Garden Birds

I would never have believed that I would report that there are almost as many goldfinches visiting us as there are chaffinches, but it's true. The two species are often found together, probably because they both have an insatiable hunger for sunflower seed kernels, though....

....the goldfinches are much more adept at landing on the feeders than the chaffinches, which seem rather clumsy - the one pictured here is a bit of an exception.

We have two main feeding points on our property. One is on the other side of the road at the front of the property, and it consists of....

....hanging feeders containing peanuts and fat balls, these being most used by the tit family - blue, coal, great and, occasionally, long-tailed - and the occasional greenfinch, and one sunflower feeder that the chaffinches and goldfinches monopolise.

There's a much greater assortment of foods in the back garden but this has less visitors than the front, though one of the visitors here is the occasional and very welcome siskin.

Blackbirds - and we have several - only visit the back garden, as do....

....the wood pigeons from the nearby forestry. The pigeons are a quarrelsome bunch, this one being top bully.

The back garden is also the haunt of our resident robin and one or two dunnocks, and more chaffinches and goldfinches, while some species are totally absent. We never see a house sparrow, though there is a whole bunch of them in a thicket not a hundred metres from our plot, thrushes are absent, and we've only had the very occasional visit from starlings and, happily, crows.

We've been in this house for just over a year so I suppose we should be quite pleased with the number of small birds visiting us, but I'm never satisfied. What the back garden needs is trees for the birds to sit in while contemplating the feast we've laid out for them - but unfortunately trees take time to grow.

Birds Along the Seashore

The ancient coast track which runs from Golspie village northwards towards Dunrobin Castle and thence to John-o'-Groats crosses the Golspie Burn by a substantial footbridge from which we've often watched a pair of dippers. No more. Sadly, we haven't seen any sign of them for well over a year.

Once across the bridge on this morning's walk I disturbed a large mixed flock of gulls, crows and rock doves all feeding in the harvested barley field. It was a beautiful morning, the sky almost cloudless, with not a breath of wind so....

....the sea hardly moved, just the occasional dark wave, leftover from the recent winds, lifting lazily to slop out onto the beach.

This  bird, I think a pipit, was making good use of one of the many wooden structures which are testament to past human activity along this section of coast. It, with two hooded crows, decided to join....

....a cormorant which was drying its wings in the sunshine.

This was one of a pair of oystercatchers feeding along the seaweed line, along with a small flock of redshanks. The flock of curlews we saw a few days ago was still there, but feeding in the barley field.

Three song thrushes were singing from treetops between the bridge and the castle, with others feeding on ground still white from the overnight frost. Only one of the three singers had developed a full range of those beautiful, repeated calls, the other two being much less full-throated. The one calling properly was easy to spot, high on a tree by the burn. Perhaps because of their lack of confidence, the other two, one of which was in a tree right by the castle....

....weren't in sight.

Buzzards

When we lived on Ardnamurchan buzzards were always the most common of the raptors and, to our surprise, when we moved to Felixstowe we found that they were almost as common there. These days, in this part of Sutherland, we have a problem because, although we occasionally hear....

....a buzzard's plaintive cry high above the forested slopes of Bheinn Bhraggie, we only occasionally....

....see one.

One reason for their decline may well be the increasing scarcity of a quite different species, the humble....

....rabbit, of which we see precious few these days - this one was spotted enjoying the grass in a neighbour's garden. Rabbits are top of the menu for buzzards and the worrying drop-off in rabbit numbers seems to have occurred over this winter.

I don't know what the problem is with our rabbits. It may be disease, though we haven't, thank goodness, come across any distressed rabbits. It may be that, since the pandemic, more and more dogs are being walked through the areas they used to favour. It may simply be that the balance between predators and prey has been unbalanced. However, it isn't just these two species which seem to be struggling - for example, we're seeing precious few red kites these days.

One just has the feeling that Nature is struggling in a world more and more dominated by man.

Frogspawn

There used to be a small aggregate quarry on this site with a pond which was home to frogs and palmate newts but a few months ago the local estate used heavy machinery to remove industrial amounts of aggregate and, in the process, fill in the pond to form an area where they could accommodate workers in three caravans.

As we passed this morning a grey heron rose, drawing our attention to a small rivulet which, after recent rain, had formed on the site of the old pond; and on going to investigate we found.... 

....it filled with masses of frogspawn.

While we were thrilled to see Nature fighting back, and to see another of the mileposts of spring, we were also concerned that it's early for frogspawn in these northern climes as we are liable to hard frosts through February and well into March.

Only yesterday we were looking at the pond which has formed in our garden and discussing the chances of frogs making it across the adjacent building site to breed in it. Nothing has appeared yet, and we're resisting the temptation to move some of the estate frogspawn into it.

First Skylarks Singing

We woke this morning to a waning crescent moon and the promise of a fine day so we set off for....

....the links at Littleferry where, to our joy, the first....

....skylark of the season was singing high above us. Soon after he was joined by two others, not to sing but to chase each other around at a low level, sometimes even landing to avoid attack by the others. These are the males, arriving some weeks before the females to vie for territories which they will guard ready for the females to make their choices.

Down on the shore the state of the skylarks' love life was of no interest whatsoever to old man curlew, stalking the tide line all alone while, just off shore....

....a small flotilla of wigeon were contending with the waves.

Hearing the first skylark is one of the special moments of the year, but only so because, unlike further south where some skylarks overwinter in England, northern Scottish skylarks are absent through the deepest winter months.

Hunting

As boys, living in the 'wilds of Africa', it was somehow normal to model ourselves on the great 'white hunters', to which end we usually went around with a sheath knife on our belts and an elephant hair bracelet on our wrists - and, of course, we needed to actually hunt.

This was made possible by this man, Mlalo, our 'garden boy', who provided us each with a catapult, made from a forked stick, the inner tube of a bicycle tyre, and a small leather cup which held the pebble. Thus armed, we ventured into the wilds, of which there were still some on Mombasa island, in search of game.

This bird, a mouse bird, was one of our top targets, for reasons which are lost in the mists of time. Other birds were also fair game, but what we dreaded coming across was a snake.

Happily, we were pretty useless as hunters, so I do not recall a single animal being harmed by our antics. But what I am so relieved about is that the hunting we used to practice changed, to hunting with a camera. The cameras we had in those days - ours was a Kodak Brownie 127 - were also....

....pretty useless but, happily, by the time I returned to East Africa in my sixties, I carried the digital technology which enabled me....

....to shoot game - this in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania - with precious little understanding of how my camera worked but some success.

Winter Colours

Winter's a predominately grey season so it's heartening that so many of our recent days have started with a spectacularly colourful dawn, as did today. The colours only lasted about half an hour but they certainly got us off to a cheerful start - which continued when....

....our walk through Dunrobin woods, taken to avoid having to fight our way along the coast path into the teeth of a bitterly cold and occasionally wet southeasterly wind, yielded more warm colours, in the form of upward of thirty scarlet elf cups. It's a mystery to me that this particular fungus species does so well in this weather while there's hardly another fungus to be seen.

Our walk passed masses of snowdrops. It's always difficult to estimate such things but it does seem to me that this has been an exceptionally prolific snowdrop season.

We returned along the coast track, with the wind now behind us, seeing more in the way of shore birds than in recent weeks including....

....a lonely redshank and, in the stubble of the barley field at the back of the beach, no less than....

....seven curlews, presumably feeding on the grain dropped during the harvest. We also saw far too may crows, the large winter-resident flock of rock doves, various gulls, a dozen cormorants on their usual rocky peninsula, and....

....one dead juvenile cormorant, happily the only corpse along the high tide line.

Leaving Home

The spell of really quite sunny weather finally gave up on us today, returning us to winter, with snow on the bens and sleet at sea level. This morning's walk, up into the forestry at the back of our house, was a fairly dismal affair with very little to see, but the damp cold led me to think about my experience of the winter of January 1954. This was the month in which I flew to England for my first term at Glengorse, a prep school in the Sussex countryside.

I know I was still in Mombasa on my birthday, 2nd January, as I can remember crying most of the way through my party having recently been told that I would be leaving for England in the next few days, but what I didn't know was the date on which I actually left.

My passport should have given me the answer as each time I flew in and out of countries it was stamped with....

....the exit and entry dates, but nowhere could I find a date in January 1954.

I finally found it, not where it should have been in the body of the passport but on page 4, which had details of the issue and re-issue of the passport. It's barely visible, at bottom right....

....but it gave me the departure date from Nairobi as 9th January 1954. This means I probably left Mombasa on either 7th or 8th.

None of this detail really matters except that it gives the bald facts behind what must have been a traumatic event, leaving my family and the warmth and sunshine of my home for school in a British winter probably not unlike this one.

A Bitter Wind

Yesterday's blue skies took us out to Loch Fleet for a walk through the forestry that lines its banks, to find the tide rising across sandbanks sculpted into intricate patterns we'd never seen before.

About twenty seals were hauled up on one of one of the sandbanks, far fewer than we have seen in the past. In the foreground there is a small flock of red-breasted merganser.

The loch is a large area of water which becomes a large area of sand and mud low tide, and at this stage of the tide one would expect there to be plenty of ducks and waders working the sediments. There weren't, just some curlews and oystercatchers, and ducks, mostly wigeon. But then, sadly, a lack of wildlife is what we are coming to expect.

We emerged from the forestry into the small community of Littleferry. At this point we began to realise that the sunshine, warm as it was, couldn't overcome the bitter southeasterly breeze, and the more we walked the colder we became.

The links in the Loch Fleet National Nature Reserve must be at their most barren at this time of year. Walking the paths that criss-cross them, it's difficult to believe that, come summer, they will be a mass of wildflowers; and that we'll be able to sit and enjoy the sunshine without risking frostbite.

A Backies Walk

We took a walk today which we hadn't followed in some months, one which we used to take regularly when we lived at the northern end of the village. The route took us up into the crofting community of Backies, originally communal land which, during the clearances of the late 18th century, was divided into small parcels and settled with people evicted from the more fertile areas, which were rented out as 'sheep walks'.

Relatively few of the crofts are now worked, their land having been consolidated into more viable farms, of which this neat property is one of the two biggest.

On our way up to the open croft land we followed a well-maintained mountain bike track which winds through a variety of habitats, from well-established plantations of pine and spruce to relatively recent deciduous woodland and....

....areas of ancient oak woodland. This part of the walk is usually one of the best for fungi but we found none.

The human history of the area goes back thousands of years before the clearances. Buried amongst the trees is this bracken-covered mound, an ancient Iron Age round house or 'broch', a type of fortified building which is most common in northern Scotland and the northern and western isles. There are three of these structures within a few miles of Golspie.

I have mixed feelings about the building work seen in this picture. It shows one of the croft houses in its parcel of poor land being redeveloped for modern use. The ruin it used to be was a stark reminder of the area's history. Instead it will perhaps become someone's home or a comfortable Air&b bringing visitors and money in to the area.