Small Bird News

Close followers of this blog will have been sorely missing its Small Bird News feature, for which I can only apologise and plead lack of anything really exciting happening in the small bird world in our back garden, inundated as it is by what must now be at least the third brood of the resident house sparrows this year. This cheerful, chattering hoard appears as soon as breakfast is served on the various feeding platforms and consume almost everything, leaving very little to....

....the other residents like the robin. We've been quite worried about the robins as we'd seen little of them, unlike in previous years where there were, at times, as many as three pairs arguing over their territories. One finally put in an appearance along with its young, which was joined under the crow-proof netting by....

....what I'm fairly sure was a young dunnock. Dunnocks are one of my favourite birds mostly because they are so unassuming, minding their own business and never causing anyone any bother. I've often thought of them as the bird equivalent of a small, very energetic mouse.

Hardly anything exotic has come in to the garden, this pair of goldfinches being one of the few exceptions, not even stopping for a bite to eat and moving on pretty quickly.

We do still have both great and blue tits in the garden, possibly because some of the bird feeders have been designed to be tit-accessible and sparrow-proof, but the coal tits have, rather worryingly, disappeared. We've also seen....

....a greenfinch in the last couple of days, a sight which would not have been too remarkable a couple of months ago. His strategy was to appear long after the sparrow's bedtime, when he had all the feeders to himself.

The crows have been as much of a pain as always. We've had some invasions of rooks, which terrify everyone, but the main problem has been the very intelligent jackdaws. One pair dumped this young one in our garden and it's since taken up almost permanent residence, despite some very firm 'discouragement' from us. The small birds hate him as he's a devious bully - you'll probably remember the sort of thing from your school playground.

Geckos

When I was a boy in East Africa geckos were a part of my daily life. These small lizards, typically around 10cm in length, appeared at night and, because of the amazing suction system on their feet and their superb night vision, spent the dark hours hunting insects on the walls and ceilings of our bedrooms.

In the hot season my brother and my beds were moved out onto an open, upstairs veranda for coolness, and there the geckos were in gecko clover because the lights above our beds attracted a storm of moths and other insects. Then the geckos would not only hunt insects on the walls but also on our mosquito nets, so I might be lying in bed reading to be disturbed by a small 'thump' as one of them performed an acrobatic two-foot jump from wall to the netting to chase a particularly succulent quarry.

The geckos I remember on the East African coast were the common house gecko which was originally native to SE Asia. It's a boring pale brown, its only really interesting feature being that, if it approached a wall light to grab an insect, I could see its innards. Some of the geckos of Mauritius, by comparison, are day geckos and stunningly coloured. The island, small as it is, has five resident species of which the one at the top of this page is, I think, the ornate day gecko Phelsuma ornata.

A Backies Walk

It's still far too cool here for mid-July, and we're pestered by occasional rain showers brought in by the persistent westerlies but at least the wind has dropped to a breeze. Walking up the road towards Golspie Tower this morning, the gorse flowers have all died away leaving....

....the cock yellowhammers exposed - if not enough to stop them calling to each other “a little bit of bread and no cheeeeeese...."

The largest gorse patch is home to a family of roe deer. This male was less than ten metres away but wasn't in the slightest perturbed by our arrival, simply watching us intently until we removed ourselves.

We walked up to the Backies croft where they sell their beautiful brown eggs but found the cupboard bare, so returned via the soft woodland of Golspie Glen, sitting for a time on this bench to enjoy the occasional sunny intervals and....

....to watch the speckled woods that own the clearing.

We saw four species of butterfly on our walk but the quarter of an hour we spent in the garden at lunchtime for the Big Butterfly Count produced not a single butterfly.

We stopped again to look for dragonflies along the margins of the skating pond, happy to find a few in flight, all of them large reds.

The temperature today probably won't struggle much above 16C but the forecasters are threatening us with  21C on Tuesday while England is promised something around 35C. Sometimes, just sometimes, and certainly not very often, I think I prefer the Scottish weather.

A Small Alberta Town

One of the things I came very much to like in my visits to Alberta were its small towns. A typical example is Camrose, which we visited during our holiday in 2017. We stayed in a modern, rather characterless hotel in the new part of town, where space for extensive development seems never a problem - except for whoever has to cut the grass.

Although practically no-one else does it, we walk round Canadian towns, which gives us a good feel for the place, and Camrose seemed to exude the sense of confidence, of comfort and pride, that is so typical of Canada.

Despite this, we probably wouldn't have enjoyed the town as much had we not walked down to the river where, as in so many towns and cities in Alberta, there are miles of pedestrian and cycling tracks, picnic and barbecue sites, and playing fields. Camrose, like many of those other Alberta towns, sits on a crossing point of a river, and its importance derives from a major road, now Highway 13, and....

....the Canadian Pacific Railway whose tracks, almost unbelievably, still cross the Stoney Creek by this magnificent trestle bridge.

Like so many things in Canada, nothing seems to happen in any great hurry in Camrose, so when we had the good fortune to be near the tracks as....

....one of the huge freight trains came through - over 100 wagons is far from unusual - it was going so slowly that the engineer - as the driver is called in Canada - had plenty of time to give us a wave and a cheerful smile.

I also remember Camrose for its wildlife. When the paved paths ran out as we walked up the Stoney Creek valley the surroundings became sufficiently wild for garter snakes to feel at home, raptors soared above us, the birdlife was enviable, and we saw deer which seemed very much at home in the town itself.

When I visit a place like Camrose I ask myself the question, "Could I have lived here and been content?" For Camrose, the answer is a definite, 'Yes', but I would have wanted to have lived there for most if not all my life and never have known anything else; that way I would have been an integral part of the slow and perhaps slightly unimaginative peace of the place. But.... it would have meant missing out on all the interesting places where I've lived and worked.

An Uncommon Common

Those of us living in the north of Scotland are being hammered by a strong westerly airflow which gusts at times to almost gale force, while at the same time enjoying bright, sunny intervals between occasional showers. While the rest of Britain basks in light airs and the promise of a heatwave, we took our daily walk....

....in the relative protection of Golspie Glen, heading along the well-maintained paths to this particular spot which hides the only local population of....

....the common spotted orchid Dactylorhiza fuchsii.

Most of the five orchid species we've found in this area have two or more separate populations but this is the only one which is confined to a few square metres and, on this morning's count, to only ten individual specimens, about the same number we counted last year.

The common spotted orchid is usually.... common. To quote the Wildlife Trust's website, "The common spotted-orchid is the easiest of all our orchids to see: sometimes, so many flowers appear together that they create a pale pink carpet in our woodlands, old quarries, dunes and marshes."

Not around here: the common spotted is definitely uncommon.

The animated world weather map can be found here. 

The Culmaily Plantation House

This is the area, between the ridge that rises to the peak of Beinn Bhraggie and the Golspie-Loch Lundaidh track, where our search last Friday produced the first group of heath fragrant orchids. However, as so often happens, a search for one thing led to another discovery.

It is difficult to distinguish in the rough vegetation but the four metre long line of boulders in the foreground is the foundations of one end of a small building, the structure extending away towards the top left for some 9m. In the right-hand side there is good evidence of a gap in the foundation stones which....

....was the doorway of the building - Mrs MW is standing in it in this picture, which looks in the diametrically opposite direction.

At 36 square metres it's a small building but this is typical of rural buildings dating back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. While there is no evidence for this, at this size it may well have been someone's home and, if it was, it's typical of our ancestors as they, like us, did favour a site with a good view. Locally this is particularly true of the much earlier hut circles which often commanded fine panoramas.

The red arrow on this satellite picture of the area points to the barely-visible outline of the building, which runs almost exactly north-south with the entrance, as one would expect, on the east side where it is protected from the prevailing westerly winds.

The structure is also marked on the local 1:25,000 OS map, as are other structures to its east - which gives me more to investigate when next we walk up that way.

What's in a Good Walk?

Primarily, a good walk needs to have something new or unusual, something to provide a moment of excitement, so today's wander at Littleferry gave us masses of jellyfish along the high-tide line, mostly moon with some blues, but the unusual, perhaps rather unpleasant sight of their decomposing remains being covered by....

....a seething mass of sand fleas (also called sand hoppers). One would have expected the beach to have been crowded with sea birds feasting on this bounty but the only birds along Littleferry's beach were....

....the sad remains of the H5N1 'flu outbreak, many of the skeletal corpses being steadily and decently buried by drifting sand.

Also new on today's walk were these two birds. They may be rock doves, the truly wild version of Columba livia, but the rock dove is the ancestor of our feral pigeon, one of the scourges of city living. That the identification is correct is supported by the fact that we've not seen feral pigeons here in Sutherland while the wild rock dove is only found along the north and west coasts of Scotland.

A good walk also needs the reassurance that life is appearing at the right time in the right numbers and in the right places in the cycle of the year. So today we found six-spotted Burnetts in good numbers on the links....

....and we saw that the creeping lady's tresses were growing in their customary two places in the pine plntation....

....and we found two of the damselfly species in their usual spot along the bank of Loch Unes.

A good walk also needs to provide reassurance so, with so many sea birds dying it was good to look across the mouth of Loch Fleet to the Embo side and see twenty or more terns - too distant to distinguish the species - resting on the beach in the close company of as many oystercatchers.