Across an Ocean and a Continent

I accept that I will probably never again set out on a journey anything like as long as the one we embarked upon in September 2008, so there is a bitter-sweet pleasure in recalling it. As with our first trip to Canada in 2006, there are moments which I vividly recall, like this one, when we stood on the cliff above Dover's ferry terminal and looked across the bay to the cruise ship which would carry us across the Atlantic to the New World. Anticipation, excitement, perhaps trepidation, and certainly some worries about what our first experience of cruise ship travel would be like - so many emotions overwhelm one at such moments, emotions which, now, one would dearly love to relive.

The North Atlantic gave us plenty of variety, whales and dolphins, dead calms, a day exploring Iceland, and a passage through the tail-end of Hurricane Ike, before, on the 24th September, we made landfall at St John's, Newfoundland, a superb natural harbour into which we really did not believe our ship would fit. It would have been perfect to have started our trans-Canadian journey from there but we were obliged to carry on to New York, whence we took a train to Toronto and then joined The Canadian for a three-day journey to Edmonton.

From Edmonton we hired a car to drive northwest to Dawson Creek in British Columbia and then south, via Fort George, Kamloops, the US border at Osoyoos and the Cascade Mountains to the Pacific coast near Seattle, which we reached on 26th October.

We flew back to London and then took the Caledonian Sleeper from Euston to Fort William, waking on Rannoch Moor to a scene which might have been straight out of the Rockies.

Long-Tailed Ducks

We walked the slippery pavements of Golspie to reach its south beach this morning, to find that Storm Arwen had removed most of its sand, leaving us with an algal-slippery concrete ramp and several metres of equally slithery rocks to negotiate to reach the beach, something we weren't prepared to risk, so we....

....walked along the top of the sea defences, straying at times onto the deserted golf course before finally reaching the second point where it's possible to....

....access what's left of the sandy beach. With the exception of one man walking his dog, we had it to ourselves, the only shore life being....

....a few scattered oystercatchers.

However, we were provided with some entertainment when we spotted two female long-tailed ducks offshore which were later joined by....

....several of the now very smartly attired males who set about courting them with concentrated vigour. This romancing consists of almost constant pursuit - the female is on the left - accompanied by flapping of wings, splashing, synchronised diving and, when the female takes off....

....a mad scramble to catch up with her.

Some, obviously, had given up, and one presumes that this is the idea, that the female ends up with one, very exhausted, suitor.

As we walked home the snow was beginning at last to thaw, and we are forecast rather warmer weather for the next couple of days, before the thermometer plunges again next weekend.

An Eagle

Storm Arwen saw winds gusting well over gale force here, nothing compared to the 98mph recorded in Northumberland but probably the fiercest since we've been in Golspie. In the late evening the northwesterly swung quickly into the north to bring curtains of almost horizontal snow, the flurries continuing into daylight hours.

This morning we walked, very gently, by the sea. The NS Elida was still anchored out in the firth, occasionally obscured by passing snow showers. Between them....

....we enjoyed welcome bursts of warm sun, but what made the walk special was the sighting of....

....the first sea eagle since we've been here. I was convinced it was a sea eagle but two passing Geordies, both with binoculars, also found it and one averred that he could see its white tail. It's barely visible in the centre of this picture.

Storm Arwen

So Storm Arwen has arrived, bringing the first real gales of the winter. While Golspie has an amber warning for wind and a yellow for snow, areas to the south and east of us are set to fare far worse, possibly up to 90mph. The Met Office is promising us gusts to 52mph this afternoon and....

....while there's sleet and the occasional snowflake mixed in the rain at our level, his lordship is freezing in the first settling snows of the winter up on Beinn Bhraggie.

We have a walk designed for this weather which involves being blown down the hill to the A9 and across it to the Golspie Burn then, with the wind behind us to give our old bones a helping hand, along the shore path to Dunrobin Castle.

Today, along the sea edge, the cormorants and gulls seem unphased by the wind and even less interested in the unusual sight of a ship anchored offshore. She's the....

....NS Elida, an offshore tug and supply ship built seven years ago and registered in the Cayman Islands.

We rarely see ships anchored offshore, even for shelter in bad weather, so the Elida's master is either in no hurry to reach his destination or he's genuinely worried by the forecast.

The return leg of our foul-weather wander, which is largely into the wind, is through the forestry where the wind is much less fierce and a minor danger might be from falling dead branches.

We enjoyed our walk, wet as we were when we arrived home, not least because we met a very cheerful young couple who were walking from Brora to Golspie as part of an adventure. Having paddle-boarded from Land's End to John o' Groats, they're now using their camper van as a base to walk back to Land's End.

Faraway Beaches

We are so, so fortunate to have these many miles of almost deserted sandy beach within a few minutes' walk of our front door, particularly on bright, sunny days, and we should bless that good fortune and be deeply satisfied. The trouble is that I look at a Scottish beach with its chill wind and grey sea and recall....

....beaches we have walked before, tropical beaches, where a light wind caresses our skin, the sun is warm across our shoulders, and the sea is inviting; and when we look at the thin collection of birds along the local beaches we recall....

....the exuberance of the life along tropical shores.

Would it have been better, then, never to have visited Maziwi Island - no more than a shelf of shallow water with a bank a few hundred yards long formed of coral-white sand off the coast of Tanzania - to spare myself the pangs of memory?

No. I'm glad we visited it, experienced it, and that I remember it so vividly. I just wish I could dampen the yearning to be back there.

Low Tide

Other than the two days a week when we volunteer at the Alzheimer shop in Golspie, we usually walk in the mornings, perhaps two to three miles, and where we go is partly determined by the weather and the state of the tide. For example, we can only get down from the end of the promenade onto Golspie's south beach during about a week each lunar month as the time of low tide moves through the morning. So today, with low tide at 07.59, light westerlies, blue skies, and only the occasional heavy shower, that is where we headed.

As usual there was hardly another soul on the beach, and even looking at the tracks of those who had already come and gone, I doubt whether the beach saw twenty people before the tide ran in to cover it. Nor did we see much of interest along the beach: the only shore birds were a dozen oystercatchers which we disturbed feeding on the tide line.

Despite an air temperature of 4C, the sun was gloriously warm on our faces as we walked south in the direction of Littleferry but our time on the beach was limited by....

....the way it narrows as it approaches Golspie and the point where a concrete ramp - just beyond the dog-walker - is the only access from the promenade.

As we walked back - and reached the ramp almost at the same moment as the incoming tide - we searched for birds out at sea, finding a couple of cormorants, a small raft of eider, what may have been a merganser, and....
 

....these two. They're long-tailed ducks, the first we've seen this winter. Last January - see post here - we saw small flocks of them, the males at that time in their black-and-white mating finery and long tails, and very actively quarrelling over the drabber females.

King Robin

As winter closes in we are witnesses to a series of bird battles which seem almost comical but which are, in fact, deadly serious. They are about territory, for domination within a territory, particularly a rich one like ours with its multiple feeders, offers the best chance of survival through the cold months ahead.

The main protagonist is a robin, perhaps one of the most aggressive of his species we have ever encountered. He takes on everything - house sparrows, dunnocks, grey, blue and coal tits. In the picture he's seen defending 'his' new bird feeder against a blue tit and a coal tit.

This time last year we had four robins in the garden. This year, although we have seen a second robin on a couple of occasions, this one seems to reign supreme. However, he has a long road ahead of him, one which we will watch King Robin tread with great interest - and some amusement.

A Log of Jellies

We had been walking through Dunrobin Woods for over an hour this morning without seeing anything worthy of a picture when, in the last quarter mile, we spotted two blobs of jelly on a large rotting log. Each was about 30mm in diameter and had....

....no real structure within them. However, they were closely associated with purple structures which may be....

...the purple jelly disc fungus Ascocoryne sarcoides. However, there is nothing on the First Nature website, which is good on fungi, to suggest there is any connection between the two.

Another blob of jelly, much the same as the first two, was on a nearby branch of the same log and, perhaps coincidentally, it also had a purple jelly fungus close by. I have tried on the internet to find a jelly fungus to match the jelly-like one, without success.

Excited by these finds I looked under the log to find yet more fungi. I think there may be no less than four more species here, starting with the one at bottom left which is similar to the first large jellies but is more opaque and has a little more structure to it. Then....

....there's the orange one, which may be Phlebia radiata, the wrinkled crust fungus. The third species is seen in the bottom centre of tha above photo, with a sort of trumpet structure. Th nearest I can find to this is the tripe fungus - what a lovely name - Auricularia mesenterica, but I really am guessing.

Lastly, there's this one, which may be the same species as the previous tripe one, although it is quite a bit larger.

If.... if I'm right with these, there are perhaps six different jelly fungi on the same rotten tree. Fungi spread through their spores which are blown by the wind, so what is there about this particular rotten log which enabled it to collect and nurture so many different fungi?

Rainbow Weather

On a day of bright sunny intervals....

....strong westerlies bringing sudden heavy showers and the consequent accompanying....

....rainbows, we walked from the Littleferry road through Ferry Woods to an almost completely deserted beach - deserted both of shore birds and of all but two other humans. However, we found a few eider in the mouth of Loch Fleet, through which the rising tide was running strongly, steadily....

....inundating the sandbars in the outer section of the loch where....

....a mixed flock of oystercatchers, ringed plovers and dunlin had collected.

The inner section of the sea loch had more birds on it than we have seen in a long time, including....

....a large flock of widgeon.

Winter is coming in quickly now. Most of the deciduous trees have lost their leaves and the brief warm spell of the latter part of last week has given way to much colder temperatures, with sub-zero temperatures and the first snow forecast for later this week.

Small Bird Update

We had a very welcome visit the other day from a gang of long-tailed tits, a cheerful twittering mob. There must have been ten or more of them, and they were trying to get on to the feeders in the front garden in the rapidly-gathering dark: as a result, several flew into the window panes, fortunately with no ill-effects.

Almost as soon as I wrote the other day that we were rather short of great tits, a pair appeared and have since been fairly regular visitors. Another welcome returner has been....

....a pair of collared doves, one of which managed to find its way into the cage that protects the small birds' grain. I had fears that it wouldn't be able to get out again and that I would have to go and release it - probably minus some feathers - but it proved me wrong.

We have yet another bird feeder, a small table made of a tall vase I found in the charity shop. It too has a wire cover, part of a hanging basket. Unusually, it was a robin that found the seed first, followed by a blue tit and a house sparrow.

This protecting the bird's seed with wire cages is all the more necessary as....

....after being absent for some time, the jackdaws are very much in evidence in the garden and very busy probing all my defences, so far, I'm pleased to report, with little success.

A Fungal Infestation

We were walking past the immaculately-maintained grounds of the Golspie Bowling Club this morning when we noticed that the gravel which the members have recently had laid between the green and the A9 has been infested with an exceptionally vigorous fungus.

The infestation appears to be centred on an old tree stump which is rotten in the centre, and has poured out to spread for as much as ten metres, with satellite fruiting bodies popping up all over the gravel.

One of the species which does this is the honey fungus, Armillaria mellea. It uses fine mycelial threads to link an infected tree to a new host tree up to several metres away. The First Nature website (here) says, "This parasitic fungus can do immense damage to forests. It attacks both coniferous and broad-leaf trees. By the time the fruit bodies are in evidence, the damage internally is usually so great that the tree is doomed."

It may be that the trees whose stumps line the wall were attacked by the fungus and had to be chopped down, which hasn't deterred the fungus from continuing to grow. I'm just happy that out garden isn't next door to the Bowling Club.