Tain Ducks

We made one of our occasional forays to the Royal Burgh of Tain where Mrs MW visited Lidl to do a big Christmas shop while I set off for a brisk walk to....

....the small but very neat park which is Tain's frontage onto its scalps, the muddy area which the people of the burgh used to exploit for shellfish. It, in its turn, fronts onto....

....the Dornoch Firth. On the skyline at centre in this picture taken looking north across the firth stands the statue of the Duke of Sutherland atop Beinn Bhraggie while the buildings running along the far shore are those of another royal burgh, Dornoch.

I visit the scalps at this time of year to see the ducks and waders, of which there are usually several hundred, but the tide was high so only one or two waders were visible. The relatively few ducks bobbing around offshore, two hundred at most, were keeping themselves segregated from a large flotilla of gulls.

The ducks were a mixture of teal and widgeon. The females are difficult to tell apart at this range and the males of both species have chestnut brown heads but the teal males have a green bar across the tops of their eyes while the widgeon males have a pale yellow bar running down the front of their faces.

We've seen a number of widgeon on Loch Fleet but this is the first sighting this year of teal - those are teal on the land while the distinctive yellow faces of male widgeon are visible at left and in the foreground.

The local mallard had more sense than to bob around in the firth's stiff breeze, preferring to join a swan on the park's ornamental pond where a platform is provided from which the local children throw them bread.