Gannets

We stood for some time this morning on the beach at Littleferry looking across the Dornoch Firth towards Tarbat Ness lighthouse, with only the first breaths of a breeze fingering the sea. At first the sea birds, mostly gulls, seemed to be flying aimlessly but that changed....

....with a slight rise in the wind and the arrival of gannets, just a few at first but then more and more, so we watched....

....the way they folded their wings and plummeted into the water, but they reappeared quickly so whatever they were hunting was swimming shallow, possibly sand eels.

We also noticed that many of the gannets weren't white but either brown or speckled, so these were juveniles or birds in their first full summer, for whom the shallow, protected waters of the firth must be an ideal nursery.