This morning's walk along Golspie's south beach on a fine if cool morning was rather overshadowed by....
....what was washed up along the tidelines, starting with hundreds of jellyfish - mostly moon jellyfish with some blues - but then followed by....
....the bedraggled corpses of seabirds. The crows may have been enjoying themselves but we had to bear the sight of a guillemot - the most common of the birds washed up along this beach - and....
....a razorbill and, saddest of all perhaps, the corpse of a very healthy-looking....
....black-throated diver, a species we haven't seen along this coast before and of which there are only a couple of hundred breeding pairs in the UK.
We assume that these are the latest casualties of the bird flu epidemic which seems now to be centred on the Shetland Islands. The number of deaths should have fallen with the coming of more summery weather but there's no sign this is happening.
No comments:
Post a Comment