Spring's Winners and Losers

I have never seen the gorse flowering like this before, nor for such a long time: it's definitely one of this late spring's winners. This yellow explosion runs between the road and the farm land at Golspie Tower, and we passed it on this morning's walk which took us straight up the hill past a house where....

....to our relief some house martins are building at least three nests under the eaves, collecting the mud from the banks of the small burn which runs down beside the road. There have been very few house martins - and not many more swallows - in our skies until the last two days when they've suddenly started appearing, very late to start nesting. However, we still await the return of the house martins which nested under our eaves last year.

Continuing up the hill we passed into the largely coniferous forestry that clothes the sides of Beinn Bhraggie where we found....

....the year's first bugle - included here to remind anyone interested that TMW has a pictorial record of the wildflowers of this area, link here and also in a box in the right-hand column of the blog.

If the house martins are running very late, something very serious is happening to the tits. Recently we've hardly seen any of the three species we normally watch on the feeders in our garden - blue, great and coal - nor did we hear their song today in the woodland. The only tit we saw was this one, a coal tit, with its beak full of food for its young.

Above the woods we passed through a gate and out onto open moorland where the blueberries are in exuberant flower - another winner - and, if you hunt for it, the first....

....tormentil, a four-petalled flower which is characteristic of Scottish moorlands and should be out in profusion in the next few weeks.