Siskin Tragedy

Yesterday, in a further attempt to lure the local wild birds closer to our house, I hung a sunflower seed feeder off the end of the veranda not appreciating the consequences of it being right next to....

....a door with a window forming its upper half, with the result that....

....two beautiful male siskins in their full mating finery flew into the glass, evidently with such force that they died immediately.

There hasn't been a comparable disaster since one of our cats caught a goldcrest, the only one I ever saw while we lived at Matenderere, and proudly presented it to us by leaving its rather chewed corpse on the back doorstep.

The only positive aspect of this sad event is that the local siskins aren't rare here, not like the Ardnamurchan goldcrests. Nevertheless, the feeder has been hurriedly moved and the two tiny bodies buried with full ceremony in the back garden.

The Intelligence of Rooks

"There must be a way of getting the sunflower seeds out of that feeder.

"Now, let's see, perhaps if I....

"....give it a good shake, jiggle it up and down a bit....

"....lift it and drop it. Yes! Plenty falling out now but....

"....it's my mates who are benefiting, not me!"

Panasonic DMC-FZ200

The camera I use, a Panasonic DMC-FZ200, must now be over ten years old and has taken thousands of pictures in environments from the heat and humidity of Tanzania to the chill of Alaska. 

To be honest, if it stopped working tomorrow I would probably go out and buy the same machine again, though it does, for my needs, have some limitations. The worst is evident in this picture, where a couple of days ago I was trying to capture the first greenfinch I'd seen at our new house - and the camera simply wouldn't quite focus on it, preferring to focus on the twigs. The camera does have a manual focus feature but it's very clumsy. The only way of getting round this is to have a bridge camera like mine but with a manual focus - and I don't think such a machine exists.

The joy of the camera is that it's almost totally automatic. I know nothing about exposure settings so it does them for me, and it also focuses automatically, though I have various tricks to help me choose my focus. It takes a burst of about 12 pictures per second - used for example when I had only moments to catch these geese as the flew south.... yes, south.... past the house yesterday morning.

The great thing about a bridge camera is that it takes a wide range of types of picture, and can be adjusted to whatever setting I want extremely quickly - as is exemplified by this shot, taken the day before yesterday when I saw a bird, which I suspected was a red kite, soaring near a passenger jet contrail, and even more so when, walking home from the village this morning through the woods I had seconds in which to 'shoot'....

....this red squirrel which had just jumped through the low branches across the path in front of me. 

The camera has become almost an extension to my body, fitting in to my hand and bouncing happily in its case against my hips - and I can draw it faster then Roy Rogers pulled a six-gun. I seems to me to be a perfect example of a machine making easily accessible to amateurs like me a great deal of very complicated technology.

So Many Homes

Upanga Road bungalow

The other day I spent a few minutes counting up the number of places I have called 'home'. Before I started I tried to to define exactly what the term meant as a proper 'home' is more than simply a building in which one lives; there has to be a sense of belonging and, perhaps, of family living there too. I also excluded places where I had only stayed for a relatively short time, temporary residences where I hadn't developed a sense of belonging.

For the purposes of the count I divided my homes into those where the family element of it being a 'home' was that my parents lived there, and those in which Mrs MW made it 'home'. The first group started with the bungalow in Upanga Road which was home after my birth in the European Hospital, Dar-es-Salaam, and, via Mombasa and Sussex, ended with Gawthorpe, a big semi-detached house in the village of Guestling, near Hastings, which my parents had for a few years in the mid 1960s.

Excluded from this list were the two schools in England at which I was a boarder and various places I stayed during Christmas and Easter school holidays while my parents were in East Africa.

The flat in Stone, Staffordshire

Homes made with Mrs MW started with the flat in Stone, Staffordshire, where we lived while I finished my degree and while Mrs MW taught at the local girls' Catholic school, an experience which she did not enjoy. These homes included the bungalow at Bernard Mizeki College, Rhodesia, where we lived for the three years we taught at the school; a chalet-dormer-bungalow in Ludlow, Shropshire; a bungalow in the grounds of Excelsior School in Kingston, Jamaica; a terraced house in a council estate in Basildon New Town, Essex; a big semi-detached house in Maldon, Essex; The Ferry Stores, in the village of Kilchoan, Argyllshire; two houses which we had built for us, Matenderere in Kilchoan and a bungalow in Golspie, Sutherland.

There were various other places in which we lived which I might have called 'home', but at all these the stays were of brief duration.

Matenderere is the left of the two houses.

The list comes to a total of 22 places in which I have felt 'at home'. We only lived for a few months in a couple of them, and the longest we lived in any of them was Matenderere, where we spent over ten happy years.

When I first reached this total I was amazed.... and then horrified. How could I have allowed this peripatetic lifestyle to have happened? And, what effects has it had on my life and on the lives of those I hold dear? 

More Spring Firsts

This photo may not look anything particularly exciting but, for us, it's a significant moment, for this is the first insect we've seen to visit a plant which we have put into the garden at our new house, in which the aim is to make it as bird and insect friendly as possible. We've started with a blank canvas, a rocky subsoil with poor Highland soil above, and ten heathers were amongst the first plants to go in. 

We were at Littleferry this morning and came across these, the first wild pansies, Viola tricolour, of the year, while in the woodland at the back of the links we heard....

....half a dozen or more willow warblers, again, the first of the year. The trouble was that I simply could not get a picture of them, despite some careful stalking, but at least I now have a second best, a recording of their song made on the Merlin app.

Also at Littleferry, at the mouth of Loch Fleet, we were pleased to see fifty or so eider displaying themselves in their best mating plumage, as were....

....a pair of shelduck on Loch Fleet itself.

We also had a distressing moment when we realised that....

....this oystercatcher wasn't dragging a wing to lead us away from a nest but had broken it.

A Wet Spring Walk

Today has been wet; not heavily wet nor windily wet so much as steadily, coldly and persistently wet made worse by the memory of the few gloriously sunshiny intervals we had a couple of days ago. Undaunted, I set off for a walk into the grounds of Dunrobin Castle not expecting much on such a day - but, as often happens, something intervened to cheer me - in the shape of a song thrush.

I stood in this damp, unexceptional clearing, with cold fingers of rain making their way down the back of my neck, and listened to the thrush's glorious song until a growing chill drove me on.

Despite Spring plodding along and the temperature staying well below 10C, there are a few interesting things to find though this part of Scotland must be far behind the rest of the country. The last of the scarlet elfcups are 'in flower' and we have a new spring flower to enjoy....

....as a few wood sorrel blooms are now visible, most nestling on comfy beds of moss.

Then, as I came to the end of my walk, there were a couple of bonuses; a fleeting glimpse of the pale rump of a roe deer as it bounded away into the forestry and....

....when I reached home, a pair of goldfinches enjoying a meal of sunflower seeds.

A Walk to the Shops

We've found a much more pleasant walking route from our new house into the centre of the village which, unlike the present one which takes us on a pavement beside the busy A9, runs through the lower slopes of the forestry below Beinn Bhraggie. At the point where the path emerges from the trees there's a large field which, on today's very wet day, had two occupants....

....visible in the bottom left hand corner of this picture, two....

...roe deer which, at first, stopped eating to watch me but, when I didn't go away, decided....

....that it was prudent to move to the far side of the field, not in any great hurry as they were obviously....

....rather enjoying their breakfast and very annoyed at my interrupting it.

Merlin

Wherever we walk now, be it in the village, along the beaches, across the links, or up into the forestry, the air is full of bird song. In the plantations above our house the most active areas for birds are the margins between the coniferous forestry, which has been largely silent through the winter, and the open scrub-land or land with scattered deciduous cover.

Too often, the birds aren't seen but heard. I say 'too often' because I have never been very good at identifying a bird by its song, and sometimes it's even more frustrating when I find a bird because it's singing, manage to photograph it, but still can't identify it.

Recently, a lady we meet quite frequently on our walks who is also a keen bird-watcher suggested I try an app called Merlin, created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. One of the features of the app is to recognise birds by their song. As long as it can clearly pick up the song, the app will produce a record:

....and identify the birds. This particular record identified seven species, including....

....a siskin, in the space of thirty seconds.

Since the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, established in 1915 and based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, covers both Europe and North America, it's equally useful on both sides of the 'pond'.

I'm often amazed by modern technology and what people are capable of creating but I have to say that the Merlin app is outstanding.

Loch Lunndhaidh

This morning we walked up the track that runs northwest from Golspie to Loch Lunndaidh, a steady and, for us, fairly exhausting four kilometres but well worth the effort so we could spend....

....a few minutes sitting by the side of the loch listening to a silence broken only by the lap of the wavelets driven by a chilly wind.

To provide water for Golspie the loch's level has been steadily raised over the years by a dam at its southeast end which has recently seen....

....the addition of a footbridge and what appears to be parking areas. I'm not at all sure of the purpose of these as they're on Sutherland Estate land but it may be to offer improved access to the local fishing club which has the rights on the loch.

We had hoped to see an osprey and, perhaps, the year's first wheatear but had to be satisfied with a rather smart meadow pipit and the songs of the skylarks hovering high above us.

Golspie South Beach

We used to walk along the long, sandy beach to the south of Golspie regularly, particularly when we had our house in the village's Main Street, but recently we haven't been onto it in months - not least because, after some of the winter's worst storm damage, it was impossible to get down to the beach from the promenade. As can be seen in this picture, there used to be a ramp down, never very safe, but this was undermined and partially collapsed.

Despite this, with the beach's sand beginning to reappear after being removed by the sea earlier in the winter, it's now possible to clamber, very carefully, down the ramp and, once again....

....enjoy the miles of open beach which run south all the way to Littleferry.

It was low tide when we walked out onto the beach this morning, low enough to expose large areas of weed-covered rocks much enjoyed by the shore birds. A careful study of this picture will reveal nine redshanks, an oystercatcher and a couple of gulls, while somewhere amongst them was....

....a pair of ring-necked plovers, a species which has been conspicuously absent recently.

I do hope that the plovers aren't planning to nest at the back of the beach, something they used to do when we were first in Golspie, as much of....

....the sea wall, composed of large blocks of rock, was badly damaged in the storms and is having to be rebuilt.

When the sea wall was broached at this point it allowed waves to cross the fifty metres or so to....

....attack the next wall, a much smaller one built as additional protection for the static caravan site.

The golf course, which runs along the back of the sea wall from the caravan site to the village, had its sea wall broached in several places, all of them now repaired. This amount of damage is, as we understand it from people who've lived in the village for many years, unprecedented, and suggests that global warming is coming to Golspie apace.

More Firsts

Today's a very welcome fine if hazy day but my walk along the coast path this morning was dominated by a strong and gusty southwester. Under it, a rapidly rising tide was steadily forcing....

....more and more of the cormorants whose favoured roost is on the slippery rocks and boulders of a spit-like structure which sticks out at right-angles to the shore to take off and go fishing. I was watching them when they were joined in the air by what was instantly recognisable from its short, harsh call as....

....the first sandwich tern of the year, back from its winter hunting grounds along the western coast of Africa, anywhere from Morocco to Namibia.

A little further along, just before the path reaches Dunrobin Castle grounds, it dives into a tunnel through shrubs dominated by sea buckthorn but which also include willow and what I think is blackthorn. The blackthorn has just come into flower and on them I found a real surprise....

....the first butterfly of the year, a very smart peacock which, unlike the tern, has managed to over-winter in this cold and damp place.

The Music of a Place

Bernard Mizeki College in Rhodesia.

When I look back and remember a place, the first thing my brain provides is a picture of it, in full colour. I find it very odd that this picture doesn't have to be from my point of view when I lived there; more often it's as if I'm seeing it through the lens of a drone, hovering, picking out objects, corners, details, perhaps of a particular room in which I spent a lot of time, or a view, then moving to explore other parts. What my brain seems less bothered about are the other senses, for example, sound and smell. Usually, that's provided only if I ask for it, and then it's sometimes quite difficult to conjure the sound. In fact, some places, for all my efforts, remain almost silent.

The Cliff Avenue house.

The noisiest are those where I was happy. With happiness comes, in particular, music; so I well remember the music I listened to while sitting on the veranda of the last house we occupied in Mombasa, in the late fifties, early sixties, a mixture of classical music and pop, depending upon who was with me. So, if it was the group of friends in whose company my brother and I spent so many hours, then it was Elvis and the Everly Brothers and Connie Francis; and if it was my parents, then it was Tchaikovsky and Mozart and Beethoven.  However, there was one piece of music which crossed over the two groups: Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, and this pervades the memory of that lovely house.

It's very appropriate that Scheherazade does this, for the house overlooked the Indian Ocean where the dhows arrived each year from the Persian Gulf, from Arabia, where Rimsky-Korsakov's musical story is set; and, as Scheherazade did to her sultan, the music seems to blend with the sigh of the trade winds to cast a spell around and through the building.

Other senses can become involved, if reluctantly. Again, particularly with that building, I recall the smell of rain on hot tarmac from the heavy showers that came in from the ocean just after lunch, in the heat of early afternoon.

The Ferry Stores in Kilchoan.

The connection works the other way: certain pieces of music act like the strange force that suddenly, and for no logical reason, throws a memory into my head. So, if I hear Going Home, the theme music of the film Local Hero, I am instantly back in Kilchoan, at the time we ran the shop, a time in which I was very happy.

So, when I remember most of the places I have been, their memories come with music; so that music is the theme music of my life and is, therefore, particularly precious.