Dippers A'Courting

We woke to a stiff westerly, a crust of slushy snow and occasional, short snow-showers, nothing to put us off from our daily walk which took us down to the Golspie Burn and onto the footbridge where we spotted....

....the two dippers we've been watching - but this time they were, despite the snow and a temperature struggling to reach 3C, evidently in....

....mating mode. I'm assuming the one on the right, which seems to have rather more white on it, is the male, as he....

....performed a short dance, twisting and turning and....

....shaking his tail at the, rather dismissive, female - rather like we used to do all the years ago.

We left them chasing each other up and down the burn but when we returned what we took to be the male was almost under the footbridge -  he's visible at bottom left - where he gave us....

....a fine photo opportunity.

Big Garden Bird Watch 2022

Our one-hour survey for the annual Big Garden Birdwatch run by the RSPB took place in our back garden, an ideal spot since it has no less than fourteen feeders permanently available and regularly refilled so it stood to yield a good count. We carried out the survey over lunch, usually a time when the feeders are busy. The weather started well, with grey skies and hardly a breath of wind but, as the hour progressed, the wind began to rise and the first rain of Storm Corrie started.

The way the survey works is that one reports the largest number of each species seen at any one time. Look carefully at this picture and you'll find no less than five blue tits, and this was the main feature of this year's survey - an overwhelming win for the blue tits, with a maximum of ten visible at one time. The trouble with a blizzard of blue tits is that they do rather intimidate some of the other birds, so we saw only two coal tits but know that there are good numbers of this species around.

The main, and very expected, finding of our little survey was the crash in the number of house sparrows: we saw only one at any time. I'm not sure what's going on with the sparrows but they tend now go around in packs so, usually, you'll either see none or half-a-dozen. This picture was taken some days ago.

Most of the other results were about right: great tits - 1, chaffinches - 5, dunnocks - 1, robins - 2, and blackbirds - 2. In all, for an hour's watching, this was a disappointing but very representative result.

Far too many birds are 'missing'. The greenfinches have disappeared again; we don't see any goldfinches; and more exotic species such as black caps and woodpeckers are absent.

So we're seeing some species, such as chaffinches, blue tits, robins, blackbirds and, perhaps, coal tits, doing quite well; we're seeing some, like the sparrows, struggling; and we're missing a number of species which used to be quite common. It'll be interesting to see the RSPB's report on the country as a whole.

Waders Along the Sands

For the first time in a few weeks we headed to the so-called 'sands' south of Golspie, expecting them to be as absent from the beach as they were the last time we walked there, to find that recent weather has brought the sand back, piling it so high that we could step directly from the ramp at the end of the promenade straight onto....

.... a seemingly limitless stretch of sand. Most of the cobbles and pebbles that formed the beach are now covered, but places where the beach sand ends and the stones begin, which were being steadily exposed by the falling tide, seemed to be the spots favoured by the waders working the beach. So today we saw....

....a small flock of some dozen or so oystercatchers and ....

....a lone and rather lonely ringed plover....

....and the occasional redshank. But the main pleasure, as always when they're on this beach, was watching....

....the little sanderlings in their never-ending, ever-busy search for a bite to eat; and they were so intent on their food that we were able to move quite close before they started to worry.

Flying to the Moon

After several fiery-red sunrises over the last few days, today, on the one morning we were up early enough to catch it, dawned grey. This was the view from the bridge across the Dornoch Firth where we stopped for a few minutes as we were early for our dental appointments in Tain. However, Fate did smile on us as....

....a small skein of six geese chose the moment to fly to within touching distance of this month's waning moon. They did well but not as well as....

....the young Ardnamurchan sea eagle which soared round and round in front of a similar moon, for long enough to be quite sure I had a good shot of him.

It's one of the joys of carrying a camera everywhere, that one does get the occasional chance of a slightly unusual picture.

Dalmanites myops

Time was when I had quite an extensive collection of rocks, minerals and fossils but I have given it away and all that remains are pictures of some of the best - see earlier post here. What intrigues me is that, although many memories, such as of people's names, are fading I can often recall instantly the identification of many of these specimens, some of which I found several decades ago.

This is a good example. I first saw a specimen of this trilobite in a drawer in the palaeontology lab at Keele University, some time between 1963 and 1967, and I subsequently found specimens during my time at Ludlow Grammar School between 1971 and 1973, when I found this particularly fine individual.

This is the head, or cephalon, of Dalmanites myops, from the Silurian beds along Wenlock Edge and I was particularly thrilled with it because it had such fine preservation of its multiple-lensed eye - to the extent that I spent hours picking it out of the rock using dental instruments which my dentist had kindly given me.

It was a labour of love but it brought some strange thoughts. This animal, whose whole group is long extinct, last saw the light of day over 400 million years ago while swimming in a warm sea. Now it seems to stare at me as if, perhaps, slightly upset at the sudden exposure.

My Father's Pubs

My father loved a good pub, by which he meant an establishment which was fairly quiet, had atmosphere, good bitter, good company, and the right sort of landlord

The pub shown here is the Cinque Ports in Old Town Hastings. It was small, didn't serve food, tended to discourage the sort of 'day tripper' who came to Hastings, and had young, very friendly landlords - sadly, I have forgotten their names.

From the time he retired to England in 1961, my father went down to the pub for a couple of beers almost every day, so he was the sort of customer worth cultivating - look carefully at the picture and you will see a cake with a candle on it, probably to celebrate a birthday. He was also very good company, so in many of the pubs he frequented a small group of regulars would form around him.

Along with the Cinque Ports, this was one of his favourites, the Ferry Inn on the Isle of Oxney near Appledore in Kent. The landlord was George and, although the pub never seemed to have many customers, my father enjoyed George's company so visited it fairly often.

It was where I found him on the day I arrived back in England from a six-week expedition into North Africa in 1964. I recall walking in through the front door of the pub and finding the bar empty except for George and my father. They turned to look at me and then turned away - and my father made some sort of derogatory comment.

I think they thought my companion, Michael, and I were gypsies or vagabonds. They certainly didn't recognise me, which isn't surprising as, during the trip, I had grown a beard. Once my father acknowledged his son we joined them for a beer, and an exceptionally good one it was.

Snowdrops

The deep woods around Dunrobin seem barren places at this time of year, with even the fungi keeping their heads down, but the area just to the south of the castle where we spotted the first snowdrops almost a fortnight ago is now....

....carpeted with them.

That there are so many and that they're so early may be caused by the weather, which is unseasonably warm. Yesterday's maximum was 8C and the thermometer didn't drop much below 6C overnight, and this warmth is expected to continue.

Not that the snowdrops are yet in full flower: we have that pleasure to look forward to.

The Hunt Continues

We've been walking more frequently recently along the coastline to the north of Golspie with its wintery views across the Dornoch Firth towards the lighthouse at Tarbat Ness. At the moment it's probably one of the best places around Golspie....

....for spotting coastal wildlife, including a small flock of cormorants and....

....rafts of eider. They're already beginning the mating game as, on a much more vigorous note, are the....

....long-tailed ducks, a species which is more common along Golspie's south beach but which we saw here for the first time today.

However, what we spend most time searching for in this wilderness of small pools and slick, seaweed-covered rocks is a glimpse of the resident otters. We know they come here, mostly because several people whom we have met along the path have reported seeing them but also because, unless I am mistaken, the....

....small piles of scat on top of prominent rocks and grassy tussocks at the back of the beach belong to otters.

Peace

If I want to imagine a place of deepest peace this is the scene that springs to mind. It is of a simple house with a palm roof and a veranda deep-shaded from the sun. It is midday, the heat threaded by the scream of the crickets in the undergrowth behind the house and stirred by a light breeze which cools the shadowed interior. Immediately in front of the veranda is a beach of coarse coral sand against which small waves break. The sand shelves away under shallow water as far as a narrow reef of ancient, eroded coral. Beyond is the azure blue of the deep Indian Ocean with, near the horizon, a small dhow, a jahazi, sped by the trade winds on its way to Bagamoyo.

I want to sit in one of those chairs and let time slide. I want to close my eyes and listen to the slap-slap of the small waves breaking and the rustle of the wind in the palms behind the house. I want to feel the heat and the breeze on my skin. I want to sit and sense the place and think of nothing.

Sparrow Bath

A year ago we were viewing our house sparrow population - or, rather, overpopulation - as something of a menace but their numbers have declined so drastically since last summer that we now worry about them. They obviously worry about themselves too, spending a great deal of their time in the tangled undergrowth along the side of our house, which makes us think that a sparrowhawk may be part of their problem.

However, there are times when one temptation is too much for them so they venture out into the open....

....and that's a bath.

Bathtime with the sparrows is a community occasion, with everyone gathering around the pool to enjoy a drink, a chirrupy gossip, and, for some of the more adventurous....

....a plunge in the pool. The female sparrow on the left went all the way, jumping into the water and....

....splashing around and getting so sodden that....

....climbing out become a problem - but not so much of a problem as to prevent her....

....leaping back in again and disappearing almost completely under water.

We now rather like our sparrows and would miss them and their antics desperately if the sparrowhawk ate too many of them.

A New Life

 I struggle to imagine what my wife thought as she travelled with me to Africa for the first time, just over a year after our marriage. Since I had already spent time at the school where we were to teach for three years she did have some idea of what to expect, but the reality of what she found when we arrived in Rhodesia must have been overwhelming. Not that I recall her being in any way worried - she seemed to take everything very much in her stride.

We were very privileged. In this view of the Bernard Mizeki campus the bungalow at top right was ours, along with a large garden which included glorious flowering shrubs like bougainvillea and passion vine and a well developed vegetable plot.  The other five bungalows were home to some of our colleagues and their families, including Pauline and Les Davis, Jeff and Pat Armstrong, Herbert and Elizabeth Katedza, and the headmaster. The school buildings, including the classrooms and boarding houses for the students, were a short walk away to the left of the picture.

One of the things which Mrs MW took to was the countryside which surrounded us. The school's lands extended over some two thousand acres, most of it bush, which featured these great piles of granite stones called kopjes - a line of them ran along the ridge behind our house. She thought nothing of walking for miles alone through this beautiful landscape with, soon after we arrived, Marx, the alsation we acquired who is seen at bottom right in this picture.

It was wild country, its main hazard being a range of quite unpleasant snakes, including cobras, puff adders, pythons and boomslangs, and there was also reputed to be a resident leopard. This was Africa. Some might have been intimidated. She loved it.

Alba na Mara

We don't see many ships in the Moray Firth but we found this one on Saturday afternoon when we were walking below Dunrobin Castle. The Alba na Mara looked like a fishing boat but she's a research vessel operated by Marine Science Scotland on behalf of the Scottish Government, with eight crew and five scientists. Her main work is on fish and shellfish stock assessment and environmental monitoring in the North Sea and off the west coast of Scotland. She was built in Fraserburgh and launched in 2008.

This isn't the first time we've seen her. She was a not infrequent visitor to the Sound of Mull, and the last time I reported seeing her in one of the Kilchoan Diary's 'Ships in the Sound' entries was in May 2017 - link here.

I just hope she finds something in the Moray Firth on which to carry out her research. That fishing boats, other than the two small inshore creel boats, are virtually absent from these waters is hardly a good sign!

A Misty Walk by Loch Fleet

Today's light southerly airstream brought us damp mists and occasional drizzle so we walked through Balblair Woods on the southern shore of Loch Fleet this morning, a walk along....

....easy paths through a variety of woodland, which had little to show of interest other than....

....the occasional nondescript fungus.

It really is a very flat time of year for wildlife so we welcomed the lack of other visitors to the woods to spend a few minutes....

....in the bird hide the overlooks the loch.

There were a good number of ducks and waders taking advantage of the mudflats being steadily exposed by the falling tide, all very peaceful until....

....a low-flying raptor disturbed them. For us it was only a fleeting glance but from its size it might have been a sparrowhawk.

The dismally poor light conditions made photographing the assembled birds very difficult but we identified widgeon, shelduck and mallard among the ducks, and oystercatchers, curlews and a small wader which might have been either sanderling or dunlin. At this time of year we had hoped to see bar-tailed godwit but, unless the birds with their heads firmly buried under their wings were godwits, we saw none.