Ermine

There's a large static caravan site which faces on to the beach about half way between Golspie and Littleferry. The access to it and to the neighbouring kart track has public parking which leads to what used to be a long, sandy beach but, as can be seen from the photo, the sand has disappeared, presumably dragged out to sea by recent weather events.

This morning we walked about a mile in the Lttleferry direction, much of it along the links at the back of the beach, though there were one or two sections of sandy beach which we enjoyed. In the bright sunshine we sat on a log and searched along the beaches and out to sea for some wildlife, and found very little - a few gulls, a redshank, and some crows.

On our way home we pulled in to a passing place to look at something small and white lying on the tarmac. This turned out to be....

....the corpse of a stoat, presumably run over by a car.

The stoat was in full winter gear, with its startlingly white coat and black tip to its tail. Called an ermine when it is white, this mustelid is only found in Europe, the pelt's main use at one time being in the making of the cloaks worn by royalty and nobility on formal occasions such as the coronation.

It seemed rather sad that the only wildlife of any excitement lay dead in the dirt of the public highway.

The Dead Time

I set off this morning for a walk up the track which leads to Loch Lunndaidh not realising that the puddles on the track, recently heavily eroded by heavy rain, would be frozen - and therefore that I would have to watch my step as I walked - and that there would be a dusting of snow on the tops of the beinns.

Walking through the forestry on the lower slopes is pretty miserable as, to me, a walk is all about the wildlife I see and, at this time of year, the countryside away from human habitation seems almost empty of life. Through the coniferous plantations the only sound was the calling of a few small birds, mostly tits, though one pair might, just might have been crossbills.

At most times of year there are a few fungi 'in flower' but on today's two-hour walk these were the only ones I found, growing in a ditch on a mush of dead gorse branches and bracken. I'm not at all sure what they are but they may possibly be tawny funnels.

As I approached home my spirits lifted for a moment as a buzzard was calling but, when it appeared, it was being chased by a crow and was soon out of sight. It's very noticeable that both buzzards and red kites are in short supply at the moment.

Although the snowdrops are out I don't count them as 'wildlife' as most are only to be found around human habitation, suggesting they were planted. So I have to wait patiently through this 'dead time' as it's a good month before the first true wildflower, lesser celandine, is out.

Bird News

The recent storms which played such havoc in parts of the UK largely missed us, though they created enough of a swell to bring in lots of seaweed to the beaches, much to the pleasure of....

....the redshanks that were working the beach below Dunrobin Castle on Tuesday morning. We've seen few redshanks recently so their presence was much appreciated.

Small numbers of eider were promenading at the mouth of Loch Fleet on Monday. In this flock there was only one male, at the front, which was in mating plumage.

The number of birds using the feeders in the garden varies hugely. At times there isn't a bird to be seen; a few minutes later, and the feeders are busy.

I have been given a very smart architect-designed, hand-made bird table designed to cope with the Scottish weather. Almost as soon as it was up the first bird arrived to sample the fare and, as expected, it was a blue tit though....

....the most common birds using it now are the goldfinches, chaffinches and....

....coal tits. This particular coal tit is of interest as it's been caught and ringed.

Saying my Prayers

My mother was brought up a Presbyterian. If there was no Presbyterian church she was happy to worship in the Church of Scotland and, while we were in East Africa and after she retired to Sussex, in the Church of England. She was a devout woman, which didn't prevent her from also being very superstitious.

She set about bringing up her two sons to be equally devout, so Richard and I attended church with her every Sunday and, under her supervision, knelt by our beds each night to say our prayers. I remember every word of the family prayer, which started off -

        God bless Mummy and Daddy

        Richard and Jonathan

        Carolyn, Michael and Emily....

It does seem strange that I prayed for myself, even stranger that I prayed for some of my cousins by name but not for all of them, nor did I name some of my aunts and uncles. The cousins that did get a mention were all on my mother's side of the family.

In due course Richard and I progressed on to boarding schools in England where, while we no longer knelt by our beds to pray, we spent even longer on our knees in services: each morning we attended a service in chapel, and morning and evening services on Sundays; and each evening, except on Sundays, we attended house prayers.

This upbringing did not have the desired effect. While I would attend the chapel services in the boarding schools in which I taught, if it was required of me, and attend church with my mother on occasions such as Christmas Eve carol services, I lost my faith, thus following in my father's footsteps.

Friends

In their years in East Africa my parents made and lost many friends, for the white community was ever transient, with people coming out from the UK, working there for sometimes perhaps a year or two, then moving on, back to the UK or to other, usually British, territories. A few, however, were there throughout their time in East Africa.

As a boy in Mombasa a few very good friends of my parents stick in my memory. In the above picture, my father is on the left, with Do and Frank Anstey, and the photo was taken at the Hoey house which faced out onto Nyali beach - so this must have been in about 1957.

My parents knew them from the war years in Dar-es-Salaam, when Do was very helpful to my mother in obtaining fresh food for her in a wartime economy when I was a baby.

The house they had in Mombasa was in the district called Tudor, where they had a garden which stretched down to Tudor creek, part of the inlet which surrounded Mombasa island. Perhaps Frank had a colour camera because this is the only colour  picture I have of my brother Richard (right) and I dating back to the 1950s.

I'm sure it wasn't a factor in my parents' friendship with the Ansteys, but Frank managed East African Breweries, the manufacturers of....

....Tusker beer.

Raptors

We have visitors, to whom I was complaining that it was weeks since we'd last seen a buzzard or a red kite - but, of course, as soon as we went on a walk up into the pine forestry we saw, first, a buzzard, sadly being chased by a couple of crows, and then this....

....beautiful red kite which did a couple of circuits just to make sure we'd seen and admired its spectacular colours, before....

....wheeling away and disappearing behind the tree line.

Predator

Some days ago, while snow still lay on the ground, in the Scots pine forestry which we pass through on our almost daily walk down to the village, we found....

....a small pile of predominately grey feathers beside an old, rotten log. I think, without being too sure, that these are the leftovers from a sparrowhawk's meal.

Today, only a few metres beyond where we found the first pile, we found a second, almost identical. Both are close to Doe Corner, where the coniferous forestry ends and our path emerges into a more open landscape of fields and young, deciduous plantings. 

We used to have a sparrowhawk visit the garden not infrequently at our previous house, a very bold bird which had learnt to try to outface an approaching human if it was on a kill. Since being in the new house we've seen one pass through the garden, fast and low, just skimming the tops of the fences.

I love my small birds but I also love the idea that there is a predator at large, there as an integral part of the natural order.

An Empty Shore

So many times, in the years we have lived in the Scottish highlands, we have driven the car for just a few miles from home, parked it by the side of the (usually single track) road, and walked off into the wilderness. On so many of those occasions we have wandered for miles and perhaps not seen a soul, though we have often....

.....encountered some majestic wildlife.

We set out to do the same today, parking a few miles out of the village and taking a lonely walk along a....

....long beach with not....

....another person to be seen. The difference today was that, with the exception of what might have been a small flock of sanderlings, we saw hardly any wildlife in what is designated one of Scotland's National Nature Reserves: a dozen oystercatchers, a curlew, a redshank, a few crows and gulls, and a seal.

We sat for some time looking out across a wonderfully still sea and discussed the apparent loss of our wildlife. One example we talked about was the guillemot. We used to see these divers fairly frequently off this shore, often in pairs. They had a grim time in the bird flu epidemic and they've not recovered, for we haven't seen one in a year or so.

Beach Casting

On Saturday's Brora walk we came across this small group with their beach casters deployed, enjoying their fishing and a sunny, convivial chat.

I think this is only the second time I have seen this type of fishing off Sutherland beaches, and the other time the lone fisherman was an Englishman travelling around northern Scotland.

This is in stark contrast to Felixstowe, where beach casting is a popular sport, one which I enjoyed - I was serious enough to buy all the necessary tackle - but not in the sort of conditions that....

....some people were prepared to endure.

The great thing about beach casting is that it can be a very sociable sort of fishing, unlike some types which are of necessity rather lone occupations. I've sampled several types of fishing and, of all of them, this is probably the most gentle.

First Snowdrops

With another beautiful day in prospect, and having scraped a thick layer of frost off the car, we drove to the start of one of our favourite walks, along the old coast path to the north of Golspie, passing below Dunrobin Castle and.... 

....on into the woodland beyond where, amongst the dead leaves from last year's fall, we spotted....

....the first flowers of this year's snowdrops. These seem early. On the evidence of previous years we would be expecting them in mid-February but after a cold start January has been exceptionally warm, which has probably brought them on.

We get a bit excited about snowdrops, thinking of them as the first flowers of the year, but....

....the gorse has been in bloom non-stop, even through the coldest weather.

We didn't see much in the way of wildlife: an oystercatcher, a curlew, a handful of redshanks, a dozen or so cormorants, the usual flock of fifty or so rock doves, and two grey herons.

Brora Waders

We drove to Brora this morning to avail ourselves of the one of the few services which Golspie lacks - a petrol station - and while we were there, in bright sunshine and light winds, we took a walk along....

....Brora's long, sandy beach. It's a great beach if you just want to stretch your legs but I was hoping for something interesting in the way of wildlife, and the only sighting we had along the length of the beach was of a small group of oystercatchers. However, as we were on the point of turning back we spotted....

....just beyond the point where a small burn runs down across the beach, four gulls - at right in this picture - and a mass of much smaller waders - to the left in the picture.

We managed to approach to within fifty metres of the waders without disturbing them, from where we could clearly see that this mass of birds consisted of ringed plovers which had organised themselves so they surrounded a large flock of a different wader species, almost all of which were asleep with their heads tucked under their wings.

It was difficult to identify these birds with any confidence until we were home and could look at the photos where we found....

....one individual which was awake - and it had the characteristic beak of a sanderling.

Which leaves an intriguing question: why do the ringed plovers appear to surround and stand guard while the sanderlings sleep?

Boats - 5

After my father retired to Hastings he joined the local fishermen's association, I suppose justifying his membership by saying he came from a distinguished Norfolk fishing family. Through him, I was occasionally invited to join the crew on this fishing boat, RX134, the Stacey Marie, more for my benefit as I was pretty useless at helping with the work. She was a trammel netter, leaving out overnight a long net, like a curtain, with floats along the top and weights along the bottom. They caught a wide variety of fish, of which dover sole seemed to be the most sought-after, but it was hard, wet, cold and, at times, dispiriting work. The Stacey Marie is now a museum piece.

When my parents came out in 1970 to visit us at Bernard Mizeki College in Rhodesia the one expedition we made was a day trip from Salisbury, the then capital, to the Victoria Falls, where we took this pleasure boat on a trip above the falls. 

Over the years I've travelled on various ferries including Dover to Calais several times, and Harwich to Hook of Holland, but the ferries which I most used were....

....those on the west coast of Scotland where ferries are essential in connecting the Highlands and Islands. Where we lived on Ardnamurchan we depended on two ferries - this boat, the Raasay, was one of several small ferries which, over the years, plied between Kilchoan and Tobermory on Mull, and the Corran ferry which connected Ardnamurchan to the A82 and Fort William.

We also enjoyed trips out on pleasure craft such as this boat, on which we spent a day at the Treshnish Islands off western Mull, the highlight, for me, being the puffins.

In my time in Kilchoan I spent thirteen years as a member of Her Majesty's Coastguard, and this resulted in some interesting trips. This is the Tobermory lifeboat in which we enjoyed a 'jolly' around the Sound of Mull. I shall never forget the sheer power of this boat's engines.

In those years HM Coastguard maintained an emergency tug based at Stornoway. Her task was to prevent ships being smashed to pieces on the vicious rocks along the coastline, with the resulting pollution. Shipwrecks were not uncommon: in our twenty-one years there we saw three cargo ships ashore, including one, the Lysblink Seaways, immediately in front of Kilchoan.

I had a trip on one of these tugs when the Kilchoan team was invited to a Coastguard open day at Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. What impressed me, not favourably, was the variety of nationalities amongst the crew, some of whom appeared to speak precious little English.