Littleferry Wildlife

Murky but dead calm weather took us to Littleferry this morning for a brisk walk and a hope that we'd see something interesting or unusual in the way of wildlife. As must be evident from the entries in this blog, I become more and more dejected about the state of the local wildlife, particularly at a National Nature Reserve like Littleferry.

We started by checking the pool just in from the mouth of Loch Fleet, its waters dead calm, where we spotted....

....this small flock of birds working sands recently cleaned by the falling tide. It was difficult to tell what these waders were until we got home, when the photos revealed a very heartening sight - that....

....it was a small flock of ringed plovers, a species of which we've seen little over the past few months. Sadly, they....

....weren't willing to hang around.

Near them we saw a single pair of long-tailed ducks, the female parading very obediently behind the male.

Walking out onto the long sandy beach which runs north from the mouth of Loch Fleet all the way to Golspie, we found little in the way of seaweed washed up along last night's high tide mark. In general, where there isn't much weed there isn't much in the way of resident wildlife either. This section of beach used to be good for bivalves, including big ones like otter and razor shells and Arctica, but today there were few to be found. The only things to be remarked upon were....

....a few sea potatoes in places where we used to find dozens, and an unusually large number of....

.....common whelk egg cases.

To cheer us, on our way home we spotted a small flock of curlews working one of the local farmer's fields. At this time of year these birds feed along beach tidelines, between rocky, seaweed-covered boulders, and on nearby grasslands, but shortly they'll be moving inland to breed on moorlands and peat bogs.