South Beach

There are moments when I find Golspie's south beach depressing, when I set off to walk along its smooth sands and see nothing living except two oystercatchers probing the waveline; not even dead crabs; and think, 'This beach should be crowded with waders, it should have flocks of ducks just offshore, it should have shoals of herring and sand eels boiling in the shallows, it should have sea eagles swooping to feed...."

It probably hasn't had anything like that in hundreds of years, possibly not for a thousand; which leads me to imagine what it must have been like in the early Neolithic, when our ancestors were first arriving and discovering a land untouched by humanity's cruel hand.

Things on yesterday's walk did look up a bit. A few eider were diving for food close offshore, waving at us as we passed, which cheered us, and then we spotted what we thought were small rafts of eider but which turned out to be....

....long-tailed ducks, the first we've seen since last winter. Like the eider they were concentrating on diving for food and there was none of the mad chasing by the males - of both other males and females - which seems to start later this month and makes watching this species in the mating season such fun.

Then, just as we were leaving the beach, a flight of swans passed, flying very determinedly south. They were at the limit of the camera's capabilities but clear enough for me to be fairly certain that they were whoopers.

So I walked home feeling happier, for I had seen two interesting species, but then I thought, "There is something very wrong that I am satisfied with so little. Surely, instead, I should be angry and ashamed that we have failed so catastrophically in our stewardship of our Earth."