Orchids

This morning we walked the steep uphill of the track that runs from Drummuie towards Loch Lunndaidh in muggy weather and under a sky which well illustrated the forecast for later today. The lower section which passes through mixed woodland, was....

....full of birdsong, and we stopped for a few minutes to watch the antics of this warbler family, possibly willow warblers.

We've found orchids along this track in previous years but this year is special. There were masses of very pale heath spotted orchids and perhaps even more....

....of what I think are marsh fragrants which Mrs MW, who has a better nose than I, declared to be wonderfully scented.

Time was when we would have cheerfully continued on to the loch itself but these days we have to be more careful, stopping at the point where the track emerges onto open moorland to sit on a convenient rock and look out at a view that stretched across Loch Fleet towards the distant Ross-shire hills.

Urban Roe

This rather fine stone-walled house is just the other side of the Golspie Burn, upstream from the footbridge. We passed it this morning on our way to the woods but Mrs MW noticed, just to the left of the large grass tussock at centre of the picture....

....a roe deer. It stood absolutely still, watching us, apparently quite unconcerned, even though we might have had a dog with us and it was only about twenty metres from us.

It was as if it was determined to out-stare us, and only moved off when....

....we crossed the bridge and approached a little closer - and even then it was in absolutely no hurry.

Urban Bullfinches

We walked along Back Road in Golspie this morning, a road which, as its name suggests, runs along the back of the village. This resulted in cars following the A9 using it as a short cut to avoid Main Street, so some fairly fierce sleeping policemen were installed, which has largely solved the problem.

The road's now mostly used for local access and, as we discovered....

....by bullfinches which were intent on the litter under the beech trees - perhaps their flowers. This male was so busy that we were able to approach to within five metres before he, very reluctantly, moved....

....flying up into an overhanging branch until we'd passed before....

....returning to the road, this time with his mate.

A Wander Through Trees

I spent half-an-hour this morning alone in an area of croft land west of Dornoch, doing little but wander through the relatively-recently planted trees in bright sunshine, listening to the birds - willow warblers, chaffinches, blue tits, crows - and marvelling at the number of....

....northern marsh orchids, far more than last year but most of them half the usual height, perhaps because of the dry weather.

This orchid species dominates this part of Sutherland, search as one may for others, but it's good to see it thriving and it does make some effort at variety by....

....appearing in several shades, from a purply-blue through to almost pink.

Quiet, contemplative time like this is so refreshing for the soul and so easy to find.

Sycamores

We've noticed that a number of young sycamores are growing along the top of the storm beach just to the north of Golspie. They must be pretty hardy to have survived the winter gales and salt spray.

I assume they grew from seeds - known as 'keys' - blown along the coast from a number of big sycamores in the castle's forestry a few hundred metres to the northeast but this species is a master at seizing the opportunity to propagate by any means available, for example by....

....exploiting a bit of leaf mould and rotten wood in an old fallen tree and even....

....sending out shoots from logs cut when a number of sycamores were recently felled. I assume that, for this effort to be successful, the new sycamore would have had to put down roots from the log into the underlying soil.

Neap Tides

The tides are at neaps, the air is still and heavy, and the sun is high in a hazy sky - this is summer at last but with a sultriness which brought very welcome rain in both yesterday's and Saturday's late afternoons.

We walked our usual walk along the front below Dunrobin castle this morning, seeing....

....the first common blue butterflies, feeding on the bacon-and-egg flowers, and....

....a very chewed-up tortoiseshell feeding on sea campion.

We've seen alarmingly few butterflies during this warm weather though as soon as we went inland we saw far more. We didn't see a single one in our garden yesterday even though we were in it for much of the day and there are plenty of flowers, such as the aubretia, for them to enjoy.

On our way back we sat on the usual bench looking out across the sea and watched what we took to be one of the local mallard pairs escorting their only chick but when they reached the rocks we realised, with some surprise, that they were shelduck.

We've noticed a pair of shelduck here a couple of times recently so we're thrilled with the idea that they've manage to nest somewhere along this busy shore - though I shudder to think, with all the dogs, crows, gulls and stoats around, what happened to the rest of their brood.

A Portrait of my Father

This photograph of my father is in his album and is typical of him - always so very smartly turned out. There is nothing in the album to indicate where or when it was taken, although it does look like a studio portrait, but what intrigues me is that....

....he appears to be the same age and dressed in the same suit in this picture, where he is on a beach with his sisters Dolly and Hilda and his mother, Edith.

I would guess that his age in these pictures was late teens to early twenties. He was twenty-one when he left the UK to work in Port Sudan on the Red Sea, so I wonder whether this was the reason for the studio picture.

This can't be Yarmouth or Caister because of the steep cliff behind them so again I wonder whether this is my grandmother and aunts seeing him off in Liverpool.

Another Farlary Walk

Summer has arrived on the northeast coast of Scotland, with temperatures soaring to 25C, light easterly breezes, and only a little high cloud to mar the sunshine, weather which many up this way consider indecently hot.

We took the opportunity to drive a few miles inland from Golspie to the crofting township of Farlary, where we spent a happy couple of hours wandering the trails the crofter on Croft 43 has opened to the public, seeing not another soul in that time. However, the wildlife obliged with....

....plenty of large red damselflies on the wing, many very difficult to spot as they tended to rest on sprigs of heather, and....

....the first, very smart, male common blues, some of them having already found....

....the love interest of the moment.

We sat beside one of the little ponds the crofter has dug, on a picnic table he's provided, and watched half-a-dozen four-spotted chasers pursing each other along the water margins, with occasional stops to rest.

It was a wonderfully peaceful morning crowned by....

....an encounter on the way home, on the road entering Backies township, with a red deer stag in velvet which ran in front of us for a couple of hundred metres before leaping into the woodland to the left.

Large Reds

Today's beautifully sunny morning was marred by a chill easterly breeze but it didn't prevent us from sitting for a few minutes on a bench overlooking the old skating pond and watching a duck with her two ducklings. 13C isn't the sort of temperature which is likely to tempt a dragonfly but the sunny warmth of the wood of the little jetty brought out....

....the first large red damselflies of the year to bask in the sun. Only three appeared and, as best as I could tell, all were males. They were very active, perhaps either to keep themselves warm or to establish some sort of pecking order ready for the appearance of the females.

House Martins

We have been watching these house martins for some two weeks as, initially, they showed interest in each other (24th May), then....

....started showing interest in setting up house together in the gable-end of our house (29th May), an on-and-off process which continued....

....through the end of May into June until, in the last few days, they....

....have really got cracking on the job of building a nest, with almost constant to-ing and fro-ing for mud.

Today, one of them was working on the inside, with the nest looking almost finished, to the extent that, under the watchful gaze of one of their neighbours....

....the next generation was being started.

We drove to Littleferry this morning to see if the northern marsh orchids had started their annual spectacular display across the links and they had - that is, they had started but it was far from the usual 'spectacular' as the dry weather has hit them hard. This picture shows one of the largest; most were very much smaller.

Never mind. As they say, "one man's meat is another man's poison," and the beneficiary of our increasing drought has been....

....the purple milk vetch, which is growing in small florets and in big bunches like this, and in a subtle variety of shades.

So we wandered the paths, seeing upward of half-a-dozen people and sundry dogs and enjoying the masses of wildflowers - the tricolor pansies in particular - before....

....moving on to the beach and its miles of almost deserted sands.

There wasn't much to remark upon except....

 ....a number of tests of sea potatoes being pushed up the beach by the rising tide and the....

....dismal lack of shore birds. In the hour for so we wandered along the beach we saw this group of eider feeding just off the mouth of Loch Fleet, a small flock of waders, a couple of oystercatchers and a few gulls. Our only other excitement was two seals watching us from the incoming waters in the entrance to Loch Fleet.

Sports Day

The local primary school held its sports day today on the field opposite our house which put me in mind of sports days seventy years ago when I was at the Mombasa European Primary School. I never seemed to be able to excel on such occasions, this picture bearing witness - this was the obstacle race in which one of the challenges one had to overcome was take a bite out of a bun. I simply could not manage it.

If I was discomfited so, I am sure, was my father who, on the sports day shown here, had been persuaded to assist. It was the sort of event he would have disliked intensely, the only positive side being that he probably escaped as soon as he decently could and went to the Club for a beer or two.

Seven Weasels

We must walk along the coast path north towards John o' Groats several times each week but it's a rare occasion to see something as elusive as a weasel - which we did today, at the gate across the track at the far end of Dunrobin Castle's grounds - if only a fleeting sighting. What one does not expect is to see more weasels, which we did as we walked back, in the long grass to the right of this picture when....

....a loud squeaking, very like the noise made by young birds in a nest, drew our attention to another adult weasel, just visible above the dandelion in this snatched shot, running away from us. However, when the squeaking continued we poked around to find....

....a small face watching us, one of five young in a rough nest....

....in the long grass. 

They looked very like kittens, squirming together to find the most comfortable spot, and not too worried by our interest until....

....two of them became sufficiently concerned to find a hole, perhaps their original nest, in which to disappear.

It's interesting that both weasel adults were seen in the grass at  the back of the beach, and that the adult parent was setting off, presumably to hunt, in the direction of the shore. It's not surprising therefore that we haven't seen either oystercatchers or ringed plovers nesting along the beach this spring.