A Walk with the Wind

Today's weather is dominated by a fierce southwesterly gusting from force 5 up to gale 10, all under an almost cloudless blue sky. Winds like this remind me of the trade winds in their constancy and vigour but the Trades are oh! so much warmer. At least the daily temperatures are heading in the right direction, 7C at midday today and not dropping below zero at night, which probably explains why....

....this wanderer is back, the first pied wagtail of the year chasing elusive insects amongst the pebbles thrown from the beach into the fields during recent storms.

Also at the back of the beach a passing otter left its mark on a stone, so they're around again. One man said he'd seen a pair recently at the mouth of the Golspie burn. 

I enjoyed being blown north along the coast path, but headed into the protection of the woods for the journey back, stopping off for a few minutes at the site of the only active fungi, these scarlet elf cups, but they will be....

....disappearing soon, many already shrivelling and whitening, leaving the woods emptier of fungi than I have seen them.

Rabbits!

We have at last seen a couple of rabbits up in the crofter's field where, a year or so ago, we would regularly see three or four. The scarcity of rabbits has been brought on by the return of myxomatosis, so their reappearance suggests the worst of this wave of the epidemic may be over.

Rabbits use to be ubiquitous in the British countryside, a useful source of meat and of skins for clothing. I recall as a small boy stalking them while at my prep school so I could draw them - for which I won the school art prize. They also used to be common on Ardnamurchan, and we recall seeing families of rabbits on summer evenings playing on the grass on the opposite side of the road from our shop. They were even more common at Sanna, where they reached almost plague proportions - until myxomatosis and, possibly, the increase in the pine marten population, destroyed them.

So it is good to see them back and, for all the damage they'll probably do to our garden, I hope they thrive.

The IMI

She was first visible far out on the horizon, at the limit of my camera's zoom, little more than a hazy rectangle until....

....her fo'c's'le emerged. My father, who knew his ships, would have called her 'hull down', the ship part-hidden by the curvature of the earth and looking as if she is climbing over a hill.

It took some minutes for her to be 'hull up', revealing that she was probably a bulk carrier - which was confirmed when the website marinetraffic.com was consulted. She was the Bahamas-registered IMI en route from Riga to Reykjavik, though she perhaps isn't in any hurry as she is currently anchored in the Dornoch Firth.

The rather unimaginative name IMI comes from her owners, a new shipyard venture, International Maritime Industries, which is backed by Saudi money and seems to aim to build ships for the offshore oil and gas industries.

A Country Walk

One of the pleasures of a county walk is watching Nature at work.

The crow is a hooded crow or 'hoodie', which is closely related to the all-black carrion crow and is confined to Scotland and Ireland. The two sometimes interbreed, producing young which have a darker plumage - this may be an example. Carrion crows and hoodies are notorious for pecking out eyes, sometimes blinding a lamb when it is new-born.

The crofter who owns this field is having a bad time: we've seen several dead sheep in the last few weeks. It's probably the time of year, with weaker animals succumbing after a tough winter.

Signs of Spring

I can't take snowdrops as a sign of spring as they often appear, as they did this year, in the middle of some awful winter weather. Nor....

....are the daffodils a true sign of the beginning of spring as most, like the snowdrops, are now so artificial. One has to look for plants with which man hasn't fiddled, like.... 

....lesser celandine, a plant considered a weed, to find something which really heralds the coming of spring.

In fact there. are very few celandines around as yet, though another natural indicator of the lengthening days are....

....the catkins, which have been out for some days.

Spring is definitely in the air here, with today's temperature just touching 10C, but this isn't spring as experienced down in England's West Country where I'm told that the butterflies are already on the wing.

There's a small pond at the side of the track that runs up from our house into the forestry and it contains another sure sign of spring, in the form of....

....masses of frog spawn with....

 ....half a dozen frogs working hard to add to it. I do hope that their efforts aren't premature: the forecast is for some cold nights in the days ahead.

A Soggy Walk

I spent a couple of soggy hours in Dunrobin's soggy woods this morning looking for fungi and this was all I found, an equally soggy bouquet of very tired puffballs, except....

....on checking the path that passes this standing stone where, last year, we found half-a-dozen scarlet elf cups, they....

....were there again, but only these two. They were 'flowering' in the perfect elf cup environment, on a bed of moss covering a branch of very rotten wood. There must be....

....thousands of places in these woods which offer this environment but don't host scarlet elf cups, and then one stumbles upon a site....

....in which they thrive. This is a picture today of the 'original' elf cup site where, a couple of weeks ago - see post here - we found the highest concentration of this fungus ever. Today there were even more, some of them....

....crowded together on a favoured branch. At a guess, there were upward of 80 fruiting bodies in an area of perhaps four square metres, a....

....glorious little garden burning brightly in the incessant rain.

The Last Day

This is a miserable picture for it shows my brother and I saying goodbye to the house servants on the last day of our last holiday in Mombasa, shortly before we set off to catch the overnight train to Nairobi. They were, from left to right, Mlalo the garden 'boy'; Saidi the head 'boy'; Ouma the cook; and Kitetu the dhobi 'boy'.

They were grown men whom we boys called 'boys'. They had to put up with us even when we were pesky nuisances; they washed, cleaned, cooked, served at table, acted as babysitters when our parents went out to a party and did anything else which, within reason, we asked of them - all with good humour. They were the black me I knew best, and I loved them to the extent that, at times like this, I was sadder to say goodbye to them than to my parents who, after all, were responsible for the decision to send us away to school in England.

I loved them all but I had a particular soft spot for Mlalo. He had his own little kingdom in the garden, tending the miserable lawn which fought a hopeless battle against heat and drought, keeping the birdbath topped up with water, maintaining an almost perpetual bonfire round the back of the house, and drawing our attention to all sorts of beasties and creepy crawlies that passed through his domain. But I think it was his reticence that chimed with me; he was a loner, the bottom of the pecking order, a deeply reserved man - and I respected him for these characteristics.

After my parents left East Africa later in that year, 1961, they kept in touch with the 'boys', all except for Mlalo. He, characteristically, faded from our lives.

New Birds

The lavish offerings both at the back of the house, where there is the overgrown gorse bush to give them cover, and at the front, where there are plenty of young deciduous trees, are beginning to draw in the birds which, until recently, have been somewhat shy of approaching close enough to partake of the feast.

First to find a good thing are always the tits, including blue, coal and great, but today....

....they were joined by two long-tailed tits. Usually this species goes around in larger groups, so it's a bit sad to see so few, but they enjoyed a good few minutes, both on the fat and peanut feeders.

Another welcome sighting was of these two buzzards, wheeling high above the forestry at the front of the house and calling to each other. I've remarked before on how the number of buzzards seems to have fallen dramatically, and....

....one of the reasons may be the decline in the population of one of their main prey species, rabbits. A couple of years ago we used regularly to see half a dozen of them in the field a couple of hundred yards up the track which rises into the forestry: these days we see none, and we're told it's because myxomatosis has killed them.

The rabbit in the picture, which was browsing a gorse bush on the other side of the road from our house, was the first we'd seen since we moved in and seemed remarkably tame - which isn't surprising as one of our neighbours feeds them.

A Return to Littleferry

With our existence over the last few weeks concentrated on moving house we hadn't been to Littleferry and Loch Fleet in a long time so today's sudden break from three days of gale-force easterlies finally offered an opportunity - but in the cold, damp, dead calm conditions we found a chilly, grey landscape.

The picture above looks out to sea near the mouth of Loch Fleet, with the tide running strongly into the loch with two hours to go before high water. On the point in the right distance we could just make out....

....a flock of about fifty oystercatchers roosting on the beach and in the calmer waters round the edge of the strong tidal flow we watched a constant procession of....

....eider in their mating plumage. However, turn the other way to look inland towards the small settlement of Littleferry and....

....winter's resculpting of the entrance to the loch becomes evident. Not only has the sea removed....

....most of the miles of sand which we used to enjoy so much but it has also severely eroded the dunes, breaking through into the grass and heather dominated area of the links behind the beach; and it has completely changed the geography of the entrance to the loch.

Having walked north along the beach as far as the rapidly-rising tide would allow, we took to the network of paths through the links, finding plenty of evidence of the recent heavy rain which has accompanied the storms - but were surprised to see ice on the puddles, showing that the temperatures last night must have dropped below zero.

As we usually do, we stopped off on our way home to look at the main basin of Loch Fleet, seeing a few small ducks - perhaps widgeon - and a dozen or so....

....very smart shelduck.

The shelduck, along with the eider, widgeon, oystercatchers and a small flock of waders on the wing were all the birds we saw on and around a loch which should be a major wintering site for hundreds of birds.

Safari

Like English, the KiSwahili language of eastern Africa has grown rich through adopting words from other languages, so safari, meaning journey, comes originally from Arabic. The British stole it from the Swahili, at first using it in a narrower sense to describe a journey, on foot or by vehicle, involving hunting. By the time we were using the word it was broader again, so any land journey could be termed a safari.

As children we went on many safaris, particularly to game parks like Tsavo East - above, with an elephant distantly visible in the centre of the picture - and loved them.

My mother also loved a safari - her most daring one was from Lake Victoria down the Nile to Cairo in 1961 - but my father avoided their discomfort, though he did come on this safari, of a few hours into Nairobi National Park on one of the occasions when the family was seeing me off to school in England. 

There was one exception. When he first moved to Dar-es-Salaam his company insisted he did a tour - a safari - of Tanganyika to acquaint himself with the country and to visit all the company's offices. This he did in a Ford Mercury which was driven by an employee who was so short he could hardly see over the steering wheel. As a result, my father drove. He didn't enjoy his safari at all, and did not repeat it.

Mrs MW and I did three big safaris, in 2010, 2011, and 2012, in Tanzania. Not all the roads were as bad as this one, between Tanga and Saadani, though many were dirt roads, and the journeys were often hot, long and tiring, but they were well worth it as they gave us a much better 'feel' for the country than moving around it as many tourists did, by light aircraft. We. weren't allowed to self-drive in Tanzania but were in....

....Namibia - though perhaps we shouldn't call that journey a 'safari' as it was outside eastern Africa.

Snow Again

Snow came through the latter part of last night, falling silently onto ground which had been prepared for it by a sharp frost yesterday evening, about two inches in all, the sort of snow that sticks to everything including....

....those gorse bushes which, for reasons that are a complete mystery to me, are in full flower.

The top picture was taken at nine this morning, a view from our kitchen window across the road to where I've hung several feeders for the blue, coal and great tits to enjoy as they are still too nervous to venture closer into our bare front garden.

Some of the blackbirds are growing bolder, having discovered that, under the wire that keeps the crows off, there's seed and a fat ball buried in the snow.

The snow hasn't finished with us. The forecast is for more tomorrow but there were heavy snow showers offshore, moving steadily eastwards across the Moray Firth.

A New Garden

One of the challenges which comes with building a house is that we have to build a new garden to go with it. At present, the only plant left growing in it is this rather large and ancient gorse; the rest of the garden is made of so-called 'top soil' scraped off at the start of the build - and it's full of stones.

Before his machinery left the site, our builder created some mounds of soil divided up by aggregate paths. To create the 'scenery' he also dug down about a metre, a hole which, to our great joy, immediately filled with water, so we have a natural pond. Its level does rise and fall a bit - more 'rise' than 'fall' in the present weather - but we're optimistic that it will be permanent.

Other than the mounds, the pond, and the paths, our garden will very haphazard, but planted mainly with shrubs chosen to benefit the local insects and birds. The former haven't put in an appearance yet, and the birds have been very wary of the various feeders put out for them, for the very simple reason that, other than the gorse, there's no cover for them to hide in.

Despite this, blackbirds, dunnocks, chaffinches, blue, coal and great tits, and a robin have all put in an appearance, so the potential is there. All we need is to plant some very, very fast-growing shrubs and trees.

Elf Cups

Over the last ten days we've been in a westerly airstream which, while giving us some fine, if breezy weather, has also brought grey skies, gale-force winds and heavy rain. 

Despite today's fairly miserable conditions we took a walk along the coast path below Dunrobin Castle where the sea has been steadily piling more and more shingle at the back of the beach until it's able to throw flotsam, and shingle, right over the retaining wall. Looking at sights like this does make one feel that our coastline is under siege from a very determined foe, and that the foe is, at present, beginning to win.

So it was a fairly dismal walk - until we came to the clearing in the wood which best seems to suit the local....

....scarlet elf cup fungi where, on Thursday, I struggled to find four individuals. Today, in one fairly confined area, there must have been forty, their red glowing against the contrasting green of the moss.

What seems surprising is that other fungi are having a bad time this winter, to the extent that we're hardly seeing any, yet the elf cups are thriving.