Bird Flu

Each time we walk along the beaches up and down the coast from Golspie we are amazed that we encounter so few other humans - which is good in many ways including that this....

....bench, one of only a few along the beach at Littleferry, is usually free for us to sit and ease our aching bones. But the other day we didn't stay long because the remains of a bird, possibly a small goose, was tucked up under one end of it.

These sad corpses are everywhere. Worse, perhaps, we are seeing so few of the ducks and waders which would usually be exploiting the rich sands and muds of Loch Fleet. We see the remains of the larger birds but fear that the corpses of the smaller ones, the ringed plovers, sanderlings, turnstones, dunlins, are probably lost amongst the seaweed along the high-tide line.

The current H5N1 flu outbreak is a slow-burning disaster that will affect our bird life for years.