Geese

We sat in our sunroom until after five yesterday evening with the room still warm from late sunshine and watched as skein after skein of pink-footed geese flew over heading south to their night roosts.

As each skein merged into the gathering dusk we thought it must be the last but more and yet more flew over. We know when they're passing overhead as they call, not all at once but in a never-ending conversation, perhaps as they urge each other on, fading only as the last skein passes.

Then, this morning, as we set out for our walk, they started coming over again, following the coastline north. I have tried to count this multiple skein and estimate that there are at least five hundred individuals.

Most pass over in these huge groups but there are often smaller ones - these ones heading in the wrong direction although some peeled off and turned north to follow the larger group.

Every time we hear them we stop and look up, feeling that we are very privileged to be watching a wildlife spectacle, with the thought that, as the winter deepens and from past experience, the day will come when we suddenly realise we are no longer hearing their calls.

Views

This picture was taken this morning shortly after half-past nine as we walked along Golspie's slightly run-down promenade, looking across the village's beach and jetty and an almost mirror-calm sea to the south coast of the Moray Firth. It's one of several pictures I've taken recently of local views, not always with any purpose but sometimes....

....in an attempt to record how fleeting the detail can be. This is part of Golspie's south beach where, for reasons best known to the sea, sand has been carefully arranged to form a featureless plain while only a mile further south....

....the sea has taken great bites out of the same beach. Quite why it left a meandering mini-canyon is, like so many things the sea does, a mystery, and when we return to this same section of beach during the coming week this feature will, no doubt, have been erased.

This constant movement does have some interesting historical consequences. One recent low tide exposed what appears to be an old wall formed of rocks angling out from the shore. We've walked this part of the beach often enough before and have never noticed it and, probably, when we return that way it will have been obscured again. It interests me because elsewhere such water-walls have turned out to be old and often very cleverly constructed fish traps.

We are so fortunate that the open views we can choose to enjoy from our walks along the coastlines to the south and north of the village are in such contrast to the enclosed views we can opt for if, instead, we turn inland and upwards into the forested areas to the west of us, where a rather colour-muted autumn is in process. At such times we are often looking, not at views but....

....at the ground at our feet in search of beauties like this, a rather fine shaggy parasol fungus.

The Memory of Photographs

These days, most of us have hundreds if not thousands of photographs on our 'devices', and the vast majority of these pictures are rarely if ever looked at. I am fortunate that I now have the time and the inclination to browse back through mine and enjoy the sudden sense of being back in the moment they were taken.

This picture has a special place in those memories. It was taken from the Radisson hotel where we were staying, looking out across the Toronto waterfront to the islands in Lake Ontario. We had just arrived by 'plane from Glasgow, we had Rachael with us, and we were at the start of the first of many visits we would make to Canada. I recall the sense of intense anticipation, in the short term of enjoying exploring what we discovered was a lovely city and taking a trip to Niagara Falls but in the longer term because we were going to take a train, the Canadian, to Edmonton and then drive across the Rockies to Seattle, from where we would fly home - and all of this was strange and new and immensely exciting.

What I love so much about it - and many others of the pictures I look at - is that I can FEEL the sensation of being there, not just the sights and sounds but also the touch of a warm autumn sun and a light breeze on my face. I can't help it but I so wish I could transport myself back to that moment and relive the adventures and events that unfolded over the following few weeks.

Sanna Bay Beaches

We had the good fortune for over twenty years of our lives to live within a few miles of Sanna, a tiny crofting community which boasts some of Scotland's finest beaches. This view looks north across Sanna Bay towards Rum, Eigg and Muck, and shows how the bay is broken up into a series of smaller bays, and it is these, some of them only a few metres wide, which I think of as Sanna Bay beaches.

There were so many of them that, even when the car park at Sanna was full, each family could almost guarantee to have one of the bays to itself. However, we knew of many more Sanna Bay type beaches a few minutes' walk to the north and east of the settlement, this one being the nearest and a fine beach for beach cricket.

Each of these little beaches had its own personality. The one in the distance we called Shelly Beach because its sand was coarse and composed of often complete little shells, including the rare Arctic cowrie, for which we spent hours searching, while the one just visible in the foreground was one of our secret beaches, difficult to access and covered at high tide.

East Africa has many such beaches. This is Mangapwane beach, Zanzibar, a favourite of my mother's and one she took my brother and I to when we visited Zanzibar in 1950. In those days it was a lonely place with just a few fishing ngalowas pulled up onto its sands but these days it is much busier.

Jamaica too had its fair share of these tiny, enclosed bays. This is a very small one, the perfect size for these two small children, Elizabeth and Mark, but there were also slightly larger but still relatively uncrowded bays, for example....
 

....Boston Bay just to the north of Long Bay.

These little bay beaches are the most magical of places, enclosed, safe, friendly. In Jamaica, where life in the capital, Kingston, was stressful, they were the occasional reward for sticking with a tough job.

Farlary Walk

We drove northwest towards Rogart yesterday in bright autumn sunshine and temperatures which, by early afternoon, touched 16C, to visit Farlary Croft 43 where the farmer has created....

....a network of walks for people to enjoy. We admire what he has achieved - this map by the entrance to the walks is a new addition - and grateful for the open access. It may be that some of the funds have come from....

....some of the wind turbines of the Kilbraur wind farm which are on his land. None of the turbines was working when we arrived in what should have been perfect conditions but they must have been switched off as, minutes after this picture was taken, they all started to turn.

The immediate area around the croft is a bleak moorland landscape, not dominated by higher hills but more like a dissected  plateau, across which the modern industrial landscape marches. Almost everywhere one goes on the croft one can....

....see the spindly turbine structures or hear the gentle whoosh of their blades.

Much of the croft's land is now down to trees, the impact of the plantations broken by open spaces which offer....

....distant views towards the wilder parts of Sutherland. It's as if this is at the limits of human domination, asserted by the wind farm, and beyond lies true wilderness. 

The plantations include both deciduous and coniferous woodland with the trails snaking through them, and with....

....some conveniently placed picnic tables from which one of us could admire the view while the other explored the wealth of fungi under the spruce trees - there were no fewer than eight species within ten metre of the table.

There is a cottage to rent on the croft - link here.

Mid-October Fungi

A selection of the fungi we've found in the middle part of the month serves, amongst other things, to illustrate the fun people have had in naming fungi. That their names are often so.... earthy.... reflects the importance fungi must have had in the diet of country people. Some are excellent to eat - if you know what you're eating - some are edible but only in pretty extreme circumstances, like when you're very hungry.

I was thrilled to find this fungus. For a start, it's very pretty, but its main attribute is its lovely and very appropriate name - plums and custard. 

Superficially, this may look a bit similar but it, too, if you look closely, has an apt name - the woolly milkcap.

This fresh, vigorous and thrusting young fungus has a much less happy name: it's the blackening waxcap, so called because....

....its fresh beauty so quickly....

....wizens and darkens into a rather....

....black and sad old age.

Fungi come in just about every colour and shade. This is one of a large group, the brittlegills, whose name is self-explanatory but which also tend to get their other name from something pretty obvious, like their colour. This is the green brittlegill while....

....I need hardly tell you that this is the bloody brittlegill.

Like all the local fungi this autumn, the pores continue to be excelling themselves. This is the bovine bolete, also known as the jersey cow, while....

....this one is the peppery bolete, so named because, when cooked, it's reported to have a peppery taste.

Not everything is rosy in the fungus garden. A year ago we were finding scarlet waxcaps with the blackening waxcaps on the links at Littleferry. The year, so far, we haven't found one.

I do my best to identify the various fungi I find. Apologies for any mis-identifications.

Littleferry Again

We keep going back, time and time again, to Littleferry. There are plenty of other walks we could do within a similar distance but none have the wonderful sense of open-ness felt as one steps out onto miles of sand, particularly on a cold but brilliantly sunny morning with the beach almost deserted. More, the sea keeps changing, not only its own face - today a brisk wind was whipping up moderate breakers along the shoreline - but also....

....the structure of things into which it comes in most immediate contact, like the shape and distribution of sediment of the beach itself, as well as the pattern of erosion along the coastline. Today saw big changes in both - a hefty proportion of the sand has, once again, been removed, exposing the base layer of pebbles, and the sea is also eating in to the dunes - at right in the picture - and this before we've had a proper winter storm.

Then there's the constant changes in the wildlife along the shore. The Littleferry end of the beach used to be littered with seashells but there are now relatively few. Perhaps the molluscs are fed up with the constant removal and rearrangement of their sandy homes. Today we found few shells though those we did find tended to be razor shells.

One welcome sight was a small flock of waders performing some fine synchronised flying over the entrance to Loch Fleet. I rather assumed they were dunlin but....

 ....their beaks look too short and they have rather darker heads, so I think they may have been ringed plovers.

There is a convenient bench which overlooks the entrance area of the sea loch, and it was while we were  sitting there watching the plovers that a kestrel arrived, hovering for some time quite close to us - but over the beach and nearby sandbanks. It was in full hunting mode and at one point swooped down to land on the beach but I cannot imagine what it was looking for.

As we set off for the car we heard an unexpected song, high above us, and shortly afterwards spotted two pairs of what sounded and behaved like skylarks. Either these are late migrants passing through from their summer home in the northern isles or we have skylarks thinking of over-wintering here, something they already do further south.