Highland Weather

Anyone who lives in the highlands of Scotland has to put up with this sort of weather: cold, windy, wet - a dreich day as the Scots would put it. To some extent we walk as the day's weather dictates so we started the morning in the relative shelter of the woodland between Littleferry and the main basin of Loch Fleet, where we found....

....a good selection of fungi and slime moulds enjoying their favourite weather, particularly this slime mould, Tubifera ferruginosa, which does look remarkably like caviar served with tomato sauce.

Eventually the weather relented so, with some blue sky visible, we walked to the beach, to find....

....the tide running out strongly from Loch Fleet and a mass of birds playing in the current swirling around its entrance. While there are the usual crows, seagulls, cormorants and oystercatchers in this picture, most of the birds, and particularly those in the 'raft' a little further out, are....

....eider. A few females have spent the summer here, some raising their broods on Loch Fleet, but many of these are males which have only just reappeared. The excitement, and there was plenty of the sort of the hooo-hoooing which eider make, may have been old friends and partners greeting each other.

There are big changes happening along Littleferry's beach. The sand to the right is the narrow beach we've worried about all summer, the mound to the left is the sand we lost last winter being brought back by the sea, so it looks as if we might have a good, wide sandy beach to wander this winter.

By the time we left the beach and headed back towards the car the weather did what highland weather so often does - changed suddenly and completely, giving us such warm sunshine that we sat for some time on a bench basking in it and enjoying the emptiness of the place. This unpredictability is one of the things I love about the highlands, and the wonderful clarity of the air that follows a good washing.