Harriet Plantation

Harriet Plantation is one of many areas of woodland around here which is maintained by Land & Forestry Scotland and is freely accessible to the public. We visited it last weekend for a very pleasant walk which included some of my favourite features - like, there was plenty of history, including....

....the remains of an early 13th century motte and bailey castle, Proncy Castle, and....

....a typical hut circle. Both, as is so often the case with these settlement sites, have fine views, here southwards to the Dornoch Firth. However, the highlight of the walk was the discovery of....

....an osprey nest from which....

....we inadvertently disturbed three ospreys, one of them carrying something. Now that we know where the nest is, in future we'll be able to creep up on it and observe its owners in residence.

Birds Along the Golspie Shore

Today's morning high tide along a grey, cool and drizzly Golspie beach brought in the usual sad reminders that....

....the H5N1 bird 'flu outbreak is still very much with us. This is a young gull which may have died of other causes but the other two corpses were guillemots, the species which seems to have taken the brunt of the epidemic locally.

Happily there are still seabirds along the shore, including a pair of ringed plovers camouflaged against the seaweed: they need to be as this is prime dog-walking territory. We also saw....

....some of the mallard which inhabit the mouth of the Golspie Burn - it comes into the sea just beyond the low point. Along the rocks on this section we noted something which seems increasingly common, the way that....

....what are considered land birds - wagtails, house sparrows, pipits - are taking to foraging along the tidelines.

Just off the mouth of the burn a lone eider paddled anxiously back and forth. The eider have been nesting inland - we haven't been to visit them this year but last year several pairs were rearing their young along the margins of Loch Fleet - and will shortly start to appear along the coast where they will winter.

Our Butterfly Count

The Big Butterfly Count asks us to sit for fifteen minutes in a day and count the number of each species of butterfly we see but here, with so few around, the biggest count has been of two butterflies, and on two days we saw none. So, just as an experiment, we decided to count how many we saw on a walk, one of our favourite walks up the glen of the Golspie Burn and then round through Backies. It's a good walk for the experiment, as it took us through a great variety of habitats including bracken-invaded fields, along field margins, and through both thick pine forestry and the mixed forestry....

....of the lower glen, the last with plenty of open, sunny glades. The weather helped, giving us cloudy moments but also plenty of sun.

We walked eight kilometres in two hours and, including....

....the very pretty small tortoiseshell which now seems to be resident on our garden's verbena, we saw 42 butterflies. Eight were whites of some sort, the rest were ringlets, speckled woods or meadow browns. Statistically, we therefore saw 5.25 butterflies per kilometre or, another way, 0.35 butterflies per minute.

I'm not sure that this is of the slightest use but seeing plenty of butterflies cheered us up no end; and it was a lovely walk.

Signs that H5N1 is Abating

This morning we walked the same stretch of beach as we did a fortnight ago when we saw scene that I described at the time as 'carnage', with both dead and sick sea birds scattered along the tideline - see earlier post here. Happily, today there were many fewer with only six corpses to be seen. However, the main victims....

....were, once again, the guillemots followed by gannets. It does seem as if certain species have suffered far worse than others - locally, the guillemots. Although there are reports of dead gulls we've only seen one, and there were plenty of them in their usual spots along the shore.

On the much more cheerful side, we saw a number of sandwich terns on rocks exposed by the falling tide, many of them in company with young black-headed gulls.

As we walked further along the coast beyond Dunrobin Castle we spotted about ten seals hauled out on the rocks, varying in size from quite small ones through to.... 

....this exceptionally large one. One wonders how he got himself onto that rock: perhaps he just lay on it and waited for the tide to go out.

A White MGB

All sorts of curious things come in to the charity shop where we work on two days of the week. This is an example, and it's part of the fun of the place that I can spend some time finding out what it is. It's about 20cm long, and a bit of research on the internet showed that it's the seed pod of Banksia grandis, a tree which is native to Western Australia.

In some ways such an object is rather sad as there's obviously a story behind it, but it's not part of our job to ask the person who has donated it, usually in amongst a load of other miscellaneous objects of more or less value to us, what the story is as it might have painful associations.

A metal plaque came in today, the sort of thing one might screw to the wall in a workshop, showing a very smart MGB sports car. It's a good example of how objects have associations for it brought back memories of our time in Jamaica because a very dear friend of ours owned this little white gem of a car.

His name was Bob Morris, he was an American, and he was part of the fun of being out there. However, like so many friends, we left him bobbing around in the wake of our continual movement, so we have no idea what happened to him. All we can do is hope he had a fulfilling life and made many other people smile as much he did us.

Swifts

This is a view looking across the playing fields to the northern end of Golspie where many of the houses are Council owned or were bought from the Council. They cluster round a small supermarket, a Spar, which kindly keeps a daily newspaper for us. In walking across to collect it this morning we noticed that the air was full of....

....swifts, a dozen or more, shrieking in excitement as they zoomed around below cloudy skies.

Only a fortnight ago I wrote a blog entry about the possible loss of our swift population yet the next day we saw about four above the promenade and now we've seen many more above the village. All of which goes to prove, I suppose, that my feelings of doom and gloom over the state of our wildlife may sometimes be a bit premature.

After collecting the paper we walked up the road towards Golspie Tower where a big house which has two perfectly-designed gable ends is once again hosting a small flock of house martins. I really am sure that there are fewer of this species as they used to nest in our gable end but didn't last summer and have given it a miss again this year.

Worms

There's a very pleasant little picnic area on the east side of Loch Fleet where NatureScot, the government body which cares for Scotland's natural heritage, has sited benches, a picnic table and a couple of 'interpretative boards' which describe the wildlife which might be visible out on the loch.

Benches have become increasingly important to us as welcome places to ease our old bones after a walk through the woods and along the Littleferry beach, but I find myself increasingly depressed when I sit beside the loch as there is so little wildlife to be seen.

These pictures were taken yesterday, looking out across the exposed mudflats of low tide to the bird hide on the north shore, when the main wildlife on the mudflats was....

....worms. Well, not the actual worms, but the casts the worms push to the surface as they work their way through the mud.

Worm casts aren't terribly exciting things to watch but the one thing that did impress me was their sheer numbers: there must have been millions of them. Yet the number of birds feeding on them was pitifully small. In this close-up view there are three gulls and a curlew, of which only the curlew has the bill to probe for worms.

Where are the other waders that one would normally expect to be feasting on this banquet? Is it normal for there to be so few at this time of year? Someone please tell me that I'm worrying unnecessarily.