Golspie's beach has been a disappointment over the last few months so, as we stepped out onto it under a grey sky this morning, we didn't have any expectations.
The eider were still there, patrolling off shore in groups of twenty or so, nervous and harassed as usual by the local gulls. Every now and then they seemed to get themselves organised and, all at once, dived, leaving the gulls bobbing around on the surface.
I don't remember eider being off the beach at the time last year, and they certainly weren't around during the summer. I did think they migrated north to breed, to places like Iceland, but perhaps these ones nest somewhere not far from here.
Some of the rafts of eider were close in to where the seaweed-covered boulders met the sea, and to where a flock of ten or more redshanks were feeding along the shore. We've seen the occasional redshank all winter but not in these numbers.
We also haven't seen one of these for some time, a red-breasted merganser patrolling off the beach with its mate.
As we approached the furthest point of our walk, where the open links start beyond the kart track, Mrs MW spotted, high above the forestry, what appeared at first sight to be....
....a lone buzzard wheeling against the clouds but....
....as it came closer it was obviously the wrong shape and size for a buzzard, and could only be....
....our first sighting this year of one of the ospreys that nest along the shores of Loch Fleet in Balblair Woods.
The ospreys return from West Africa from mid-March onwards, so this one may have been here for up to a month already.
As we walked back, very much cheered, the clouds cleared and the sun came out along the beach.
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