Spring Walk

The bright, warm spring weather continues so when we set off on our morning walk the red admiral was already out and about, sunning himself on one of the garden walls - but he was the only butterfly we saw in a two hour wander.

This took us up to Backies to collect a dozen croft eggs and then back down through pine and spruce forestry and some ancient oak woodland where we saw the next great marker of oncoming spring....

....the first wild primrose flowers.

However, what we most noticed were the birds and their song, with the first chiffchaffs calling and....

....two bluetit males having about as close to a fight as these lovely little birds could come. The confrontation was contactless and started....

....on the ground, with the two cocks taking turns in flying up into the air over the other and then dropping back, alternating with gymnastic face-offs....

....in the lower branches, followed by aerial acrobatics in....

....the uppermost twigs.

The object of their rivalry, a female, appeared occasionally to check on how the boys were getting on but, when we left, after watching them for about ten minutes and taking about eighty photographs in an attempt to record their behaviour, the two males were still at it.

Our walk took us home along a section of Golspie Glen where the burn runs below some huge fallen blocks of the local red sandstone. There we spotted our dipper pair, usually seen a half-mile further downstream by the footbridge. One is at bottom centre of the picture, the other at bottom right - but what interested us was that one of them kept flying up to explore the horizontal crack between the masonry blocks, exactly the sort of place that dippers favour for a nest.