Views from the Dornoch Bridge

We were up early today to drive to Tain to a new dentist but, before leaving, while feeding the small birds, the first skein of geese of the winter passed overhead, heading not south but north, suggesting that these are one of our local, winter-resident gaggles which will return to a night-time roost at Loch Fleet.

It was difficult to tell which species the birds were, either greylags or pink-footed, but having seen them at Littleferry on Sunday I would guess it was greylags.

On our way south along the A9 we stopped on the Dornoch Firth bridge where the sun was busy burning back the early mist. The tide was rising in the firth, flooding the long banks of sand in the area looking east towards the open sea, with....

....surprisingly, perhaps worryingly few birds feeding, a single grey heron and a few gulls.

This looks west, up the firth towards Struie Hill on the south shore in Easter Ross, while, looking to the left of this....

....the little peninsula in the foreground is the Ness of Portnaculter which ends in Ferry Point, whence a ferry once crossed to Meikle on the Sutherland shore.

Insects in the Garden

It's autumn, with daddy-longlegs on the outside of the windows asking to be allowed in and a heavy dew across the lawn, but the temperatures are higher than they've been most of the summer - 22C in the back garden this morning - which has brought out....

....the first peacock in months, attracted by the michaelmas daisies which are just coming into flower.

One forgets how incredibly dark the underwing is on this species, ideal for soaking up the heat in the fleeting sunny intervals.

Only one other butterfly visited the garden, possibly a tortoiseshell, but it spurned our garden flowers, an opportunity which a variety of bumblebees and....

....flies and....

....hoverflies seized upon. It's been a bad year here for insects so it was good to see them.

The peacock stayed around all morning, spending some time on the profusion of blooms on the new buddleia which is on the shady side of the house, where it became almost comatose as it feasted, allowing me to take a picture from inches away: such a beautiful, beautiful beast!

Something New

I suppose it's only human to be constantly on the lookout for something that is new and exciting rather than glorying in the beauty of what is normally all around us. So I can't help it when visiting a place like Loch Unes in the middle of Ferry Woods on a warm, sunny morning to be disappointed when....

....the 'only' damselflies present seemed to be the 'usual' emeralds, and the 'only' darters....

....the 'usual', boring old black darters. Both are, of course, utterly beautiful, wonderful creatures of a family dating back over 300 million years.

I was reminded of a sense of wonder only when, by sheer luck, I caught the 'only' other dragonfly on the wing that day....

....this lean, mean hunting machine, a male common hawker - not 'common' at all when captured in flight - patrolling the lochan in a hunt for a female.

It's inevitable, this far north, with our short, cool summers and preponderance of grey days, that the number of dragon- and damselfly species resident here is likely to be limited. So far I've 'only' found two hawker, three darter, one chaser and three, maybe four, damselfly species and, according to my dragonfly book, should only expect to find one more....

....the golden ringed dragonfly - this one was photographed on Ardnamurchan. Quite why we have missed this very spectacular beast is a bit of a mystery.

Autumn at Loch Fleet

The air has a chill to it, the waters of Loch Fleet are as grey as the sky, but the brittle stillness is broken by the arrival of the first....

....geese of the oncoming winter, a hundred or so greylags falling out of the sky to stretch and gossip on waters suddenly ruffled by a light breeze.

On the beach we meet others who will be our companions through the winter: sanderlings are one of our favourites, small groups of busy little waders running up and down with the waves, while....

....flights of ringed plovers skim the choppy waters at the entrance to the loch, the narrow channel stirred up by the fast-rising tide.

Below them Loch Fleet's seals patrol, the prospect of a meal exciting black-headed gulls and a few lingering sandwich terns.

Inquisitive beasts the seals, not afraid of coming close in to the beach to inspect us perhaps because.... 

....there's little else moving on the beach to interest them: other than one other couple, we were the only humans out for a Sunday morning stroll.

Late August Fungi

The fungi shown in this post are a few of the many we saw on a walk on 27th August, and are from just two locations, Golspie Glen and the upper Dunrobin Woods.  This first was found in the glen, one of several which had been knocked over. I'm fairly certain it's honey fungus, Armillaria mellea, but not certain enough to tell Mrs MW to take it home and cook it for our evening meal.

It took me ages of searching on the internet to find this one, from Dunrobin Woods, and the final give-away came not from the net but from the stem. It's also honey fungus, but juveniles.

This looks rather the same but it has a very short stem and is a bit more 'prickly', so I think it's a dusky puffball, Lycoperdon nigrescens.

This was Mrs MW's prize find, in Dunrobin Woods. It was huge - the Swiss Army knife is for scale - teetered on an incredibly slim stem, and was absolutely perfect. I'm fairly certain it's the parasol mushroom, Macrolepiota procera.

This was an exciting find as it was the first of its kind for us. It's the prettily- and descriptively-named stinkhorn, Phallus impudicus.

This one seems to be flowing out of the trunk of a living tree and is about 9" across. I'm reasonably certain it's Daedaleopsis confragosa, blushing bracket.

I've written about this one before but include a picture of another in part because the specimens are so neat and perfect, in part because there's a mature one and a new one, and in part because it's probably very poisonous - it's either grey spotted amanita or - I think more likely - panthercap.

Then there were all the ones I haven't been able to identify, like this mass growing out of the side of a half-dead, moss-covered treetrunk, and....

....this goblet-shaped specimen with its gills on the outside, and....

....this one with a strange internal structure, and....

....this one which really should be easy to identify and may, just may be the charcoal burner, but.... I'm not sure.

Walking through the woods at the moment is almost intimidating. I'm afraid of finding yet more which, after an hour's searching, I still can't identify. It doesn't really make any difference, they're just as beautiful without their names - though some of them are fun - yet I'm driven to find them.

A Gathering of the Clans

We looked out of the window at breakfast this morning to see masses of birds swooping and twisting across a drizzle-grey sky before landing on the power lines up towards Golspie Tower. Then they would take off again, only to return. There was a restlessness about them, an energy and urgency, as if they knew that a great event was ahead. 

A close-up proved that the birds were a mixture of the swallow and house martin clans - which takes me back to Wednesday's post where I wondered if the two species flew south together. This is more evidence that they do.

Au Revoir!

Today's brilliant blue skies with hardly a cloud to spoil the sun and temperatures at midday warmer than we've had all summer must have wound up the swallows because suddenly the air was full of them, thirty or more, flying at frantically high speeds, chasing each other, screeching in excitement, until a group landed on and around the north eave of our house where they started to display exactly the same behaviour as they did in mid-August a year ago - see post here - when....

....they began to fly up to and investigate the remains of the nest abandoned by a pair of house martins earlier that summer. Visiting it seemed to excite them the more until...

....they were joined by a flight of house martins in a new game which involved some of them landing on a branch of our cherry tree and others swooping at them; and it seemed to involve both species equally. There are five birds in this picture, at least one of which is a swallow.

A few minutes later they all disappeared, though they kept returning, flying low around the house and through the garden and between the trees, until a new group, this time house martins, decided it was their turn to investigate the abandoned nest.

It's the first time I have seen swallows and martins 'playing' together, and I wonder whether there is some serious reason behind their games. Obviously, the speeding and the acrobatics are part of the process of getting fit for a very long journey, but do the two species co-operate along the way? Do they, for example, form mixed groups as they fly south, perhaps to help pace each other, or even to find the way? And why the interest in the old nest?

From their behaviour this was swallows and martins which knew our house, so they're local, not birds of passage from north of here. They're at least a fortnight behind last year, probably because we've had fine weather recently and a least some insects in the air, but they're bound to be leaving soon. Au revoir!