Playing with Sand

The sand on Golspie's main beach has been almost completely removed by the sea leaving only a short stretch by the pier. If this were a tourist town the sudden removal of tonnes of beach sand would be a bit of a disaster but the village doesn't make much attempt to lure tourists so the beaches along this stretch of coast are little used except by local dog walkers.... and us.

The shallow waters immediately off the now-pebble beach are, however, popular with shore birds, with a flock of around twenty-five redshanks feeding this morning. The redshanks have been conspicuously absent through the summer so it's good to see them back.

The sand is also awol from the south end of the town's 'promenade' so the concrete ramp down to the beach ends in seaweed-slippery boulders which have to be crossed before one can reach the sand. However, the vagaries of the sea mean that, once down on the firm sand exposed at low tide, one can stretch one's legs properly.

A couple of hundred metres on the sand is back, kindly returned by the sea, but deserted of wildlife except the occasional gull and oystercatcher. The beach's inaccessibility has a bonus - we walked for a couple of hours along it and met three other people, all with dogs.

The highlight of our walk, if that's what it might be called, was finding something washed up on the beach, in the form of a rather chewed-up moon jellyfish. A year ago we were referring to this as 'Jellyfish Beach' - see post here.

The sea really does seem to be playing with the sand for, a couple of kilometres further along the beach, past the kart track, the sea defences end and the sea has, in its infinite wisdom, once again decided to remove the sand. We know from yesterday's walk that huge amounts of sand are also missing at the southern end of the Littleferry beach. We assume that the sea squirrels all this sand just offshore. We do hope so, and that it returns it by winter's arrival so we can once again have long, brisk walks in the driving wind and rain.

White Heather

This morning's walk took us through coniferous plantation from the tiny settlement of Littleferry to the shores of Loch Fleet. The bell heather under the trees is much less stressed than its cousins out on the links where a dry summer has burnt it, so it is in full and exuberant flower.

As always, the ling is later and only just coming in to bloom. The heather under the trees grows in small patches in one of which we found....

....the first white heather we've seen in Sutherland. There's plenty of heather here but the incidence of white flowers seems much rarer - on Ardnamurchan we not infrequently came across white bell heather, white ling and white cross-leaved heath. I have a particular soft spot for white heather as....

....one of the few portraits I have of my Wilson grandfather George shows him sporting a sprig of white heather in his buttonhole, though I think it's ling as opposed to the white bell heather we found today.

The tide was low in Loch Fleet when we reached it, to find masses of seals lazing out on the extensive sandbanks. I counted 118 though I'm sure there were more, some of them....

....this year's pups. That there are so many seals looking plump and sleek suggests there are fish to be had though when we circle round though the forestry for a brisk walk out on Littleferry beach, there was, once again, absolutely nothing washed up along the tideline.

At Last - a Dipper

Until recently there was a rather tatty interpretative board in Golspie Glen which showed some of the wildlife that could be seen, and one of those pictured was a dipper. For two years we've looked out for one without success and had concluded that there weren't any - until today when, crossing the footbridge over the Golspie Burn below our house, we spotted one.

Dippers are one of those birds which I feel are quite special. The first I ever saw was on our first visit to Ardnamurchan in, I think, 1995, when we were driving over from Inverness in a hired Discovery and stopped just off the A82 by the side of a river for a break. Later, when we lived in Kilchoan, I used to see them regularly at the mouth of the Millburn where it entered Kilchoan Bay.

They're great indicators of the health of a waterway. They're special too in the way they 'swim' in rushing rivers and burns to hunt for crustaceans and other invertebrates amongst the rocks. They're shy birds, best spotted, as happened today, when they fly low and fast along a stream, though they are easily confused with a blackbird.

A Sunny Morning

Golspie isn't a great place for warm, sunny days even at the height of summer but today started with bright sunshine and and not a breath of wind, so traces of mist were rising off Loch Unes as we made our way through Ferry Wood to Littleferry beach. The loch was buzzing with dragon- and damselflies, mostly emeralds, but the finest was found not on the loch but....

....basking in the sun on the trunk of a pine tree. It's a male common hawker, a species we've seen on the loch before, but this is an exceptionally fine specimen.

We walked out onto a gloriously empty beach and wandered along the waterline for half a mile or so with the sun warm on our skin. We are becoming accustomed to there being nothing washed up on the beach, not even a single, small jellyfish, so it was just as well that, offshore, the birds decided to entertain us, starting with....

....twenty or thirty gannets performing aerial acrobatics over a shoal of fish which they had found a hundred metres or so offshore.

Nearer the mouth of Loch Fleet, on a sandbank shortly to be inundated by the fast-rising tide, we noticed large numbers of sandwich terns mixed in with more oystercatchers than we've seen in ages. On a sandbank a little further into the loch we counted 84 oystercatchers in a separate group.

As we re-entered the wood on our way back to the car we spotted this ichneumonid wasp. A quick search on the internet suggests it may be a female Rhyssa persuasoria, the aptly-named sabre wasp, which is found in pine woodland and uses its exceptionally long ovipositor to inject its eggs into the larvae of wood wasps.

We are becoming used to a farewell from the resident roe hind as we leave Ferry Wood but this time she had two young with her instead of the one we've seen before. They were feeding in a field adjoining the forestry, a field belonging to an exceptionally neat and well-worked little farm.

A Casualty & a Beauty

We walk every day, whatever the weather, usually around two to three miles, today's effort being up the road towards Backies and then home down the Golspie Glen. The countryside is beginning to take on the feel of autumn, with more and more....

....fungi visible, this impressive one, about an open hand's width in size, being relatively certainly identified as an orange birch bolete. The boletes are common here, being in a group called....

....the pores, named for their undersides, in contrast to the gills of fungi like the common field mushroom.

As we approached home we came upon this sorry sight. We've seen more hedgehogs dead on the road in the last couple of weeks than we've seen in a year, which is always sad but does, at least, mean that there are hedgehogs around. This one looks as if it was making a last despairing effort to get out of the way as it was hit.

However, we cheered up as we entered our gate, beside which is a gloriously coloured buddleia called black knight, upon which several bees and this butterfly were feeding. Surprisingly, it's another painted lady, a migrant from sunnier climes to the south of us.

North & South Beaches

We had a somewhat depressing walk along Golspie's south beach yesterday. The easterly winds, we now realise, are responsible for removing sand from this beach so, since we've had several days of easterlies, what used to be a sandy beach is in a sad state. There's also a continuing lack of waders - perhaps they too prefer a beach with sand.

Today's walk, to the north of Golspie along the shoreline which runs below Dunrobin Castle, was much more cheerful, mainly because there were so many shore birds - curlews, terns, oystercatchers, black-backed, black-headed and common gulls, and....

....a flock of over 25 redshanks, a bird which has been conspicuously absent for months.

To add to our pleasure, and despite the showery weather, this common blue was out enjoying the thistle flowers while they're still around.

Farlary Insects

We visited Farlary Croft yesterday where there's a network of tracks and paths which are open to the public. It was a perfect day for dragon and damselflies, particularly round the small lochan which occupies a quarry from which, we guess, much of the aggregate needed to create foundations for the Kilbraur wind farm was extracted.

While we had a brief glimpse of a hawker, the main dragonflies were male....

 ....and female black darters while....

....the damselflies included plenty of male emeralds patrolling the margins of the lochan some of which....

....had managed to pick up a mate, and....

....some spectacular male common blues.

It was sheer luck that I spotted this day-flying moth, camouflaged as it was in the heather. Identifying it is difficult: it may be a silver Y.

Tortoiseshells have been very thin on the ground this year so it was good to find this one on the ling heather which is just coming into flower up in the hills.

A flower which we welcome finding at this time every year is the devil's-bit scabeous; and, each year, we have the challenge of finding it in its more unusual colours of white and pink.