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.

Sunny Littleferry

We needed to clear the frost off the car this morning before we could set off for what promised to be a beautifully fine day at Littleferry, mainly in the hope that we would see rather more in the way of birds than we've been seeing elsewhere recently.

We were disappointed. While there was no shortage of oystercatchers we saw two female - or are they juvenile - eider and....

....one very fine male, the only other birds of note being....

....the skylarks and six pretty little sanderling.

One thing that did not disappoint was the weather, which was warm enough for us to follow the example of....

....the oystercatchers by sitting for some time doing nothing but soak up the warmth of the sun.

A Dispiriting Walk

This morning we walked the coast path that runs northeastwards past Dunrobin Castle, pushed along by a stiff and rather chill westerly wind which brought plenty of gaps in the clouds so we could sit on one of the benches, if only for a few minutes, and bask in the late February sunshine.

If the sunshine was cheering, the wildlife wasn't. In the field below the Castle the winter barley concealed a flock of about a dozen curlew, and along the shore we spotted small numbers of....

....oystercatchers, but otherwise, in a two mile walk, we saw precious little, the only bright spot being a small flock of long-tailed ducks chasing each other some distance offshore.

What really highlighted the dismal state the birdlife was in is illustrated in this picture - one of only five gulls we saw.

When we first came to Golspie this section of coast used to be an exciting walk for the wealth of birdlife it supported. What's happening that we find ourselves hunting for....gulls?

Recovery

This is our sparrowhawk yesterday evening, soaking up some sun after his near-catastrophic collision with the glass balustrade of our balcony. He looked fine and rather laid-back but by this morning he was....

....out hunting with focussed determination. Here, he's on one of the chaffinches' favourite stopping-off points on their way to a hearty meal at our feeders, and....

....here he's looking down onto one of the main feeding areas.

Whereas before we counted ourselves fortunate to see him once in every three days or so, today we spotted him no less than six times - here he's sitting on top of the sunflower feeders in the front yard.

One wonders why he's so frenetically active, whether he didn't feed while he was recovering yesterday or whether he's building himself up, in our present almost springlike weather, for a busy breeding season ahead.

Whatever the reason for this burst of activity it's a relief that he's come through this unhappy episode with no apparent harm.

A Disaster.... Nearly!

At lunch time yesterday the sight of our sparrowhawk apparently dead on the balcony filled me with horror - for it was obvious that he had collided with the glass railing, something which several small birds have done over the last couple of years, often with fatal results, even though we have put decals onto many of the panes.

A close look suggested that the bird was dead. The only sign of life was his tail, which kept flicking up and down.

Then, very suddenly, and to my great relief, he was up on his feet, looking extremely confused but otherwise fine. My next worry was that he might have broken or dislocated a wing but, after almost half an hour of thinking about it, he finally decided....

....it was time to go - but he could not work out how to get either over or under the sheets of glass, expending....

....huge amounts of energy bashing himself against the panes until I could bear it no longer, so went out and shooed him in the right direction, after which he flew off at some speed.

We worried overnight that he still might not survive but this morning, standing at the kitchen sink and watching the tits at the peanut feeders, a familiar brown, barred shadow shot low across the road and into the gorse bush.

It could, of course, be a different sparrowhawk but it seems unlikely that a rival has moved so quickly onto our hawk's patch. So, hopefully, he has survived and learned a hard lesson.

Where Have They Gone? - 3

I spent the Easter and Summer terms of 1963 as a teacher and estate worker at Bernard Mizeki College, a boys' boarding school in the bush of what was then Southern Rhodesia. I was given plenty of responsibility, I was treated as an adult, I was worked exhaustingly hard - and I loved it.

I wasn't the only volunteer. Michael (back left) and Malcolm (foreground left) were out there under the auspices of Voluntary Service Overseas, and we messed together in one of the staff houses.

I met some very dedicated people there and the thought of seeing and working with them again was one of the factors that prompted Mrs MW and I in 1967 to chose to go to what was then Ian Smith's Rhodesia, to teach at the same school.

During the three years of our contract we renewed my old acquaintances, we met many more similar-minded people, and....

....we met relatives of mine who had long settled in the country - picture shows me with my cousin Charlotte in a maize field on one of the Kirkmans' big farms.

When, very regretfully, we left Bernard Mizeki, the leaving card from our colleagues, both teachers and support workers, reflected the variety of people who worked there.

After returning to England we kept in touch with several of them, and had news of others through them. Sadly, as always happens, the connections steadily broke down and, to make matters worse, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe was plunged into a vicious civil war.

Despite this, and despite the decades that have passed, we remained in contact with a few, so we learned that many left the country, scattered to South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and the UK, and some died well before their time.

The contacts with those happy days are now very tenuous, but because our time there was so happy, they remain very precious to us.