Long Tailed Tits

Every now and then we have a visit from the local long tailed tit gang. We had one yesterday. I was out feeding the birds when the trees and bushes around me were suddenly crowded with these....

....beautiful little birds. Not only are they very pretty to look at, but one can't help but love the cheerful, chattering....

....socialisation that goes on.

At first there seemed to be half-a-dozen or so of them, moving along the hedge that separates us from the playing field, but....

....they just kept coming, more and more of them so, after I'd counted about thirty, I gave up.

Their visits bring such joy, but they're too rare. Perhaps their numbers suggest they've had good breeding year so we'll have the pleasure of their company again soon.

Buzzards

We drove out into the hills of Sutherland today with what I like to have with me at the start of such expeditions - a mental list of things I'd like to see and photograph. Today, one item was fungi - it is their season - but a buzzard topped the list because we haven't seen one in ages, possibly as much as a month, and they should be as common as they were on Ardnamurchan and in the air above Suffolk.

However, as so frequently happens, we were most excited about something which wasn't on the list, for when we stopped the car to take this photo of an autumnal Sutherland scene we heard....

....the roar of a red deer stag in rut, something we haven't heard since we left Kilchoan.

We didn't see the stag or his harem, but when later we left the car for our walk we came across plenty of evidence of red deer.

The fungi didn't disappoint, with moments when, standing and looking around, we could count upward of five species within a few metres, many of them spectacularly beautiful.

The weather deteriorated as our walk ended and, having searched an increasingly bleak landscape, we still hadn't seen any buzzards. However, as we drove home we glimpsed a large raptor which might have been one, or might even have been something bigger, perhaps an eagle, but it was one of those frustrating, fleeting sightings in which identification was impossible and was certainly far too sudden and brief for a photograph.

So I have something to continue to worry about: where are Sutherland's buzzards?

Aurora

Although there's technology now to help, seeing an aurora is still 90% luck, around here controlled largely by the chances of clear skies. Last night I was lucky, remembering to check the Aurorawatch site, seeing, at 10.30, that there was an event in progress, and then finding the sky brilliantly clear. Sadly, although the aurora in Shetland reached an amber level....

....here is was very low, so all I could see was a faint greenish glow along the northern horizon. At least I had a good view of the Big Dipper, seen in this picture high above the aurora.

Never mind, there's a red warning for tonight but.... it's forecast to be raining here.

Balblair Bird Hide

With the weather grey and wet, and strong winds forecast, we walked in Balblair Woods this morning with the intention of stopping off at the NatureScot bird hide in the hope of seeing some of the migrants, particularly the bar-tailed godwits, which should be passing through around now.

The hide is set well back from Loch Fleet's water's edge, and with....

....such sun as there was low in our faces, the birds far away, and the light poor across the water, it was difficult to identify the species out on the loch. Geese, I think pink-footed, were constantly rising to set off for their morning's foraging but, looking at the view above, there were plenty of other birds on the water - they're visible at bottom right.

Distinguishing what was out there proved difficult. The birds in the middle distance are geese, the nearer mass of smaller birds are mainly widgeon, and....

....this shot includes geese, widgeon, oystercatchers and curlews.

We need to come at a time when the rising tide forces the birds to feed much closer to the hide. This morning we were there some two-and-a-half hours after low water, so we need to time our rival about an hour later.

Perhaps, too, I should invest in a massive telephoto lens.

A Pink-Footed Goose

The mouth of the Golspie Burn is a gathering place for birds: gulls, crows, redshanks, curlews, cormorants, the recently-arrived flock of rock doves, and a group of mallard which is attracted by the villagers who come with packets of bread, but today there was a newcomer, a....

....lone pink-footed goose. Concerned, I walked along the beach towards it but, as....

....I approached, all it could do was to turn and look at me, as if to say, "Look, please don't bother me, I'm feeling absolutely rotten and the last thing I need is.... you."

It was still there an hour later. It had managed to move up the beach to avoid the rising tide, and it had been joined by a small flock of sympathetic redshanks.

High above, a thousand of its kind were flying north, calling. I hope it recovers, I hope it's able to join its kin high in the freedom of the sky, but I'm pessimistic. I only pray that this is not the start of a bird flu outbreak amongst these huge flocks.

The Hand

When my brother and I were sent off to school in England my mother gave each of us a photo album into which she had stuck a somewhat odd selection of pictures. One has to remember that, in those days, people didn't take many pictures so she probably did the best she could to find ones that would remind us of home.

She updated the album each time we returned for our summer holidays so....

....this picture was probably added during the summer holiday of 1954. It shows the family on the day in early January of that year when my mother, Richard and I set off for Nairobi where I would join the 'plane for my first flight alone to school in England. Bunched up in my left hand is a handkerchief: I think I held it for the next two days as we drove to Tsavo to stay the first night in an hotel, and then on the next day to Nairobi.

Why my mother thought this was an appropriate photo to have in my album defeats me as it must have reminded me of one of the most miserable days of my life. It was probably photos like this which ensured that, as far as I can recall, I never looked at the album during the years I was in England.

I don't mind looking at it now. While it carries deeply unhappy memories it's a good picture of the family, but I like it for another reason. Just to the left of my father's head is a hand, waving. It belongs to Gabriel, the cheerful African Mercantile* driver, who is sitting in the car ready to drive us over 300 miles to Nairobi in the company's Morris Oxford registration number KAA694, because my father was too busy to come.

 * The company for which my father worked.

Contentment

This is a picture of someone who is very content. Other than the two people he's with, there's probably not another soul for miles. It's a grey September day but it hasn't rained, the prevailing westerly wind isn't too fierce, and it's bringing in air that has been scrubbed clean in its passage across several thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean so the view northwards is crystal clear. Across the Minch are the islands of Eigg, Rhum and the Cuillins of Skye, and in the foreground are the broken ridges which are all that remains of a 60-million year old volcano.

The hill the group has climbed is Creag an Airgid, the silver crag. It's one of the man's favourite places so, over the years, he's spent many hours wandering on and around it because the view in front of him contains layer upon layer of history, including the lost site of a battle and the fields and dwellings of an ancient, cleared village.

He's absorbed in one of his favourite pastimes, taking photographs of the view. Later, when he's home, he'll spend considerable time going through what on a typical walk might be upward of a hundred pictures, and he'll spend more time working on the best of them, editing them until he's satisfied that, within his limited skills, they're as good as he can make them.

He has known this place for twenty years, he thinks he is beginning to understand it, and he feels at home.

Photograph courtesy Rachael.

Fungi at Littleferry

Our recent visit to the woodland around Loch Fleet produced a cornucopia of fungi, most of them old friends but with one very welcome new discovery. The finds included....

....the aptly named orange peel fungus which is usually rather more orange than this and....

....this one which is jelly-like but also has teeth on the pale underside of its cap. It looks interesting but, frustratingly, I have failed to identify it.

'Old friends' include this hintapink brittlegill, a glorious splash of colour on a grey day and an easily remembered name. I'm always concerned about my identifications. This one looks quite like the sickener which is not good to eat - one website says, reassuringly, "it only makes you vomit" - but the sickener only occurs in beech woodland and this was in a conifer plantation.

This is another old friend but the first time we've found it at Littleferry. I'm fairly sure it's woolly milkcap: lovely gentle shades of colour and texture, and matchingly warm name.

I think this is a wood blewit, my main hesitation being that it was growing a long way from the nearest woodland, right out on the links, but it looked very happy and healthy there.

This is the sort of fungus that makes my day as it's a new one, an exciting find as it's such a pretty fungus and is described on one website as "Quite rare and certainly a special find." It's flaming scalycap and I'm 90% sure the identification is right, which makes a nice change!

Geese on Loch Fleet

Loch Fleet, this morning, ten o'clock, hardly a breath of wind to ruffle the waters of a falling tide or trouble the redshanks as they probed the newly exposed muds. On the far side of the loch, in front of the bird observatory....

....geese, hundreds if not a thousand of them, all, as far as I could tell....

....pink-footed.

Suddenly they were all in the air, not because they were disturbed but perhaps because one of them announced that it was breakfast time.

Some took off and turned north while others....

....circled across the loch before following them, leaving the loch....

....to the ducks and waders.

Goosanders

We drove to Littleferry this morning for a walk in the woods to find the car parks empty on what can perfectly be described as....

....a very Scottish day.

The damp woods were teeming with fungi and moulds but the highlight of our wander was when we left the forestry to walk beside the entrance to Loch Fleet where....

....a shingle bank left exposed by high tide had four large ducks - or perhaps geese - resting on it. They were unusual enough for a grey heron to have flown across the loch to inspect them and....

....they certainly weren't a species that I could identify immediately. Once home, the very red legs of the two males and the pointed bills suggested they were goosanders, a species we've seen here before on only a couple of occasions.

We then walked along an utterly deserted beach where a steady northeaster was building a heavy surf. We met no-one on the beach and, during the rest of the walk, only three other people.

Rock Doves

Just up the coast from Golspie there's a boulder spit which sticks out into the sea and is covered at high tide.  This morning, with the tide falling, in a stiff easterly breeze which brought occasional showers, the....

....flock of cormorants which seems to 'own' it were joined by....

....the usual gulls and oystercatchers and a few crows, curlews and redshanks, and by....

....a large flock of.... pigeons.

We're getting used to various land-based species exploiting the sea shore: crows are common, mostly jackdaws and carrion cows, as are pied wagtails when they're around, but.... pigeons?

They're rock doves, which were the ancestors of the urban pigeons. Today the wild version is largely confined to the north and west coasts of Scotland. Previously we've only seen one pair, at Littleferry, but today there must have been a good fifty.

Cille Choirill's War Graves

We visited Cille Choirrill's peaceful graveyard on our recent trip to Lochaber and, as I do with all the graveyards I visit, I made a point of finding the war graves. This one contains five but another of the war dead is recorded on....

....this headstone. It tells a miserable tale of successive tragedies involving one family: the little boy who died soon after birth, the sister who died aged seventeen, and the brother, Johnnie, who went to war and died "at Normandy".

There are many John MacDonalds on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's website but I discovered that Johnnie, Service Number 14296896, was a Royal Engineer, a sapper, with the 710 Artisan Works Company who died on 12 July 1944. He was the son of John and Jessie MacDonald of Speanbridge, and was buried at Hermanville war cemetery near Caen in Normandy.

Some of the stories told on the war graves headstones are minimal. This is one of millions scattered across the world and seems scant recognition for a life laid down for his country. Even the record on the CWGC website gives little more: J McArthur was a private in the 4th battalion Cameron Highlanders, he died aged 39, and he was the son of Alexander McArthur, of Achluachrach, Roy Bridge. We're not even told his Christian name, his mother isn't mentioned, and we're not told why he was buried here rather than beside the field of battle.

This is the first CWGC headstone I have seen which a family has taken over and used to record subsequent deaths. That the additional inscriptions are recorded on the CWGC's website indicates that they were added with the Commission's permission. The site has nothing to further tell about Private MacInnes.

As always, the CWGC's headstones are in superb condition despite some of them being over a hundred years old.