Yellows

On Saturday we were hoping to see more of the bright yellow flowers in the countryside which are the markers of spring, and they have duly obliged.  This is the first dandelion and, as with Saturday's celandine, it's a rather lonely dandelion, growing in a sunny bank beside the Golspie Inn.

Then, on our walk into Beinn Bhraggie woods today, we found the first primrose, in full and flawless flower beside a forest track. It really is quite remarkable as there isn't another primrose in leaf anywhere, let alone any in bud, so this one is way ahead of the competition.

A few gorse bushes have been in flower for weeks but the others are now making an effort to catch up.  This one is growing on top of an old drystone wall along the sunken track which runs from our end of Golspie up to Golspie Tower. There are big thickets of gorse here and they're notable for being....

....home to a small flock of yellowhammers.

This is the first trickle of the flowers of spring. The flowers round here have a short summer season but have the advantage in midsummer of almost 24-hour daylight, so in a few weeks the trickle will become an avalanche. 

Gull Wars - 2

Stage one of our fight against the gulls - see earlier post here - was to buy an owl, strongly recommended on certain websites as a sure-fire way to rid a chimney of gulls, pigeons and crows. Having filled it with sand we thought we would try it out by the bird bath, which the gulls have been visiting despite the fine wire stretched across it. As can be seen, the tits paid not the slightest attention to the owl and, worse, one of....

....our resident robins was quick to make friends with it.

So we brought up the big guns, in the form of Mr MacKenzie, our local roofer/chimney sweep, who came on Thursday to....

....fit a thicket of anti-gull wire spikes on the chimney and, in the process, to remove several years of accumulated filth from it, and cap it properly.  However, while he was up on the roof we asked him....

....to put the owl up there anyway - it can be seen on the flat roof above our bedroom where, hopefully, it might prevent some of the crows from doing a dance there, as they did on numerous occasions last summer, at three in the morning.

There have been no gulls on the chimney since the spikes were installed but the owl has had no effect on the jackdaws, which still use the TV aerial as a vantage point from which to survey the garden for any food which the small birds have dropped.

The First Yellows of Spring

As seems appropriate for a spring which is following a winter of ice and snow, the snowdrop displays have been magnificent this year.  However, we were only saying earlier today that it is time to move on to the next stage of spring, which is the coming of the sun and the arrival of the first....

....yellow flowers of spring.  As if nature heard our comment we found, in the same forest bank as spring's first snowdrop, the first lesser celandine of the year and, a few paces away....

....a second.  We searched but didn't find another.

Yellow is spring's best colour, the colour of the sun, the colour of good cheer, of hope, which is probably why so many daffodils are planted in and around people's gardens - but the ones round here, sadly, aren't wild.

Balblair Woodland Walk

We woke this morning to snow on the hilltops and a keen westerly wind bringing in some sharp sleet showers so, expecting a day of more showers and perhaps a few sunny intervals we headed for the protection of....

....Balblair Woods for our daily exercise, following the track which skirts the side of Loch Fleet.

We stopped for a few minutes at the RSPB hide but the number and variety of shore birds was, as we had anticipated, rather disappointing. On this mudbank are oystercatchers, shelduck and redshanks and, at the other end of it out of the picture, a few waders which might have been bar-tailed godwits.

It's difficult to get to excited about the only fungus we found, particularly as I have still failed to identify it beyond it possibly being pinewood gingertail.

So we walked and enjoyed almost unbroken sunshine, keeping an eye open for the ospreys which are due back here in late March or early April.

We were out for over three hours and met several dog walkers and one dog-less couple, he an 83-year old ex-teacher who felt guilty that he had only taught for thirty years before suffering a heart attack and had, therefore, spent more time retired than at the chalk-face. Knowing that many male ex-teachers don't last five years after retirement, I feel I would rather he had their pension pots than that the government pocketed it.

Gull Wars - 1

There's no doubt about it, herring gulls are fine birds, good-looking, intelligent and, judging by....

....their numbers along the shore, very successful - and therein lies the problem, because this town has far too many of them, to the extent that it might be appropriate to rename it Gullspie.  People might blame the tourists for feeding them or for leaving their fish-and-chip packets lying around where the gulls can get at them, but tourists have been scarce on the ground recently, so they cannot entirely be to blame.  To make matters worse, herring gulls can be very aggressive, harassing passers by for food, but they're even worse if their young are threatened - and we're now into their breeding season.

We noticed that herring gulls were collecting in large numbers on the green beside our house and marching up and down it, rather like line dancers, nodding their heads at each other.  We concluded that this was couples pairing off ready for the next stage of the mating game which, being such large birds....

....is a fairly ungainly process particularly as they do like to perform in full view of everybody.

The warning bells really began to ring for us when we kept coming home after our walks to find a gull sitting very comfortably on our chimney pot. Sadly, we don't have a solid fuel fire so were unable to cook the gull, leaving us with a real problem.  If the gulls nested on our chimney we wouldn't be able to eat out in the garden as the gulls would be joining in the meal, and they would be very aggressive anyway to anyone approaching them.  Drastic action was required.

Blackcap in the Garden

We saw a pair of blackcaps earlier in the winter feeding on the sea buckthorn berries near Dunrobin Castle - link here - but we've now had the pleasure of watching a male which appeared a week ago in our garden. We expected him to be passing through but he's stayed, probably because he developed a taste for the odd bits of peanut which fall from the feeders when the sparrows are on them, so....

....he has spent much of his time in the caging which protects the small birds' food from the crows.

Most of our birds come into the garden only for a while but the blackcap has become a permanent resident, much to the discomfort of the other birds because, to put it mildly, he's a bit of a bully. Only the robins and some of the larger male sparrows are not intimidated.

We've watched before as our small birds discover how to work a new feeder, usually seeing the tits on it first followed by the sparrows.  We've always assumed that they learn from watching other species.  Well, the blackcap is a quick learner because, this morning, we spotted him on one of the peanut feeders which is usually the preserve of the sparrows.

Searching for Excitement

We drove out to Littleferry today for a walk through the forestry on the eastern shores of Loch Fleet on one of those days when I yearned for some sort of excitement, perhaps seeing wildlife which was new or different, or spotting a rare fungus or.... stumbling across something unusual.  This was not to be, the most notable sighting being....

....an elongated bump in the ground running for a good thirty metres across the sandy forest floor which we decided was a mole moving house.

We did have one flash of hope when we came across this, one of many areas where the mossy soil had been turned over. Could it be wild boar? Could it be, for those of you who remember them, one of Hughie's pigs, escaped again? Or a foraging badger or two?

With light winds and moments of bright sunshine it was a pleasant walk, much of it along the shore of Loch Fleet looking out to where....

....a large colony of seals, over thirty visible, makes its home in the loch where they spend much of their day....

....loafing around on one of the sandbanks which were just being exposed by the falling tide.

At least some of the walk was new, and it was warm enough for us to spend time sitting on this bench looking out at the view - and reminding ourselves that we should not be complaining, for we are extraordinarily lucky to have walks such as this one close at hand, and to be able to do it meeting only one other walker in a two-hour wander.