A Squirrel Again

 

Yet another search for the elusive red squirrels of Scotland's most northerly population, introduced last November to the woods above Dunrobin Castle, at last produced the second fleeting sighting. A single squirrel moved quickly through the canopy, only pausing for a moment before disappearing - so quickly that Mrs MW never saw it. So we will try again though I do wish the miserable little beasts, if there are more than one, would be a bit more friendly.

Our walk back along the top of the beach produced another rare sight....

....three surfers trying to catch one of the rather dismal waves that were coming in. We sat to watch them, knowing what a good spectator sport it is, as they failed to get up again and again until one of them....

....finally caught a wave which....

....hardly carried him any distance before....

....suddenly lifting and smothering him in a welter of foam.

We arrived home to find a fair number of these birds stalking around the grassy open space next to our house. It's taken some time for me to hazard a guess as to what they are as skylarks and meadow pipits are very similar, but its lack of a crest suggests it's a pipit.

Our return coincided with the start of a snowshower which caught our snowbee out in the open, forcing him to the ground. He didn't seem in the slightest put out, picking his way through the grass of the lawn to bury himself in a tussock.

Snow Bee

There may be snow on the ground and an air temperature that's struggling to reach 4C and will fall to -2C tonight but this bumblebee is busy at work.

The Beast from the Northwest

Despite snow showers continuing through the day by late yesterday afternoon most of the snow had gone but it came back overnight, with temperatures well below zero again but not cold enough for ice to form so....

....we walked up the road to Golspie Tower looking back to where more snow showers were moving across the sea. The local media are trying to hype this up as a successor to 2018's Beast from the East but it isn't as bad and, anyway, The Beast from the Northwest just doesn't sound right.

Above Golspie Tower we plunged into forestry which shielded us from the worst of the wind. Judging by the lack of footprints we were the first to walk here today except for the deer.

There are several points along the winding forestry tracks which give fine views south, across the golf course and the links to the mouth of Loch Fleet and beyond, with the waves rolling in to the firth having their tops whipped off by the wind.

From a knoll on the edge of the forestry one can look almost due west across the houses at our end of the village. This knoll is the site of....

....the silent stones of a five millennia-old Neolithic cairn - details here.

Easter Extremes

Easter Saturday saw crowds on the beach - by our standards - all madly exercising as if this might be the only day of warm sunny weather we're likely to see this summer, some even taking the extreme step....

....of a dip in the sea - we've hardly ever seen anybody swimming off Golspie - sharing it with....

....gulls and upwards of a hundred eider.

With Sunday grey and increasingly windy we walked in the protection of the woods, remarking on the haste with which the trees and shrubs were exploding into leaf and flower but when we looked out of our window as evening came on we....

....saw the first signs of the snow which had been forecast. 

By this morning, with the tamest of our robins sitting outside the kitchen waiting patiently for breakfast, a bitter westerly was blowing bringing in heavy snow showers and occasional....

....bright sunshine, not weather that's much fun....

....for anybody, even a well-fed robin. The statistics for yesterday were stark: 11C maximum, -4C minimum overnight, and -1C at nine in the morning. Not pleasant, except we can't stand the idea of a day skulking indoors so we put on our all-weather winter gear and....

....ventured into Dunrobin woods for a couple of hours' brisk walking.

Mombasa Friends

A friend phoned today to report the death of a man with whom we had been at primary school back in the early 1950s. The deceased wasn't someone I knew well, being a couple of years older than me, but he was one of the few people I knew who spent his whole life on the Kenya coast, running a game fishing business out of a small harbour to the north of Mombasa.

The conversation reminded me that I have managed to keep in contact with a number of school friends from my years at Mombasa Primary between the ages of five and eight but none from either my prep school or my public school. Perhaps it is that the Mombasa friends shared an unusually contented and privileged existence in a truly beautiful place, and wish to prolong the memories of those days.

The news prompted another, more unhappy thought, that there are fewer and fewer of those old Africa friends left, and that, with each death, a suite of memories disappears. I know that events in the history of British colonialism are under intense scrutiny but that isn't a reason for burying its history which had both a positive and negative side.

First Signs of Spring

It's unlikely that a spring has gone by since I first started the Kilchoan Diary in 2009 when I haven't reported the sighting of the first butterfly. There's something very special about these insects, perhaps their brilliant colours and patterns, perhaps their rather ungainly flight. Butterfly Conservation recently reported that 2020 was a good year for butterflies - link here - but warned that their long term prospects remained poor, with almost a third of species showing serious decline over the last fifty years.

This tortoiseshell was sunning itself on a flagstone at the front of the house but was, in fact, the second I'd seen. I disentangled the first from the cobwebs on the inside of the window in our shed where it had overwintered.

Other creatures are also beginning to appear. We saw the first honey bees some weeks ago but the first bumblebees - another group which is in serious decline - have been on the wing here for about a week. Being so far north we are, of course, behind most of the rest of the UK but everything here catches up fast as the days lengthen. By the solstice we'll be enjoying almost 24-hour daylight.

Not everything that's appearing is altogether welcome. This is the first slug of the year, fortunately not in our garden or, worse, in the greenhouse where, I'm proud to say, the first mesembryanthemums are beginning to sprout from seeds I planted a week or so ago.

All this joy at the early signs of spring seems a little premature when one looks at the forecast. The BBC is promising us winds gusting over gale force on Sunday and Monday accompanied by winter showers and a wind which, having swung into the north, will drag down Arctic air....

....which will send temperatures plummeting well below zero with little respite until well into the week after next. This clip is from the Windy.com website here.

Sunshine at Littleferry

We drove to Littleferry this morning, timing our arrival perfectly with the clearing of the early high cloud. The tide had just turned and was beginning to funnel water through the entrance to Loch Fleet where hardly a bird was visible. Sadly, too, the first thing we encountered was....

....the corpse of a seal, perhaps one of last year's pups, washed up on the high tide line.

Happily, the ends of two of the promontories of sand on the north side of the entrance to Loch Fleet were crowded with birds, most of them gulls but also some small flocks of waders - one of ringed plovers, the others difficult to identify - and pairs of ducks.

We walked along the sands towards Golspie meeting only three people, all dog walkers. The beach and the tideline of the rising tide lacked anything of interest beyond....

....a scattering of bivalves with razor shells prominent and several small sea potatoes.

On our way home we pulled off in the usual place where there is a view of the inner part of Loch Fleet, deserted of wildfowl except for a few pairs of shelduck, one of which was close enough for us to be reminded  of....

....the magnificence of the male's breeding plumage.