Wet Woodland Walks

For the last two days the wind has been firmly in the northeast drawing cold, damp air from Norway down across the North Sea into northern Scotland. In the face of winds at force four to five, persistent rain, and temperatures struggling to reach 7C, we've walked in the protection of the woodlands that surround Golspie. Yesterday we spent an hour or so wandering through the woods around Dunrobin Castle where the bluebells are nearing their best before....

....coming down to the coast and, with the wind and rain now behind us, following the beach back to town.

There wasn't much to see in the way of shore birds but, where we expected to see them we instead....

....found swallows, huddling down on the sand. I can only think that, with a severe lack of flying insects, they were doing this to conserve energy. Certainly, we were able to approach very close before, reluctantly, they took off. With the weather today, if anything, colder and wetter that yesterday, we also noticed an almost total lack swallows and martins on the wing.

Today's walk was in Balblair Wood near Littleferry. Had the sun been out this would have been a cheerful picture illustrating, as it does, the one plant that seems to be thriving in this miserable weather: gorse.

Much of the walk was along the shore of Loch Fleet where we hoped to see an osprey. In the event we saw very little. In this picture a small group of eider are attended by a couple of gulls and a cormorant, but elsewhere on the loch all we could find was the occasional curlew, a dozen or so shelduck, in pairs, a few mallard and, on the rapidly flooding sandbanks on the far side of the loch, about fifty seals.

The weather promises to improve tomorrow. It can hardly get much worse.