An Old Friend & a New

Today we walked the length of the deciduous forestry that forms a large part of the extended grounds of Dunrobin Castle. With the long daylight hours and the recent fine weather, the vegetation has sprung into life, so everything is gloriously green.

In one of the small clearings, where the sunlight reaches down through the canopy, we came across this woodland brown. They were common in similar environments in Felixstowe, a very pretty butterfly that makes a habit of perching in a sunny spot either in a clearing or on the edge of woodland.

On Friday we walked in a totally different environment, the links area to the southwest of Golspie. The picture shows a dip between two old storm beaches, formed of large pebbles, which separate today's sand beach from the links themselves.

The links' soil is formed of shell sand blown in from the beach. Its main vegetation is grass, heather and gorse, but at this time of year the wildflowers it supports are spectacular. The carpet of yellow in both pictures is bird's foot trefoil, egg-and-bacon plant, which....

....this butterfly uses as a source of nectar.

It's a new butterfly for us, Britain's smallest, the small blue, which has a wingspan of 20-30mm. It's also fairly rare, being found in only a scattering of sites from south-central England up to the eastern Highlands, and is declining in numbers. The sole food plant for its caterpillar is....

....kidney vetch, which is only just coming out.

The Waders' Nests

We're becoming very involved with the waders' nests along Golspie beach. We were along the beach two days ago checking on them from a safe distance, and again today, and we now know that along the first section of 'wader beach' there are two nests, the ringed plover nest we found some time ago with four eggs in it, which is now 'Plover 2', and this one, which we suspected was there....

....because the second of the pair kept running down the beach as we approached, which is 'Plover 1'.

However, we have also suspected that there is a third plovers' nest, 'Plover 3', just before we reach the oystercatchers', and this was confirmed today by the presence of a very agitated pair. We haven't yet seen either of the parents actually on the nest.

We were very relieved today to find the oystercatchers, with their four eggs, are doing well. One of them was on the nest while the other, above, placed him/herself between our approach and the nest, though the one on the nest....

....had to move because a dog-walker approached from the opposite direction. She had a lovely 5-month old springer spaniel with her so we warned her about the nests, but she was much more concerned about an attack on her dog by a greyhound, which had happened a few minutes before. In this picture the oystercatchers' nest is at the top on the beach at extreme right, just in front of the dark grass.

Just past the oystercatchers we spotted what we thought might be a new nest with a ringed plover sitting on it but when he/she took off, accompanied by two other plovers, we went up to find it and couldn't. Perhaps no eggs have yet been laid and it's a lady in the process of choosing between two males accompanying her. Anyway, the proposed site of the nest is in the seaweed just to the left of the large rock in the centre of the picture. We'll check again when we next pass.

Wildflower Update

I'm doing my best to educate myself on the huge variety of wildflowers in the area, this variety being encouraged by the many different environments through which we walk. As I think I have successfully identified a flower, something which has been greatly helped by the gift of a super book of wildflower photos by our old friends the Hizzards, I add it to the Wildflower page - there's a permanent link in the right-hand column of this blog.

This is blaeberry in flower on the open hillside just below the Beinn Bhraggie summit, while....

....this is water avens, a few of which are growing in the damp soils along the Golspie Glen.

Some of the colours in these flowers are breathtaking. This beauty is purple milk vetch, found in the grassy verges and, in some numbers, along the links between Golspie and Littleferry. Its colours vary, from this blue end of the purple spectrum to a much more pink version.

This single specimen was found along the track rising from Golspie Tower into the Beinn Bhraggie forestry. I have no idea what it is, despite considerable efforts to identify it both in my new book and on the internet, which irritates me as it is very pretty - an irritation aggravated by my failure to find it again, despite two searches. Perhaps its a cultivated flower which has escaped from a garden. Any ideas?

Deciduous Forestry

I feel hemmed in by woodland but there's a huge difference between the dark and often very silent oppression of thick coniferous plantation and the more open and, at this time of year, wonderfully fresh deciduous forestry that can be found in places both on the slopes of Beinn Bhraggie and in Dunrobin Woods. The deciduous or mixed woodland also, from our point of view, has the added advantage of being....

....where we are most likely to see the larger local wildlife, like roe deer. After the pleasure of watching a very laid-back young roebuck the other day - see post here - we came across this roe hind who seemed equally at ease watching us watch her.

We are exceptionally fortunate in having such a wide variety of habitats in which to walk and enjoy nature. That we arrived here in winter and have been able to follow each of them in their progression into summer has been an added bonus.

The Waders' Nests

Each time we walk along the beach we keep our eyes open for activity around the waders' nests we've found. As far as the ringed plovers are concerned, we are now fairly certain that there are at least three nests. One way of checking them is to search with the binoculars for a plover at the top of the beach which is very still and looking away from our approach.

This appears to be the one of the pair who is on guard duty, watching out for intruders like us. He or she only moves if we come too close, at which point the parent sitting on the nest....

.... gets up and moves stealthily away from it. He/she seems to avoid flying, probably because this will draw attention to the location of the nest.

The oystercatchers' nest in the sand at the very top of the beach is all still active. The parent on the nest moves away from it almost as soon as he/she sees our approach. If the other parent is around he/she may get up into the air and scold us noisily or....

....make a very visible walk down the beach in front of us to attract our attention and lure us away from the nest. From seeing this behaviour further down the beach we think there may be two more oystercatchers' nests, probably more wisely located amongst the pebbles of the storm beach.

We haven't approached any of the nests and all are in enough of a depression to be invisible from the lower beach.

Jellyfish

Golspie beach was deserted this morning, even though it is bank holiday Monday. From the tracks at the bottom of the access ramp two people and a dog had walked onto the beach before us but there was no other sign of them.

After a few days of damp and windy weather, the wind mostly from the west, the main difference on the beach was the number of jellyfish. We must have seen upward of thirty, including....

....moon jellyfish and....

....what seemed, from their colour, to be compass jellyfish.

The most common jellyfish on the beach was the blue jellyfish but we found considerable variation in colour, from the almost purple through semitransparent to....

....this paler one with its strange white structures. All these jellyfish have been floating around in the North Sea through the winter, growing steadily, but why they should suddenly start coming ashore now is a bit of a mystery.

None of them was above 10cm in diameter. However, if this is the first batch of this year's crop ashore, we're looking forward to some much bigger ones as the season advances.

Small Bird News

I cannot find it in me to be charitable towards the local crow population which spends much of its time trying to get at the small birds' food, often with some success - which infuriates me as I spend hours inventing more and more complicated ways of excluding them. Occasionally, however, they do provide us with some entertainment, like the other evening when dozens of them gathered in one corner of the graveyard opposite the house to shout down at something obscured by the wall. They spent some minutes at this, then flew away, but kept coming back in smaller groups to shout some more. I went across to discover the object of their fury, to find nothing there. Group hysteria, I presume.

The gulls and starlings, but not the crows, use the small birds' bath for their ablutions. I haven't the heart to chase them off but my dislike of the gulls increases - a pair are now adding insult to injury by nesting on our chimney pot, from where they can nip down to pinch the small birds' food. Lying awake in bed at three in the morning listening to the two of them canoodling just above one's head is no fun.

On a much more cheerful note, we found this very smart male wheatear posing in a small grove of spruce on the moorland at the back of Beinn Bhraggie. Wheatear are unusual amongst birds in that the female, in her summer clothes, is more colourful than the male.

For some of our feathered regulars, rearing the family is surprisingly advanced. Both the chaffinches and the sparrows are bringing young into the feeding area, although the young, despite the masses of food lying around, refuse to feed themselves.

We were thrilled to see house martins starting to build a nest under the eaves at the north end of the house. At one point seven birds were involved. Whether this was a pair with some of last year's young helping, or whether we're going to end up with several nests, or whether they'll all change their minds and decide to nest elsewhere, remains to be seen.

At Golspie Tower we finally saw a yellowhammer, a male camouflaging himself amongst the gorse while he sang. We hosted heaps of yellowhammers at our feeders in Kilchoan, which seemed a totally inappropriate place for a bird of open fields. This pair are in the right place, surrounded by big fields and plenty of gorse to hide in.

Another new bird for us here is the linnet. Pairs have been feeding in the playing fields round the house but have yet to come close enough for a good photo. The male linnet always looks as if he's just come back from a rather bloody fight.

This newcomer is particularly welcome as one of the birds for which I have a very soft spot. It's a siskin, a female, and she brought her very smart mate along shorty afterwards to show him the feast that was on offer but, sadly, we haven't seen them since.

Long Bay Recalled

Sometimes a memory hits me so hard it overwhelms me, as happened this morning when we were walking along the coast track beyond Dunrobin Castle and looked along this bay. We've walked this way many times before and those occasions triggered nothing, but today there was a strong onshore breeze bringing breakers tumbling onto the beach, the sky was startling blue, and I remembered....

....this place, a bay along the much less frequented east coast of Jamaica, where we stopped the car just before we arrived at a lovely beachfront hotel called Long Bay. I think I took this picture the first time we went there but we returned as often as we could.

I'm not sure whether it is that I have this faded picture that the memory of the place and the moment is so vivid, or whether I would have remembered it anyway, but for a few seconds I was back there.

Link to earlier post about Long Bay here.

Calm

We were forecast a rain sandwich today, bright sunshine morning and afternoon with a filling of heavy rain and wind through the midday. The latter didn't happen, the morning's sunshine being followed by a heavy and breathless overcast.

We do wonder what people do with themselves as, at mid-morning, the Co-op was virtually empty of customers while the beach along the village's seafront was deserted except for....

....a lone fisherman on the end of the pier, the first we've seen and a man who must have, even for a fisherman, a profound optimism as the Moray Firth appears to us, from our wanderings along the beach, to be virtually devoid of marine life. It can't be, for....

....Golspie's one commercial fisherman had been out working the creels he sets close inshore along the coast and he seemed to believe the forecast as....

....he came hurrying in to berth against the pier.

The Lactic Ladder

The Lactic Ladder is one of the few mountain bike trails which leads up from the Beinn Bhraggie forestry....

....onto the open moorland, passing though a gate in the deer fence and across a cattle grid. It's presumably so-called because....

....it rises in a series of ten hairpin bends to reach the 300m contour. The name, a reference to the use by the muscles of lactic acid when energy runs low, makes it sound steep but to walkers like us it seemed a gentle stroll compared to the more direct route to the summit which we've followed before. For a start, much of it is paved with big blocks of sandstone, some of them....

....showing interesting ripple marks, reminders that the original sands were laid down in a river or delta during the Devonian period some 400 million years ago.

As always on these walks there was lots to interest us, including some very pretty little moths, blueberry flowers, tormentil, the first cotton grass and, high above us, three buzzards wheeling and calling.

The route looks across the Golspie Glen, in which cuckoos were calling as they were when we last came this way, to Beinn Horn. At bottom left is a camper van with a tent pitched against it, with a surf board on its roof.

The cycle route meets the track that circles round the back of Beinn Bhraggie, along which the stone was brought up to build the Duke of Sutherland's statue and its plinth, down which we turned to make our way home.