A Perfect Fine Day

A truly beautiful, fine day is a rarity in northern Scotland but today was one of them, with crystal-clear blue skies and an air temperature of eighteen when we first went in to the garden shortly after nine this morning, which had risen to....

....a stunning twenty-five by one in the afternoon - compare this to yesterday when the thermometer struggled to register sixteen at lunchtime on a dull, windy day.

In such brilliant sunshine one would have expected to have had insects out in their battalions but....

....in six hours in the garden I counted five butterflies, with this small white the only one which stopped long enough for a picture. The only other insects out were a few....

....bee and hover fly species most of which were particularly attracted to the sedum.

Perhaps just to warn us how fortunate we were to have such a lovely day, by midday the morning's blue sky boasted a textbook mare's tail - top picture. These are often signals of an approaching frontal system so it's unsurprising that tomorrow's forecast is for a dull but dry day, but even higher temperatures. 

Another Orchid Species

Today we walked the track that leads westwards from Golspie towards Loch Lunndaidh searching for an un-named orchid which we'd been told was to be found where the track passes through the outer fence from the forestry onto open moorland, but we didn't have to go far before....

....despite the presence of a large rabbit population which might well have considered them a delicacy, we came across....

....a small group of northern marsh orchids in full and magnificent bloom on the grass verge.

A little further up we found a large but very localised collection of heath spotted orchids, ranging from white through to pale pink, again looking very healthy.

When we reached the forestry margin, where there is a magnificent view southwards down the coast towards Loch Fleet and beyond, we started searching and almost immediately came across....

....these two orchids. Mrs MW kindly knelt down to smell them - I have a poor sense of smell - and confirmed what I thought: they are marsh fragrant orchids, Gymnadenia densiflora, an orchid we haven't seen since our days on Ardnamurchan, where they were not uncommon. Happily, there were a good number of them, all rather spread out and, sadly, all slightly past their best.

Then, on our way back to the car, just beside the heath spotted orchids, we came across two more of the marsh fragrant.

So we have now found five species of wild orchid immediately around Golspie. The next species I would like to find would be one or both of the butterfly orchids, which should be in flower now.

Birds of Sea, Shore and Air

We walked along Golspie beach this morning on our way to a four-hour stint in the charity shop to find the mudflats exposed by the falling tide devoid of seabirds except for....

....a lone oystercatcher. In fact there were more....

....terrestrial birds than seabirds, including sparrows, rooks, a goldfinch and, high above us.... three swifts! Only yesterday I was writing about their demise and today they turn up to confound me - but, welcome back!

The swifts may have been too quick for a photograph so here's one of a species which, locally at least, is not endangered - the house sparrows in our garden. The parents have just fledged yet another brood so we must have upwards of fifty squabbling over the feeders at any one time. No doubt the sparrowhawk, who was in the garden a couple of days ago, will thin them out.

Missing, Presumed....

I was rather pleased with the composition of this picture when I took it in Sadaani National Park in Tanzania in 2010. It shows two vultures doing what vultures seem to spend most of their time doing, which is to sit high in a preferably dead, leafless tree and do.... nothing. But I was even more pleased with it when I noticed an intruder in my composition, a swift, so when I wrote about vultures in a post back in March 2021 - see post here - I pointed out that this could have been a British swift as the furthest point on their migration route is Tanzania.

We never saw swifts in our years on the west coast of Scotland - it's probably too wet for them - so, when we moved down to Felixstowe, we were rather pleased to renew their acquaintance. We were as pleased when, moving up to Golspie, we found them here - but only one very small group of about three birds. This year, while we've had fleeting glimpses of what might have been a high-flying swift, I really couldn't put my hand on my heart and swear I've seen one.

The common swift's breeding population status in the UK is now red because, according to the British Trust for Ornithology's website, it has suffered "Recent Severe Breeding Population Decline". That decline has been sudden and steep: as recently as the early 2000s their status was green and until 2020 it was amber. In 2016 there were estimated to be around 60,000 pairs in Britain, so one wonders how many are breeding here this summer.

They are spectacular birds. To give one example of their extraordinary capabilities, swifts are birds which only land to nest, so a young swift may fly 300,000 miles non-stop between fledging late one summer and first landing at a potential nest site two summers later.

And we are in danger of losing this bird from our skies.

Home

My mother used to half-sing, "Home again, home again, jiggety-jig" - or something to that effect - to my brother and I when we were small boys as we approached home, usually after a slightly long and perhaps tiring journey. It was a chant of happiness but, thinking back and remembering the ditty, it made me think about the idea of 'home'.

One thinks of a place as 'home' automatically. It's not something one consciously decides. A house or bungalow or flat (the above picture shows our first home, a flat in Stone, Staffordshire) or whatever it is, becomes home when one feels, deep down and not necessarily totally logically, that one belongs there. Not that one owns it - so many of my homes have been company houses or rented accommodation or belonged to my parents - yet they still became, for a time, home.

It usually takes some time, from the moment of moving in, for a place to become a home. In some cases that time is very short: when we moved in to Matenderere (above), the house we built in Kilchoan, a house which we'd designed for ourselves and watched rise from a rocky patch of brambles, bracken and coarse heather, it was home almost before we moved in. In other cases, while I may have called the place home, I never really felt I belonged there.

I have known people who have only had a few homes - one I can think of has only had two, and those a few hundred metres apart - and in some ways I rather envy them. My count of the minimum number of places I probably felt were 'home' is - Dar-es-Salaam, 2; Mombasa, 4; England while my parents lived in East Africa, 2; England after my father's retirement, 5; with Mrs MW, 14; making a total of 27. In most of those homes I was very content - certainly so in 4 Lodge Road, Maldon, above - in just a few I really wasn't, so while I thought of them as home I wanted to be elsewhere. Once Mrs MW and I were free to make our own decisions, we didn't stay in those homes for long.

Twenty-seven is a ridiculously large number of homes to have had. I didn't have much choice with the thirteen I had while dependent on my parents but the fourteen we've had since then seems excessive as so many of them were either in lovely places - Ludlow and Kilchoan are examples - or in exotic parts of the world - Jamaica, Rhodesia (above is our bungalow in Rhodesia) - yet we moved away. As a teacher of geography I used to say that people migrated for two main reasons: they were PUSHed out and/or they were PULLed towards. We were pushed out of some - sadly, the two exotic ones - and pulled towards most of the rest, sometimes by expectations we placed on them which were disappointed.

I don't see us ending our days in our present house, not because we dislike the area or the locals but because the house is too big and unsuitable for two ageing people. So perhaps I'll write occasionally about where, if we were able to wave a magic wand, might be the perfect home in which to end our days. The Hoey House, on the beach at Nyali near Mombasa (above), would certainly be a candidate.

'Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza'

The sky was suitably grey when we took our morning walk along the path that leads from the village to Dunrobin Castle because, as soon as we left the track and walked along the beach, we found what can only be described as carnage.

In a half-mile section of the coast we counted....

....over twenty dead guillemots washed up with the seaweed with, in some places....

....several of them within a few yards.

Not all were dead. This one, which had probably come in within the last few hours, stood stock still with its beak pointing into the air as if patiently awaiting its fate.

Because this is how we are accustomed to seeing them, flying free upon the wind, the corpses of the....

....gannets, apparently in prefect condition, were most upsetting.

This came after reading on the BBC News website that our population of rare roseate terns is now added as a species being badly affected by this new, virulent form of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI). We'd been worried that we hadn't seen any of the local sandwich terns for some time but happily saw a small flock yesterday and another today.

The RSPB is closing reserves to try to ensure that the remaining populations of all affected species are as undisturbed as possible. The organisation is appealing to the government to lead a much more organised response to the disaster, including monitoring where birds are being badly affected - such as along our local coast.

The Cassley

We enjoyed a day out today along the banks of the River Cassley half-an-hour's drive to the west of Golspie, at a point where the river, having dropped steadily, suddenly....

....plunges over a series of falls, the Achness Falls, before running through Rosehall to join the Oykel in the Strath of Sutherland. Inevitably at this time of year the waters are being....

....thrashed by the lines of hopeful salmon fishermen who, we gathered, were having a poor day. However, we did notice that, as soon as the fishermen had abandoned a run and moved elsewhere, the salmon started jumping in joy.

This little bird intrigued us. It's one of the smaller waders, perhaps a sanderling or a juvenile of one of the other species. It sat on its rock in the middle of the river emitting a plaintive peep-peep.

The strath through which the Cassley flows has some fine glacial features including this textbook roche moutonnee, plucked at the left hand end by a glacier moving from right to left. However, my main interest, as always, was in the wildflowers, for we saw....

....the first bog asphodel of the year and some of the finest....

....heath spotted orchids we've seen in Sutherland.