Pink Footed Geese

This large field between the Littleferry road and the A9, which runs just this side of the trees in the middle distance, was busy with pink-footed geese when we passed yesterday, but not in the numbers we were seeing when I last wrote about them in November.

During the harsh winter weather we hardly saw any and it's only been in the last week or so that they've reappeared. We haven't seen greylags for weeks.

It may be that the pink footed geese moved further south this year, perhaps to Norfolk which seems to offer some favoured wintering grounds, though many winter in the Montrose area. The UK population of pink footed geese is important; about 90% of the world population winters here.

They'll be building up their fat reserves now ready for April, when they migrate north to their breeding grounds in Greenland and Iceland.

Littleferry Beach

Approaching the village of Littleferry, the road is separated from the sea by a plantation, Ferry Woods, in the middle of which is a lochan, Loch Unes. On an exceptionally warm March morning we were reminded that, in summer, this small stretch of water is one of the best dragonfly sites in the area. Today it was surrounded by birdsong and inhabited by a couple of pairs of noisy mallard, probably staking out their territories.

The woods are a pleasant approach to....

....Littleferry Links and beach, the latter now...

....largely restored to its normal quantity of sand. We arrived about two hours after low tide so walked a shrinking beach, but with the warmth did not hurry and indulged in a little shelling....

....collecting various bivalves being washed up along the tideline. For the first time we paid some attention to the smaller ones, gathering as many colours and shades as we could and....

....arranging them on the sand. The bivalve may be the banded wedge shell, Donax vittatus, which is common around British shores. Judging by the pictures on various websites, we've done quite well in sampling the wide range of colours in which it occurs.

We were almost alone on the beach. Two people passed at a distance walking their dogs and a couple of kayakers came close in at the entrance to Loch Fleet, one of them calling out that paddling was hard work into the wind. Despite this, I was envious of them: a coastline is so different from the perspective of a kayak.

Unexciting Times

We spent a great deal of time this morning standing in a pine plantation hoping to see one of the local red squirrels. We started with considerable optimism, having just met a couple to whom we've talked before who said they had just seen one sitting having breakfast on one of the feeding boxes but, by the time we arrived, it had obviously finished its meal and retired to a convenient treetop to have a nap.

I don't mind being very still for considerable lengths of time in the hope of seeing elusive wildlife because, when one does spot something, it's exciting. However, to be exciting there have to be long periods which are not exciting. Today those periods were brightened by the local tits - great, blue and coal - which came along partly to pick up the food the squirrel had dropped and partly to scold us, and also by....

....a steady procession of geese flying north. 

A week or so ago we'd have frozen waiting for nothing to happen but this morning gave us blue skies and a temperature soaring above 10C, so we walked gently home along the beach below Dunrobin Castle where we sat on one of the benches and watched cormorants, oystercatchers, redshanks, various gulls, pied wagtails, and ringed plovers. The plovers are in the process of pairing up ready for nesting, but we do hope they have more success this year along these beaches than they did last, when most of their nests were either destroyed by dogs or humans, or abandoned by the parents.

'Mukiwa'

I'm steadily working my way through my old books - there really doesn't seem much point in keeping them unless I'm going to read them again, though several have huge sentimental value so I couldn't dispose of those ones.

Some of my favourites I'm reading for perhaps the fourth or even fifth time. 'Mukiwa' falls into the category of those I've only read once although, now I've finished it, I realise I should have re-read it long ago.

Mukiwa means 'white man' in the Shona language of what is now Zimbabwe. Peter Godwin was born and lived much of his early life in Southern Rhodesia / Rhodesia / Zimbabwe but was caught up in the terrible war that tore the country apart during the 1960s and 70s. Although he sympathised with the black majority - he was a fluent Shona speaker - and although he knew it was a war that the Rhodesian government under Ian Smith could never win, he had to join the white side and witnessed, both as a policeman and later, in the 1980s, as a reporter, some of the horrors of both the guerrilla war and the Mugabe regime that followed it.

He desperately wanted the new Zimbabwe to succeed but finally, as with so many of the whites who felt it was their hard work which had created a wealthy country, he gave up on it - and therein lies the tragedy of the book.

'Mukiwa' is vividly written so doesn't need photographs, though I love the only one he includes, a very small one almost lost on the back cover, which shows him playing with a Shona friend in the African dirt. Somehow it perfectly illustrates what might have been.

Yellows

On Saturday we were hoping to see more of the bright yellow flowers in the countryside which are the markers of spring, and they have duly obliged.  This is the first dandelion and, as with Saturday's celandine, it's a rather lonely dandelion, growing in a sunny bank beside the Golspie Inn.

Then, on our walk into Beinn Bhraggie woods today, we found the first primrose, in full and flawless flower beside a forest track. It really is quite remarkable as there isn't another primrose in leaf anywhere, let alone any in bud, so this one is way ahead of the competition.

A few gorse bushes have been in flower for weeks but the others are now making an effort to catch up.  This one is growing on top of an old drystone wall along the sunken track which runs from our end of Golspie up to Golspie Tower. There are big thickets of gorse here and they're notable for being....

....home to a small flock of yellowhammers.

This is the first trickle of the flowers of spring. The flowers round here have a short summer season but have the advantage in midsummer of almost 24-hour daylight, so in a few weeks the trickle will become an avalanche. 

Gull Wars - 2

Stage one of our fight against the gulls - see earlier post here - was to buy an owl, strongly recommended on certain websites as a sure-fire way to rid a chimney of gulls, pigeons and crows. Having filled it with sand we thought we would try it out by the bird bath, which the gulls have been visiting despite the fine wire stretched across it. As can be seen, the tits paid not the slightest attention to the owl and, worse, one of....

....our resident robins was quick to make friends with it.

So we brought up the big guns, in the form of Mr MacKenzie, our local roofer/chimney sweep, who came on Thursday to....

....fit a thicket of anti-gull wire spikes on the chimney and, in the process, to remove several years of accumulated filth from it, and cap it properly.  However, while he was up on the roof we asked him....

....to put the owl up there anyway - it can be seen on the flat roof above our bedroom where, hopefully, it might prevent some of the crows from doing a dance there, as they did on numerous occasions last summer, at three in the morning.

There have been no gulls on the chimney since the spikes were installed but the owl has had no effect on the jackdaws, which still use the TV aerial as a vantage point from which to survey the garden for any food which the small birds have dropped.

The First Yellows of Spring

As seems appropriate for a spring which is following a winter of ice and snow, the snowdrop displays have been magnificent this year.  However, we were only saying earlier today that it is time to move on to the next stage of spring, which is the coming of the sun and the arrival of the first....

....yellow flowers of spring.  As if nature heard our comment we found, in the same forest bank as spring's first snowdrop, the first lesser celandine of the year and, a few paces away....

....a second.  We searched but didn't find another.

Yellow is spring's best colour, the colour of the sun, the colour of good cheer, of hope, which is probably why so many daffodils are planted in and around people's gardens - but the ones round here, sadly, aren't wild.