Colour

It's a long winter here in the north of Scotland particularly when, as with this winter, we've had some proper snow and ice. By March there really should be signs of spring but, so far, the few harbingers have included the snowdrops - a terrific display this year - and the increasing smartness of some of the small birds readying themselves for the mating season.

The beaches remain miserably empty, though some of the sand at the Golspie end is being grudgingly returned by the sea. Along the path at the back of the beach in yesterday's rain we found....

....no less than four guillemot corpses. Quite why so many sad, contorted bodies of this particular species should be found along here is a bit of a mystery: possibly the seagulls or the crows bring them up here to eat what meagre flesh these poor birds possess at the end of hungry winter.

The land is as drab as beach and sea though a good display of catkins decorates the hazel and some buds are threatening to burst with the coming year's green leaves.  Even when the sun makes a brief appearance, as it did this morning on our way back from collecting a dozen big brown eggs from the Backies croft....

....we struggled to find any colour until, within a hundred metre stretch, we found....

....four explosions of yellow brain fungus.

Vultures

The skeletal branches of a dead tree along the links at Littleferry brought a vivid memory flash of a hot day at Saadani when we found....

....two vultures sitting in a similar tree surveying the scene. What I loved about this photograph was the intruder, a swift, very possibly a British swift since the BTO has tracked swifts to Tanzania - see their website here.

Vultures spend much of their day high above the land looking for death on the ground. Once a kill is located, they start to descend.  As others join them, a great column of vultures forms as they spiral down to perch in a tree or other such vantage point. These ones at Lake Manze had come down to watch a small pride of lions which, at the time, hadn't made a kill and didn't look as if they had the energy to get up and provide the vultures with a meal.

Vultures aren't beautiful birds, and their table manners are little short of disgusting, but they play an important role in keeping the land clear of rotting carrion and spreading the goodness that is in a kill across the countryside. Sadly, in Tanzania as elsewhere, they're having a bad time. As scavengers, their main threat is poisoning, accidentally from pesticides, indirectly from veterinary use and through its illegal use in killing livestock predators.  They may also be deliberately targeted by poachers who wish to avoid the circling column of vultures which indicate, from afar, the location of a recently killed animal.

Low Tide at Littleferry

Low tide and not a breath of wind when we arrived at Littleferry this morning, an arrival timed perfectly with the sun coming out from behind high cloud.  We found that huge amounts of sand had reappeared both in the mouth of the loch and....

....along a mile or so of beach, which enabled us, for the first time in many months, to walk out to....

....where the remains of the wreck of the SS Totnes lie amongst the shifting sands - see earlier post here. This time more of the wreck was visible, so one could clearly see her whole length of 38m as well as.....

...look closely at her - this was her bridge, at the stern of the vessel. Last time I wrote about her I could find little information online but there's now some more here.

As we drove home we stopped by Loch Fleet to find very little in the way of bird life out on the mudflats but, as we sat, a small flock of twenty or more curlews arrived and....

....started feeding.

We continue to notice the paucity of shorebird life along Golspie's beaches and at the mouth of Loch Fleet. Today we saw oystercatchers in some numbers but otherwise only a few widgeon, one cormorant, a guillemot, a couple of redshank and some gulls. 

Gone Fishin' - 4

After we returned to England from Jamaica in 1975 I went back to coarse fishing, mostly in the company of Tony Hizzard.  He had access near his home to some superb rivers in Shropshire and Herefordshire, such as the River Teme, but also to some good carp ponds.  

In 1979 we took a holiday with the Hizzards in a narrow boat on the Gloucester Avon. In the evenings, after we had tied up and opened a beer, we would fish off the boat, though my memory is that we caught little.

By 1990 I was visiting waters in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk with Glen, a Maldon friend.  We fished by Flatford Mill, along the Norfolk Broads, above, in artificial stocked ponds in Essex, and 'enjoyed' night fishing for bream in the side-streams in the valley of the Chelmer.

The Hizzards continued to visit us and Tony and I spent hours together fishing but the largest fish we caught during our Essex years were pike. This one came out of the Chelmer, caught by Tony on live bait: we cooked and ate it but I can't pretend that pike is my favourite fish.

Our move to Scotland returned us to ideal fishing territory.  The lochans of Ardmurchan had wild brown trout, the larger burns and rivers had sea trout and salmon, and the sea had a wealth of fish, but I never really exploited them.  It wasn't until we returned to East Anglia that I did a little more fishing, this time in Mark Sutton's company....

....casting off a sometimes windswept Felixstowe beach for whiting and bass, though we never caught anything big enough to take home for supper.

Looking back, I've never landed anything remarkable but I have enjoyed a great variety of fishing, and the fishing has both taken me to some memorable places and involved me in some exciting adventures. If I had to choose a favourite it would be....

.....the rainbow trout fishing in Inyanga National Park in Rhodesia in the late 1960s, partly for the memory of a trout lightly fried in butter and for the skill and patience it required to catch them, but mostly for the beauty of the rivers, the Matenderere and the Pungwe, and their surroundings.

Squirrel Success!

 We walked up the forestry track above Dunrobin Castle again today in another search for the elusive red squirrels, on a day of damp, chill overcast.  We now know the there is only one place along this track where there are feeders....

....in some fairly open forestry with high Scots pines and douglas firs.  There are a total of....

....four of these food boxes within a thirty metre radius, each with a lid which the squirrels have learned to lift, filled with a mixture of seeds and nuts, though there was some evidence that the squirrels have also been doing....

....some foraging of their own.

We must have stood quietly for half an hour looking up into the high canopy, getting cold and developing cricks in our necks before, finally....

....one of the squirrels broke cover.  It was amazing how quickly it moved through the branches, giving only moments in which to take pictures, with the result that only one is worth producing.  At least we now, after five failed attempts, have evidence of Scotland's most northerly red squirrel population.

Small Bird News

I embarrass myself when I count the number of feeding stations of various sorts we have round the garden but I justify the extravagance in keeping them topped up by saying that buying the food from the local hardware store helps keep it in business and, of course, that the small birds which come to feed give us endless entertainment.

We do vary the feeders. This is a new one located within inches of the glass of the kitchen's french windows which meant that, as we ate, we were joined at the table by a great tit - the first to pluck up courage - followed by....

....a blue tit and then the bird for which it was designed....

....a robin.  There are now four robins in the garden and we think that this one is the graveyard robin, who no longer lives in the graveyard but has taken over the garden since the sad death of the garden robin.

The cold weather had a very adverse effect on the coal tit population. From seeing four or more in the garden at any one time we're now lucky to see one. We don't know whether the cold weather killed them or simply scattered them back into the forestry: we hope the latter.

The tits are usually the first into any new feeder but when this patented feeder was put out it was a house sparrow that first worked out that it was filled with good things. The feeder is designed to keep larger birds out and the rain and snow off the food.

Here's an unexpected visitor to the garden, a fieldfare. They're winter visitors from Scandinavia and are usually found in sometimes very large flocks eating all the berries. Fieldfares, along with redwings, are members of the thrush family, and we've had....

....a very smart song thrush visiting us recently, working over the flower beds which Mrs MW has been weeding ready for the summer's flower planting.

As with the coal tits, we saw an alarming drop in the number of greenfinches visiting the feeders but, I'm pleased to say, their numbers have increased in recent days, and we now hear their rather tuneless calling in the trees in the nearby forestry.

Not all birds are welcome in the garden. The gulls are probably the least welcome, particularly the pair which is threatening to build a nest on our chimney pot, but the crows are also unwelcome, though one can only admire the ingenuity and, at times, sheer cheek of the jackdaws as they raid the feeders.

Shore Birds

As a welcome break from hopelessly hunting squirrels we set off for Golspie beach this morning under a grey overcast and not a breath of wind.

Although the beach below the town's 'promenade' is a favourite with dog walkers some of the shore birds, perhaps those that will never learn, use it to rest and then look surprised and nervous when they're disturbed, of which this cormorant is a good example.

As we walked on towards the longer beach which runs from the town southwestwards towards Littleferry the cloud cover began to break up, allowing the sun to pick out the stretches of sand which have begun to return to a beach which was threatening to become entirely stoney. Along here we came across....

....a flock of seventeen ringed plovers - more than we've seen in a long time - in the company of a solitary sanderling - at right - which, just to emphasise its exclusivity, resolutely looked out to sea while all the plovers looked up the beach.

The only other inhabitants of this section of shoreline were a pair of oystercatchers which, while working the beach very close to the plovers, unlike the sanderling, seemed to prefer to keep to themselves.

Seventeen ringed plovers, two oystercatchers, a sanderling and a cormorant is a small tally for a two-mile stretch of shore.  This, and the almost total absence of dead marine life, such as fish, along the tideline, suggests a worrying barren-ness in the Dornoch and Moray Firths.

By the time we were walking back towards the town the sun had chased away the clouds, promising us yet another day of remarkably sunny weather and reminding us what a strange month February was, with snow and bitter cold being followed by midday temperatures rising towards 15C. Perhaps this and the paucity of shore birds are connected.