Primarily, a good walk needs to have something new or unusual, something to provide a moment of excitement, so today's wander at Littleferry gave us masses of jellyfish along the high-tide line, mostly moon with some blues, but the unusual, perhaps rather unpleasant sight of their decomposing remains being covered by....
....a seething mass of sand fleas (also called sand hoppers). One would have expected the beach to have been crowded with sea birds feasting on this bounty but the only birds along Littleferry's beach were....
....the sad remains of the H5N1 'flu outbreak, many of the skeletal corpses being steadily and decently buried by drifting sand.
Also new on today's walk were these two birds. They may be rock doves, the truly wild version of Columba livia, but the rock dove is the ancestor of our feral pigeon, one of the scourges of city living. That the identification is correct is supported by the fact that we've not seen feral pigeons here in Sutherland while the wild rock dove is only found along the north and west coasts of Scotland.
A good walk also needs the reassurance that life is appearing at the right time in the right numbers and in the right places in the cycle of the year. So today we found six-spotted Burnetts in good numbers on the links....
....and we saw that the creeping lady's tresses were growing in their customary two places in the pine plntation....
....and we found two of the damselfly species in their usual spot along the bank of Loch Unes.
A good walk also needs to provide reassurance so, with so many sea birds dying it was good to look across the mouth of Loch Fleet to the Embo side and see twenty or more terns - too distant to distinguish the species - resting on the beach in the close company of as many oystercatchers.
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