mar our day because, when we tried to cross the border back into Rhodesia, we were charged a huge import tax, which suddenly made our pleasant day out an extremely expensive one.