Washed Up

This morning we drove a couple of miles to the south of Golspie, parking near the kart track which is right on the beach, to find that, in the recent storms, the sea had come across the links, reaching a point some hundred metres or so back from the storm beach; and there was plenty of evidence of last night's high winds, with....

....a heavy sea still breaking on what is now an entirely shingle beach. Hopefully, when the sea has finished with them, the sands of our sandy beach will be returned to us.

The wildlife continues to suffer in these conditions. The first casualty we came across was a....

....fully-grown seal, cast up almost contemptuously at the top of the storm beach. Further back the remains of....

....a cormorant were tangled up in a mess of weed; even more sadly, we came across....

....a living cormorant, completely disorientated, wandering along the path. When we returned from our walk it was lying in the long grass and seemed very unlikely to survive.

Amongst other casualties, which included several divers, we found this unlikely one, a caterpillar which had drowned in the flood.

Christmas

We've enjoyed Christmases when the number sitting down together to the main meal was in the teens, and we've enjoyed Christmases when Mrs MW and I have had each other for company. This Christmas and Boxing Day were of the latter variety, the lack of visitors being exacerbated by Covid.

That we don't see our nearest and dearest at such times is the consequence of our society's peripatetic existence, so different from the days when most people lived their whole lives in one place, surrounded by their family. So, at Christmas, our children were in Scotland, Wales, England and Canada. Yet we 'saw' them all, for they gathered on Boxing Day for an hour and half's chatter and laughter courtesy the wonders of Zoom. Compare this to the years when, as young boys and teenagers, my brother and I were in England for Christmas while our parents were in Kenya, when there was no chance of speaking to them on the 'phone.

So we had Christmas by ourselves this year but we didn't stint on the celebratory meal, washed down by a bottle of Lidl's very acceptable St Emilion.

Storm Gerrit Aftermath

Yesterday was one of those days when daylight never really happened. All day a low, heavy murk was chased across us by a vicious easterly wind which gusted well over gale force, bringing frequent hard showers. Storm Gerrit finally cleared during the night leaving a legacy of tattered clouds and line after line of breakers marching in to shore to....

....hurl themselves at the newly-rebuilt sea defences which run below Dunrobin Castle, cutting the coast path in several places.

We still  haven't discovered what it is that spurs the gulls into almost suicidal attempts to land on the water to feed, risking being caught and tumbled by the breakers. We think it may be the eggs of one of the fly species which plague the beaches in summer which are washed out of the rotting seaweed by the waves. Whatever it is, judging by their numbers and efforts, it's a gull's delicacy.

The Rock Dove Flock

From a distance the barley stubble in the field just across the Golspie Burn from our house may look empty of life but often it's alive with....

....rock doves, more than we have seen in the past couple of years. They've become quite used to the human and dog traffic along the old coast track, staying - at least partly - hidden until we're quite close, before rising....

....in a dense mass to move a few tens of metres further along the field.

The truly wild rock dove, which is what these are, is relatively rare, being found only on the coasts of northern Scotland and Ireland. Unfortunately for them, their half-sibling, the urban pigeon, is embarrassingly abundant so the wild rock dove is lumped in with them as 'green' - 'common' - when their conservation status is calculated.

In some ways, therefore, it's good to see so many of them but in normal circumstances this abundance of good food should attract predators, such as peregrines: of them this area is sadly lacking.

The Nahodha's Chest

My father bought this Arab chest off a nahodha, the captain of an ocean-going dhow, in Zanzibar harbour some time in the 1930s, so it's a good ninety years old. The nahodahs would buy a new sea chest each year while loading in the ports of the Persian Gulf and then sell it along the East African coast - see earlier blog post about the chest here.

It has always been a good place to 'park' things so it was in use yesterday lunchtime, with a couple of celebratory bottles, a laptop and a speaker on it - and I suddenly wondered what on earth the nahodha would have thought if he'd seen his chest.

The bottles of wine, both from France, he'd have understood as trade goods. The laptop and speaker would have seemed like minor miracles - which, when I think of it, they are - but I don't think it would have taken him too long to catch on to some of their more simple functions. I say that having seen how totally at home his descendants in places like Tanzania are with the technology they access through their mobile phones. Finally, he wouldn't have been phased by the electricity that runs the laptop: the Gulf Arabs were frequent visitors to the offices where my mother worked, coming in, not on business but to see the Beit al Ajaib's electric lift.

Finally, I hope he'd have been pleased to see that his chest has been given years of love. We keep it as a memento of my parents' time on Zanzibar, the place where they met and married. 

Season's Greetings

 

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas!

What's in a Name?

I have four mature African violets scattered around the house at the moment and all of them are in flower. When they flower during the year seems to be a bit random but they all seem to make an effort at this wintery time, just when one most needs their cheerful colour.

I love them because, as well as being beautiful and very long-suffering, they remind me of Africa coming, as they do originally, from the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania and south-eastern Kenya. Sadly, this exotic heritage isn't reflected in their scientific name, Saintpaulia, which is in honour of Baron von Saint Paul-Illaire, a German colonial official who is credited with their discovery (by Europeans) in German East Africa (now Tanzania) in 1892. How much more appropriate it would have been had they been called Usambaria.

I think I may have been to the Usambaras. When we moved from Dar-es-Salaam to Mombasa in 1950 my mother, Richard and I stayed with people inland from Tanga. To quote from her autobiography, "The next day Marjory decided we would take a picnic up to the Agricultural Station in the Usambaras, and we set off in the car with an African driver and climbed up into the hills."

I have no recollection of that day - I would have been five at the time - but I do love the way that these two intrepid British ladies, along with two small children, 'decided' to take a picnic into the wilds of Africa.

Sticky Snow

It wasn't supposed to snow overnight but it did, this the view from our bedroom window when we drew the curtains at 7.45; and since then it hasn't stopped snowing though the forecasts keep promising it'll change to rain shortly.

It's very odd snow which has been falling in increasingly large flakes as the morning has progressed. Its main characteristic - after being wet and cold - is that it sticks to the first thing it hits. So, as well as the bird feeders....

....the branches and twigs of the trees are covered in it, few of the flakes making it as far as the ground.

We walked out into it, to find that, as well as being sticky snow, it's also very slippery snow, which is probably why the....

....A9 is virtually deserted of traffic. Looking on the on-line map, there are hold-ups in several places, including north of Brora, north of Helmsdale and near the turn to Skelbo Woods to the south of us.

Once home we set about the most important task, feeding the small birds. The wire cage is to keep the jackdaws out but the main problem is that the grain is rapidly covered by more sticky snow.

Grey, Grey, Grey

The weather is evidently exhausted from the effort of yesterday's spectacular cloud display, the colours reverting to a uniform, dismal grey: grey sky, grey sea, grey rocks, and a grey....

....heron fishing along the low-tide mark, while high above the....

....skeins of pink-footed geese call as they pass over us, illogically heading north but presumably that's where their chosen forage-field is today. One wonders which amongst the hundred-plus geese decided on today's field.

By early afternoon a cold, sleety rain was falling, the garden birds had given up on the day, and the heather hillside around the duke on his plinth at the summit of Bheinn Bhraggie was turning grey - from the winter's first dusting of snow.

Nacreous Clouds

We had some fine examples of nacreous clouds over Golspie today, the display starting around 3pm and continuing into the early evening.

The Met Office has a good description of and explanation for these rare clouds - link here - but, in brief, the clouds usually form in the lower stratosphere over polar regions when the sun is very low below the horizon. The ice particles of which they are composed are unusually small, so scatter the sunlight in a unique way, the colours being reminiscent of oil on water.

Mice

I loved being a member of Her Majesty's Coastguard, which I was for some thirteen years while we lived on Ardnamurchan, not least because I learned so much. Amongst other things, I leaned that a mouse can render a huge Toyota HiLux useless, simply by chewing through the right electrical cable under the bonnet. From this I leaned to keep an ear open for scuttlings in our house roof, because there's lots up there that mice like to chew - the lagging on the pipes and the electric wires in particular, a good chew through one of the latter being a potential cause of fire.

So, having tried several other, perhaps more humane traps in the years we had the general store on Ardnamurchan, I now deploy one of these if I have a suspicion that we have small visitors which, the other day, we had, since the warning raisin I keep in the roof suddenly disappeared. So two of these Little Nippers were deployed. Normally I catch the mouse immediately but this one had obviously come across this sort of trap before, because twice he managed to remove the raisin without springing the trap. 

Happily, for the electrics in the roof if not the mouse, I caught him this morning. In 95% of cases, the mouse's death is instantaneous but this doesn't always happen. A week or so ago I caught a mouse by his left hind leg; disposing of him was not pleasant.

My experience is that mice often come into the house in pairs, so the traps will remain armed for the next couple of days, though I would far prefer it if the mice would kindly NOT visit our house.

Birds at the Sink

I have never minded washing up the dishes. It's a brainless job so I try to organise things so there is something else to do at the same time - like watching the builders working in the next-door housing development, or the small birds at the many feeders hanging along the side of the summer house to the right of this picture.

Recently, though, I've built a feeding platform that runs along the bottom of the window immediately in front of the sink, to which several birds - like our resident male blackbird in the picture above - now come for their deluxe mixed grain. Unusually, it was the chaffinches which first plucked up the courage to visit it, followed by the coal and blue tits, followed by the blackbirds, followed by the sparrows. Some of the visitors have become....

....quite brazen, like this blackbird. It carries on eating however close I put my face or my camera to the glass.

I'm not sure what sort of blackbird it is, except that it's not one of the local males as they have very black feathers and an orange beak. It may be a local female, or perhaps a Scandinavian immigrant, male or female.

It's tough weather for the birds. We're under the cosh of a strong, cold westerly which is bringing in heavy showers which bounce over Bheinn Bhraggie to catch us unawares. In some ways it's been like an October day, with bright, sunny intervals splashing rainbows across the clouds, but mostly, with temperatures struggling to reach 5C, it has felt like winter.

Which makes me wonder why this pied wagtail is still here. Most of the Scottish ones, and particularly those who summer in the Highlands, move south for the winter, so usually we don't see any until early spring, but this one was hopping around on the Golspie sea wall yesterday, looking very much at home.

Go south, young man....

A Portrait of a Boy

This portrait of a young prep school boy was taken some time in the late 1950s when he was perhaps eleven. He's dressed to reflect his class and his time - tweed jacket, grey, v-necked tank top, grey cotton shirt and school tie. In his jacket buttonhole he has a T-bar at the end of a chain which attaches to the pocket watch which is in his breast pocket along with a small notebook. Also pinned in his lapel is a Robertson's jam gollywog, one of a small collection he has of which he is rather proud. His hairstyle is military, short back and sides and longer on top, and his ears are pink, which isn't surprising as.... 

....it's a bitterly cold day with almost six inches of snow on the ground.

That it's cold and snowy makes no difference to what he's wearing - with the exception of the tank top he wore exactly the same clothes the previous summer, although the wellington boots would only have been worn on wet days and for walks across muddy fields.

It's a continuing mystery to him that they have to wear shorts. In summer they were fine but in winter they did nothing to keep him warm. It was a relief when he moved on to public school that they all wore long trousers.

The picture was taken in morning break, after the boys had collected two sweets and a half slice of white bread, thinly smeared with margarine, from the school dining room. He is rather looking forward to the afternoon as they can't play rugby so the whole school will be involved in a 'wide game', with two teams each defending a fortress built on a knoll around which various treasures are hidden that the opposition has to find and carry back to their fortress.

He's become accustomed to being chilly through the day - the school's central heating is inadequate - but he hates the nights as he is so cold. His bedcovers are a cotton sheet, a thin, grey, ex-services blanket and an almost-as-thin eiderdown. The dormitory has no heating, a window is always open, and it isn't unusual to find the water frozen in the handbasins when they rise in the morning.

One of the masters took the photograph and gave him a print, which he stuck into the album his mother gave him when he first went away to school. He's grateful to the master: this is one of several small kindnesses he did to the boy.

Over sixty years later the boy looks at the picture and remembers those times as amongst the unhappiest of his life. He is surprised that the boys survived them so apparently unscathed; or perhaps they didn't.

Littleferry Beach

It's some time since we took our usual, and favourite walk at Littleferry, through Ferry Wood from the Littleferry Road, then along the beach to the mouth of Loch Fleet, then back to the car via the links and the wood; and a fair bit has changed.

The most noticeable change is to the beach. While there is still plenty of sand there's much less than usual, and this has resulted in the storm waves doing considerable damage to the dunes at the back of the beach.

A much more worrying change is the lack of birds exploiting the tideline along the beach. On the sandy beach we encountered just one black-backed gull, and, amongst the pebbles at the top of the beach....

....a corpse, which we identified as a juvenile gannet.

There were a few more birds at the mouth of the loch. These included about fifty eider just off-shore....

....a couple of dozen oystercatcher working their way through the cobbles that form the lower beach, and a handful of redshanks. In addition, we saw one cormorant, a curlew, and a few common gulls.

Even in the inner basin of the loch there was little to see, despite the miles of mud-flats waiting to be exploited by ducks and waders. The list of species was limited: curlew, oystercatcher, gulls, mallard and a disappointingly few widgeon.

I keep going on about the reduction in the amount of wildlife along the Golspie shores. Today showed no improvement.

A Slow Recovery

While the coast to the north of us still hasn't recovered from October and November's storms, there are the first hints of a return to normal. For a start, small patches of sand are beginning to appear, this along a beach which used to be largely sand. 

The wildlife is returning too. Today we saw....

....the largest flock of redshanks in some time, of which these are a few. They were feeding on the tops of the great banks of seaweed which have accumulated in the last few weeks.

The rock doves are still here in large numbers. They spend much of their time along the beach - they too like the piles of weed - but when they get the chance they take advantage of a south-facing roof which catches the sunshine.

We were at Tain yesterday where, as usual, Mrs MW shopped at Lidl while I walked down to check on the scalps which are usually crowded with ducks at this time of year: there were hardly any close in, the only visitors being a pair of mute swans.

High Tide

This was high tide along Golspie's promenade at 10.30 this morning, the sea unexpectedly angry, there being little wind under a still, grey overcast.

At times like this the promenade is impassible for pedestrians as the bigger waves pick up pebbles and flotsam and throw them across it. The houses that back the promenade all have concrete walls and flood-defence gates, though in storm conditions many of their gardens are flooded.

The promenade's coastal defences were probably adequate in their time but global warming is reaching this small Scottish village. New flood defences are promised, and planned, and then replanned, so little has yet been achieved. That anything is happening at all is down to the A9, the major trunk road to Wick, Thurso and the Orkneys, which passes not fifty metres away from, and parallel to the promenade, so an exceptional storm might well cut it.

Maybe Golspie's new defences will only be expedited after such an event, preferably a relatively mild one, but one which sees the A9 flooded and impassible.