A Sick Pink-foot

We walked this morning along sands at Littleferry deserted of both humans and wildlife until....

....we came upon this sad sight, a....

....pink-footed goose standing at the edge of the falling tide, quite oblivious to our approach.

The pink-footed geese aren't flying back and forth above us in their skeins of hundreds as they were a few weeks ago but we know they are not far away on the far side of the Moray Firth from the reports of bird flu outbreaks there - though there is no evidence that this bird was suffering from flu.

We left it and continued along to the mouth of Loch Fleet where the sea has been moving vast quantities of sand around. In the foreground, scattered across the seaweed-covered cobbles, there were upward of a hundred oystercatchers feeding, accompanied by gulls which, it seemed, were stealing the oystercatchers' food as much as finding their own. Beyond them, visible in the mouth of the channel, we watched a raft of eider.

We walked back along the beach to find the goose now unable to stand or raise its head. One's human reaction is to put it out of its misery - but how? On the other hand, it might yet survive as the tide won't be bringing the sea back across the sands until later this afternoon, so it has time. And, if it did survive, and if it did have avian flu, then this would be a goose with some resistance to the strain.

We left the beach having not seen another human along the mile or so of beach we walked.