Littleferry Again

We keep going back, time and time again, to Littleferry. There are plenty of other walks we could do within a similar distance but none have the wonderful sense of open-ness felt as one steps out onto miles of sand, particularly on a cold but brilliantly sunny morning with the beach almost deserted. More, the sea keeps changing, not only its own face - today a brisk wind was whipping up moderate breakers along the shoreline - but also....

....the structure of things into which it comes in most immediate contact, like the shape and distribution of sediment of the beach itself, as well as the pattern of erosion along the coastline. Today saw big changes in both - a hefty proportion of the sand has, once again, been removed, exposing the base layer of pebbles, and the sea is also eating in to the dunes - at right in the picture - and this before we've had a proper winter storm.

Then there's the constant changes in the wildlife along the shore. The Littleferry end of the beach used to be littered with seashells but there are now relatively few. Perhaps the molluscs are fed up with the constant removal and rearrangement of their sandy homes. Today we found few shells though those we did find tended to be razor shells.

One welcome sight was a small flock of waders performing some fine synchronised flying over the entrance to Loch Fleet. I rather assumed they were dunlin but....

 ....their beaks look too short and they have rather darker heads, so I think they may have been ringed plovers.

There is a convenient bench which overlooks the entrance area of the sea loch, and it was while we were  sitting there watching the plovers that a kestrel arrived, hovering for some time quite close to us - but over the beach and nearby sandbanks. It was in full hunting mode and at one point swooped down to land on the beach but I cannot imagine what it was looking for.

As we set off for the car we heard an unexpected song, high above us, and shortly afterwards spotted two pairs of what sounded and behaved like skylarks. Either these are late migrants passing through from their summer home in the northern isles or we have skylarks thinking of over-wintering here, something they already do further south.