Shore Buddies

We are very fortunate to live within a five minute walk of this beach which combines sandy stretches with pebbles and clumps of weed, and which also, at low tide, exposes....

....low promontaries of kelp-slick boulders on which the shore birds like to relax. Some days there are hardly any to be seen, though there are always a few gulls, and some days there are more. Today was fairly good for a wander along the beach, but what one noticed was how most species seem to like the company of others - so here we have cormorants with a grey heron and a gull, while....

....a little further along an oystercatcher was keeping company with a curlew, and elsewhere the oystercatchers were feeding alongside gulls. These species don't always seek out company: the curlews in particular....

....seem quite happy to nap alone.

Of the species along the shore today - and there are still some conspicuously missing, like the ringed plovers -  only one shunned the company of other species, keeping in small groups of its own or....

....relaxing alone, and that was the turnstones. They may be antisocial but these are the first turnstones we've seen here in some weeks so it's good to have them back.

Dead Wood Fungi

We - and the horses in the field at Golspie Tower - are not enjoying the first real gale of the winter, which started early yesterday afternoon, battered the house through the night, and isn't due to ease until around 2pm today. It's been pretty fierce, with gusts to 60mph and driving rain which has, this morning, alternated with brilliant blue skies, which persisted for most of our walk during which....

....we found some quite unusual fungi, all of which were growing on dead wood. This is an odd one, perhaps white spindles, Clavaria fragilis, which usually grows in short-cropped grass but can grow in woodland, which is where we found it.

This tiny jelly - it's about 15mm long - may be either crystal brain fungus or white brain fungus, though I think it's the former, Myxarium nucletum, because it is clear. However, unusually, I'm....

....almost 100% sure of this, the leafy brain fungus Phaeotremella folacea. This fine specimen was about 6" across.

I also had a bit of a struggle identifying this one but I concluded that it's Bisporella sulphurina, a cup fungus with tiny cups of around 1mm diameter, and one which is sufficiently unusual not to have a common name. Another interesting fact - well, to me anyway - is that, if it is sulphurina, it's uncommon in Scotland.

This is one we found often enough last winter. It's the yellow brain fungus, Tremella mesenterica, which tends locally to grow on dead gorse branches. It seems an appropriate fungus to find on the day when....

....we spotted the first new flowers on a living gorse bush.

Along the Shore

Although we looked at exactly the right times cloud cover spoiled any sight of the auroras that have lit up the Scottish skies elsewhere over the last few days so it was good to see an attempt, in yesterday's sunset, at a light pillar. 

Otherwise, the skies have been colourless, with little sun to light up the last autumn leaves on the trees above the dairy park. At such times the local forestry seems dark so our daily walk tends to wander under the open skies along the coastline. Not that there is much to see at the moment, with....    

....a few eider bobbing in the seas offshore and....

.... a few insects taking advantage of the wilting oxeye daisies.

However, in the seaweed accumulated along this morning's high-tide line we found this. It's seen side-on, is about six inches long and almost certainly bone. I think it's the eroded vertebra of a small whale or dolphin.

The Engineer

This is The Canadian, a sleeper train which is hauled by three giant diesel locos from Toronto on Lake Ontario for four days westwards, across the Canadian shield, across the prairies, and across the Rockies, until it reaches Vancouver on the Pacific coast. It's an epic journey across a stunning continent, and we've done various sections of it on several occasions, but this picture is from the first time we did it, in 2006, when we realised the comfort of the cabin and the excellence of the food, when we experienced for the first time....

....the stunning scenery which could be enjoyed from the vantage of the observation dome, when the full vastness of the country became evident, when, after almost 24 hours of travel from Toronto....

....we were still in Ontario and the temperature, which had been 20C on the day we left, had now dropped below zero. It's a breathtaking journey but it was made even more special by some of the people we met, of which....

....this man is an example. The first picture in this post was a typical tourist snap taken at one of the many stops the train makes as it wends its way slowly across the landscape, but as we turned to walk back along the train the driver - I beg his pardon, the 'engineer' as he is called in Canada - leaned out of his cab and invited us to climb up the steep ladder so he could show us the controls. In Britain this would have been unthinkable, perhaps even a disciplinary offence, but in Canada this is something it took time for us to comprehend - Canadian courtesy. What he told us of his work was fascinating, the sort of insight into a life which I so enjoy, and I am deeply grateful to him for his kindness.

Thoughts Along a Grey Strandline

Sometimes, in an open landscape like this, one that is bleak and colourless, one that is relatively featureless so our frail form seems to stand out against it, we do look very small and insignificant. Yet it is as if we are challenging our surroundings, particularly when we stand somewhere so special, at that meeting point of three great elements, earth, sky and sea.

We look so puny yet we are increasingly aware of how much our presence has altered the world upon which we look out. I use the term 'altered' advisedly: too many people would use a more emotive term like 'damaged': the world has constantly been damaged throughout its history by far more powerful forces than us; think of the meteorite impact 66 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs and perhaps 75% of other species. Earth doesn't care; it certainly doesn't care about us. It is merely a question of whether we care about ourselves.

I am very conscious that it is my generation which has done most to endanger our species, with a mindset that makes it the more difficult for us to do anything about it. We have made a mess and it is too late for us to mend it. The old men, in particular, need urgently to stand aside and give way to a much younger generation, and offer them the chance to mould the world to their future.

Butterfly & Rainbow

We took a walk in the woods around Dunrobin Castle after we arrived home yesterday, to find far fewer leaves on the trees compared to Glen Roy, not least because they were being stripped from the trees by a bitter west wind, the accumulating leaf litter making the search for....

....fungi very much more difficult. This, I think, is sulphur tuft, Hypholoma fasciculare: clumps of it were growing along a rotten, moss-covered log perched at the top of a steep bank above the Golspie Burn.

Today was a sunshine and showers and rainbows day, this beauty greeting us as we arrived home for a late lunch, but what caught our attention on the green fencing was....

....a very smart red admiral taking advantage of the warmth that is still to be found in direct sunshine. 

Glen Roy

We spent the weekend in the West Highlands where we were greeted by the sort of weather to which, over the twenty years we lived there, we became well accustomed - and it continued to rain for most of our visit. However, a bit of liquid sunshine has never prevented us from....

....getting out into the truly beautiful landscapes of that part of the world. Some of our time was spent wandering through the woodlands of the lower River Roy which, had the sun chosen to appear, would have been at their autumn best but I felt most at home when we....

 ....drove steadily higher and higher into Glen Roy and the trees fell away to reveal panoramic views of rolling open moorland around....

....the upper reaches of the glen. These days it is almost empty of human habitation but, after we had left the car and walked upstream along the winding, single-track road, we soon found signs of....

....the times when a much larger population lived here, in the days before....

....the arrival of these beasts, which still have possession of this land.

Seeing Glen Roy for the first time, albeit that the full magnificence of the views was obscured throughout our time there by incessant rain, brought back memories of my years as a geography teacher when the 'parallel roads' of Glen Roy - visible high on the hillside in the centre of this picture - were quoted as a classic example of ancient beach lines left as a glacial lake which once filled the glen rose to successive levels as the ice dams that held it back advanced up the valley.