Territories

It was so warm this morning that I was able to sit on the bench on the village side of Dunrobin Castle for a good half-hour, just watching the sea and the birds and exchanging comments about the weather with the occasional passer-by, every one of them accompanied by a dog or two - and thinking that the beach is like a no-man's land, the area between the wildlife's territory out to sea and on the rocks and our territory on the land.

Only the occasional oystercatcher ventured into no-man's land, walking along the sandy beach to probe for shellfish and worms, accepting that, every now and then, a human with a cockapoo or some such would come along the beach and chase them away, at which point they would retreat to the rocky point in the left distance where....

....the resident birds feel safe as no human, or dog, in their right mind would scramble across the wickedly slippery, seaweed-covered rocks to reach them. So today 'their' territory was occupied by the usual dozen-or-so cormorants, two grey herons, four black backed gulls and a handful of common gulls, a changeable population of oystercatchers and curlews, and a small flock of eider, some of them preening themselves out on the rocks. There was a conspicuous absentee, the redshanks, which seem to have completely disappeared.

I suppose that is how it is now with our wildlife. We have taken possession of most of the available space, the better space, and altered it to our needs, while they have to make do with what's left, either the places we can't reach or the places for which we have no use.