Nacreous Clouds

We had some fine examples of nacreous clouds over Golspie today, the display starting around 3pm and continuing into the early evening.

The Met Office has a good description of and explanation for these rare clouds - link here - but, in brief, the clouds usually form in the lower stratosphere over polar regions when the sun is very low below the horizon. The ice particles of which they are composed are unusually small, so scatter the sunlight in a unique way, the colours being reminiscent of oil on water.

Mice

I loved being a member of Her Majesty's Coastguard, which I was for some thirteen years while we lived on Ardnamurchan, not least because I learned so much. Amongst other things, I leaned that a mouse can render a huge Toyota HiLux useless, simply by chewing through the right electrical cable under the bonnet. From this I leaned to keep an ear open for scuttlings in our house roof, because there's lots up there that mice like to chew - the lagging on the pipes and the electric wires in particular, a good chew through one of the latter being a potential cause of fire.

So, having tried several other, perhaps more humane traps in the years we had the general store on Ardnamurchan, I now deploy one of these if I have a suspicion that we have small visitors which, the other day, we had, since the warning raisin I keep in the roof suddenly disappeared. So two of these Little Nippers were deployed. Normally I catch the mouse immediately but this one had obviously come across this sort of trap before, because twice he managed to remove the raisin without springing the trap. 

Happily, for the electrics in the roof if not the mouse, I caught him this morning. In 95% of cases, the mouse's death is instantaneous but this doesn't always happen. A week or so ago I caught a mouse by his left hind leg; disposing of him was not pleasant.

My experience is that mice often come into the house in pairs, so the traps will remain armed for the next couple of days, though I would far prefer it if the mice would kindly NOT visit our house.

Birds at the Sink

I have never minded washing up the dishes. It's a brainless job so I try to organise things so there is something else to do at the same time - like watching the builders working in the next-door housing development, or the small birds at the many feeders hanging along the side of the summer house to the right of this picture.

Recently, though, I've built a feeding platform that runs along the bottom of the window immediately in front of the sink, to which several birds - like our resident male blackbird in the picture above - now come for their deluxe mixed grain. Unusually, it was the chaffinches which first plucked up the courage to visit it, followed by the coal and blue tits, followed by the blackbirds, followed by the sparrows. Some of the visitors have become....

....quite brazen, like this blackbird. It carries on eating however close I put my face or my camera to the glass.

I'm not sure what sort of blackbird it is, except that it's not one of the local males as they have very black feathers and an orange beak. It may be a local female, or perhaps a Scandinavian immigrant, male or female.

It's tough weather for the birds. We're under the cosh of a strong, cold westerly which is bringing in heavy showers which bounce over Bheinn Bhraggie to catch us unawares. In some ways it's been like an October day, with bright, sunny intervals splashing rainbows across the clouds, but mostly, with temperatures struggling to reach 5C, it has felt like winter.

Which makes me wonder why this pied wagtail is still here. Most of the Scottish ones, and particularly those who summer in the Highlands, move south for the winter, so usually we don't see any until early spring, but this one was hopping around on the Golspie sea wall yesterday, looking very much at home.

Go south, young man....

A Portrait of a Boy

This portrait of a young prep school boy was taken some time in the late 1950s when he was perhaps eleven. He's dressed to reflect his class and his time - tweed jacket, grey, v-necked tank top, grey cotton shirt and school tie. In his jacket buttonhole he has a T-bar at the end of a chain which attaches to the pocket watch which is in his breast pocket along with a small notebook. Also pinned in his lapel is a Robertson's jam gollywog, one of a small collection he has of which he is rather proud. His hairstyle is military, short back and sides and longer on top, and his ears are pink, which isn't surprising as.... 

....it's a bitterly cold day with almost six inches of snow on the ground.

That it's cold and snowy makes no difference to what he's wearing - with the exception of the tank top he wore exactly the same clothes the previous summer, although the wellington boots would only have been worn on wet days and for walks across muddy fields.

It's a continuing mystery to him that they have to wear shorts. In summer they were fine but in winter they did nothing to keep him warm. It was a relief when he moved on to public school that they all wore long trousers.

The picture was taken in morning break, after the boys had collected two sweets and a half slice of white bread, thinly smeared with margarine, from the school dining room. He is rather looking forward to the afternoon as they can't play rugby so the whole school will be involved in a 'wide game', with two teams each defending a fortress built on a knoll around which various treasures are hidden that the opposition has to find and carry back to their fortress.

He's become accustomed to being chilly through the day - the school's central heating is inadequate - but he hates the nights as he is so cold. His bedcovers are a cotton sheet, a thin, grey, ex-services blanket and an almost-as-thin eiderdown. The dormitory has no heating, a window is always open, and it isn't unusual to find the water frozen in the handbasins when they rise in the morning.

One of the masters took the photograph and gave him a print, which he stuck into the album his mother gave him when he first went away to school. He's grateful to the master: this is one of several small kindnesses he did to the boy.

Over sixty years later the boy looks at the picture and remembers those times as amongst the unhappiest of his life. He is surprised that the boys survived them so apparently unscathed; or perhaps they didn't.

Littleferry Beach

It's some time since we took our usual, and favourite walk at Littleferry, through Ferry Wood from the Littleferry Road, then along the beach to the mouth of Loch Fleet, then back to the car via the links and the wood; and a fair bit has changed.

The most noticeable change is to the beach. While there is still plenty of sand there's much less than usual, and this has resulted in the storm waves doing considerable damage to the dunes at the back of the beach.

A much more worrying change is the lack of birds exploiting the tideline along the beach. On the sandy beach we encountered just one black-backed gull, and, amongst the pebbles at the top of the beach....

....a corpse, which we identified as a juvenile gannet.

There were a few more birds at the mouth of the loch. These included about fifty eider just off-shore....

....a couple of dozen oystercatcher working their way through the cobbles that form the lower beach, and a handful of redshanks. In addition, we saw one cormorant, a curlew, and a few common gulls.

Even in the inner basin of the loch there was little to see, despite the miles of mud-flats waiting to be exploited by ducks and waders. The list of species was limited: curlew, oystercatcher, gulls, mallard and a disappointingly few widgeon.

I keep going on about the reduction in the amount of wildlife along the Golspie shores. Today showed no improvement.

A Slow Recovery

While the coast to the north of us still hasn't recovered from October and November's storms, there are the first hints of a return to normal. For a start, small patches of sand are beginning to appear, this along a beach which used to be largely sand. 

The wildlife is returning too. Today we saw....

....the largest flock of redshanks in some time, of which these are a few. They were feeding on the tops of the great banks of seaweed which have accumulated in the last few weeks.

The rock doves are still here in large numbers. They spend much of their time along the beach - they too like the piles of weed - but when they get the chance they take advantage of a south-facing roof which catches the sunshine.

We were at Tain yesterday where, as usual, Mrs MW shopped at Lidl while I walked down to check on the scalps which are usually crowded with ducks at this time of year: there were hardly any close in, the only visitors being a pair of mute swans.

High Tide

This was high tide along Golspie's promenade at 10.30 this morning, the sea unexpectedly angry, there being little wind under a still, grey overcast.

At times like this the promenade is impassible for pedestrians as the bigger waves pick up pebbles and flotsam and throw them across it. The houses that back the promenade all have concrete walls and flood-defence gates, though in storm conditions many of their gardens are flooded.

The promenade's coastal defences were probably adequate in their time but global warming is reaching this small Scottish village. New flood defences are promised, and planned, and then replanned, so little has yet been achieved. That anything is happening at all is down to the A9, the major trunk road to Wick, Thurso and the Orkneys, which passes not fifty metres away from, and parallel to the promenade, so an exceptional storm might well cut it.

Maybe Golspie's new defences will only be expedited after such an event, preferably a relatively mild one, but one which sees the A9 flooded and impassible.