Loch Fleet

 

We walked the north shore of Loch Fleet this morning, through Balblair woods, finding the mudflats largely deserted of wildfowl with the exception of a small flock of pink-footed geese: half a dozen shelduck, a few remaining eider, a curlew or two.

I can't understand this. Judging by the worm burrows this must be a very rich environment for ducks and waders. Where are they all?

The only thing we found of interest along the shore were a few oyster shells, all very old and degraded but suggesting there are, or were, oyster beds out in the loch.

The woods were much more cheerful, full of the sound of willow warblers - though still no chiffchaffs - chaffinches, wrens, robins and other small song birds, but the highlight was an unusually close encounter with a tree creeper.

These small, unassuming birds start at the base of a treetrunk and work their way upwards, using their tail to help leverage as they probe for insects in the cracks in the bark. When they reach the top of a tree, they fly down to the bottom of the next. They're usually quite shy but this one ignored us.

Despite the deteriorating weather we walked to the usual little gravel point with its view down the loch towards the sea. The gravel supports a small meadow which is a wealth of wildflowers in summer but it's also the place where we first saw ospreys - and....

....two flew over again today. That this happened so soon after we emerged into the open, as it did last July - see post here - almost suggests that they came over to check on us before flying off to the north.

Swallows & Martins

The temperature was 2C at nine this morning and, with a stiff northeasterly blowing, it felt like winter as we set out along Golspie beach, its miles of sands occupied by a single human. From the footprints radiating out from the ramp leading down to the beach only five people had ventured onto the beach this morning, along with dogs and....

....an otter. Judging by the freshness of its prints it can't have been on the beach too long before us so we cling to the hope that, one day, we'll see one here.

I wanted to check the quarry on the golf course which the club's maintenance team use for bunker sand to see if the sand martins which dig nests into the steep face at the back of it have arrived yet. They are due from March onwards but, if they have any sense, will have delayed their return from North Africa to allow this place to warm up a bit. Disappointingly, there was no sign of them but, as we returned to the beach....

....a mass of what looked like swallows or martins were swooping low over the sand. Oddly, it turned out to be a mixture, the blacker ones being swallows while....

....the browner ones - an example is at left foreground - are sand martins. Welcome back!

A Slow Spring

George - that's the first duke of Sutherland to those who are not well-connected - watched us as we walked the tracks in the woods below Beinn Bhuidhe this morning, one of which....

....passes the spot where the stone for his plinth was quarried. It's a handsome red to red-brown sandstone which is a fine freestone - that is, it cleaves easily into rectangular blocks - which often shows structures, such as rippled marks, formed by the running water which laid the sands down back in Devonian times over 350 million years ago.

The higher woods remain unusually silent, the only bird species which is normally active being....

....the willow warbler, of which there seems to be one singing from a vantage point every hundred metres or so. We heard a few chiff-chaffs at Strathpeffer the other day, but they aren't singing here.

So far we've seen peacocks and tortoiseshells on the wing but today it was good to find a third species, the speckled brown. It was where one always finds this pretty butterfly, in a sunny clearing in the woods, but often there are several of them flying around each other.

After a cold winter it's a slow spring coming: the weather forecaster on the radio this morning suggested that this was going to be the coldest April for sixty years.

Busier Beaches

Suddenly the beaches, having looked miserably deserted these last few weeks, are beginning to look a little busier. These pictures were all taken along the pebbly beach below Dunrobin Castle over the course of half-an-hour. While....

....some of the long-time winter residents are still around - oystercatchers, common gulls, cormorants....

....curlews....

....redshanks....

....and ringed plovers - they're all looking very much smarter, as if they've put on their best to greet the seasonal returners, the....

....sandwich terns and the....

....turnstones.

Kilbraur Wind Farm

On Saturday we drove up to the Kilbraur wind farm development which extends across miles of open moorland a few miles northwest of Golspie. It's a bit like being on a huge industrial site, with all the....

....warning and information notices but with the actual working bits only occupying a tiny area of what is....

....a bleak landscape. Bleak it may be but humans have been working it for years. Today, as well as being a wind 'farm', it's part of a working cattle and sheep farm but there are plenty of signs of....

....older farming activities. We've seen ploughs cast side like this before - Glendrian on Ardnamurchan springs to mind - where the farmer seems to have suddenly given up on an almost hopeless task and, perhaps, set off for a new life in Australia or Canada. However, the farming is even older. Scattered along one ridge are the remains of Iron Age roundhouses: finding them was one of the man purposes of the visit and we failed, so we'll be back.

We followed the track into the heart of the 'farm', sited at the summit of a ridge beyond which the land falls towards Strath Brora. The towers were huge, far bigger than anything we've experienced before, and when we stood under them the blades made a not unpleasant 'whooshing' sound as they turned.

There were birds aplenty around the turbines - pipits, skylarks, wheatears and, near the lochan, lapwings - but no sign of any corpses created by collisions with the blades. It seemed to us that the birds had learned to fly a little lower.

The whole site seemed very neat and caring so, for example, there was no danger of our being unable to find our way off the site. The only distressing note was this sheep which had, as sheep so often do, managed to get itself on the wrong side of a fence and wanted to get back to its friends. 

There are 27 turbines on the farm. What seems to me to be particularly good about this development is that it's a co-operative with over 500 members - more details here.

More Nyjer Woes

Look who came to enjoy breakfast with us on a glorious April morning - the first goldfinch we've seen for some time, and what a smart one! It was good of it to drop in but.... the wretched bird is feeding in the wrong place, in the mixed seed under its jackdaw- and gull-proof wire, in with all the....

....sparrows, chaffinches, dunnocks, tits and greenfinches. It's supposed to be on the nyjer feeder, which was a couple of feet over its head, eating the nyjer I spent so much on buying just to attract the goldfinches.

I feel like giving up, except that, as soon as the goldfinch flew off, hopefully to tell all its friends what super grub there is here, one of the....

....greenfinches flew up onto the nyjer feeder. I didn't know greenfinches ate nyjer. Anyway, they're welcome to it as the goldfinches don't deserve it.

Loch Farlary Osprey

We'd only been watching an osprey working its way upwind high above Loch Farlary for a few minutes this morning when it suddenly dived and....

....picked up a fish, after which....

....it flew away southwards, suggesting that this is one of the birds.... 

....which nest at Loch Fleet.

Some hours later, on our way home, we spotted the osprey again, sitting on a fence post below the road. It then returned to his search for fish....

....starting downwind of the loch and working its way up it, going round twice before....

....being chased away by a pair of ravens.

To Tain

The most enjoyable thing about one of our occasional visits to Tain, during which Mrs MW pillages Lidl while I take a walk down to the town's pleasant frontage on the Dornoch Firth, is the wildfowl that gather close in to the shore. On a good day there can be hundreds of birds, mainly teal and widgeon but also shelduck, mallard, redshank, curlew and oystercatchers.  For a moment today the prospect was promising but a closer look revealed....

....a hundred very noisy gulls, two mute swans, one redshank....

....one pair of mallard and....

....half a dozen teal.

I didn't mind too much except that I feel I stick out amongst the other humans promenading there. They are all, without exception, being taken for a walk by a dog, and I feel a little.... ownerless.

Sparrowhawk Attack

We walked to the north of Golspie this morning, along a track which is called Queen's Drive - we assume because Queen Victoria, who was a visitor to Dunrobin Castle, drove along it - with good views south along the coast to the golf course, caravan park and Loch Fleet.

One south-facing bank along the side of the track caught our eye. Growing along it were several....

....primroses, a flower of which we saw a few some weeks ago but which has since disappeared, and the first....

....violets of the year. The paucity of primroses may be because of the weather which, while sunny during the day, brings temperatures below zero at night, and the violets seem very late in appearing.

Back at home I was on my way out with some home made bread for the small birds' lunch when a sparrowhawk took a starling not five metres from me, but collided with the utility room window and dropped the starling. It was still quivering so....

....I turned him right-side-up and left him to recover but, looking out of the kitchen window a couple of minutes later, I saw the sparrowhawk return, pick up the bird, and fly off, much to the disgust of....

....two hopeful crows.