Badgers

On the right of the road leading down from Golspie Tower to Golspie Tower Farm there's the remains of an old wall at one point along which the turf...

....has been dug out to expose....

....a wasps' nest built under a protecting rock.

Some of the cells of the comb still have the larvae in them but most have been cleared out....

....either by the wasps which were desperate to save the next generation or by whatever it was that dug them out.

We think the perpetrator of this raid may have been a badger, the only British animal, the internet tells me, that feeds on wasps' nests. If so, this is the first sign we've seen of badgers in the area.

Butterfly Catastrophe?

It's been a beautifully blue and warm day today which, with the michaelmas daisies, verbena and buddleia all in flower, should have brought butterflies crowding into the garden to join the mass of bees, bumblebees, flies and hoverflies congregating on the flowers - but not a single one have we seen.

One butterfly flew over yesterday during lunch, and we saw....

....a rather sorry-for-itself peacock at Littleferry yesterday, but otherwise we've not seen a butterfly in the garden since 7th September. We aren't the only ones to notice their absence: the man who came to mend our boiler this afternoon commented on it, and he lives in the countryside to the north of here.

What's going on?

Insects at Littleferry

A recent walk at Littleferry started badly when, having parked the car and crossed the road to a viewpoint overlooking Loch Fleet, we could see no birds out on the mudflats except a few gulls. However, once into the woods and walking along the path that leads to the beach, things looked up when....

....we found the usual three species of dragonfly on Loch Unes, including this emerald damselfly peeping out from behind a grass stalk.

As we emerged onto the links a beautiful red admiral awaited us, feeding on the ling some of which is still in full flower while soon after, out on the links....

....we found a lone female common blue basking in the sun. However, the find of the day was....

....this grayling, a butterfly which we haven't seen here before.

Graylings have a habit of flopping onto their side as soon as they land which, while exposing the wonderful camouflage of their underwings, means that the bold patterns and colours of their upper wing are rarely visible.

Strath Brora

We took a road trip today to explore Strath Brora. 'Road trip' is a lovely term which we associate with happy holidays in Canada but whereas those trips often involved several days and many hundreds of miles along Canada's superb road network, and nights in well-appointed motels, our trip was a mere twenty-five miles, most of it along....

....single-track roads with occasional passing places. Compared to the A9 which passes through Golspie, busy these days with both its usual traffic of heavy goods vehicles and white vans, and further packed with cars and camper vans following the North Coast 500 tourist route, this was blissfully empty, the biggest problem as a driver being to keep one's eyes on the road amidst....

....such stunning scenery.

This is Loch Brora, an elongate lake filling the lower reaches of the strath, a strath being a term used on the east and north coasts of Scotland to mean a wide valley, much the same as the term glen except a glen is usually steeper-sided.

Upstream the road started running along the Brora river which winds its way through rich farmland but which is probably better known as....

....one of the area's premier salmon waters. We walked along its banks, stopping to watch the fishermen casting their flies. To the left of the picture, on the edge of the river, a license-holder casts his line under the supervision of his gillie, who is employed to offer him advice on tackle and tactics as well as on where and how to fish these waters. To the right are their cars: I leave it to you to work out which is whose.

While taking a rest on one of the many benches provided for weary fishermen we talked to one - his rather expensive Land Rover is on the left of this picture. He obviously knew these waters as he didn't have a gillie, and he was commenting on how poor the fishing is: the waters are very low this year following an unusually dry summer.

The strath is rich in birds of prey. We watched four buzzards wheeling and calling high above the woodland on the side of the valley in the company of a smaller raptor, perhaps a sparrowhawk, and minutes later we spotted a red kite hunting low across the heather.

The single-track road followed the Brora river until we were almost due north of Golspie when it began to circle back, giving us a final view of the upper reaches of Strath Brora before taking us home, via Backies and Golspie Tower.

The State of Scotland's Waterbirds

It's always an uplifting moment when one steps out onto a wide beach washed clean by the tide but Saturday's walk along Golspie's south beach became an increasingly depressing affair. Although some of the sand which has been absent for so many months has been returned by the sea, it was almost bare of both life and death. We saw more pipits and pied wagtails than waders, not surprising when the only waders were a pair of oystercatchers.

Then, in one fifty metre stretch of the beach, we came across....

....a dead fulmar and....

....two dead guillemots.

Offshore, other than a few gulls, all we could find was a lone guillemot.

This follows a report of a conversation a friend had with two local fishermen who said that the fishing in the Moray Firth at present is very poor. If the bait fish, and particularly the sand eels, aren't there - and the absence of gannets suggest this - then the birds which depend on them will move away.

NatureScot has just published a report into the state of Scotland's wintering waterbirds which doesn't make happy reading. Waders have suffered the worst, with declines of 58% since 1975. While oystercatchers are highlighted as having suffered badly we were pleased to note that the little sanderlings are holding their own. A link to the report is here.

The only cheerful note from our walk - other than the collection of five golf balls which will go to the local charity shop - was the presence of a flock of some twenty redshanks on the mudflats below the village.

Winter Visitors

We walked up to Backies this morning hoping to buy some eggs from the croft but the cupboard was bare; all we received in compensation was a view of a low rainbow.

On the west coast we always thought of October as rainbow month. Perhaps this rainbow was warning us, for as we returned home....

....along a different route, where the rowan tree at top right was laden with ripe berries, we saw....

....masses of medium-sized birds congregating in the higher trees and and along the overhead cables, bursting into flight as they were harried by a sparrowhawk.

They were easily identifiable as fieldfares, a large member of the thrush family which, according to the RSPB website, "begin to arrive from October and numbers build up as the winter progresses."

So they've arrived early which bodes ill for the berry crop and the winter food supply of our resident birds. It also suggests that Scandinavia's winter has arrived early which may mean we are also in for a hard one.

Despite the coolness of the day - yesterday's temperature struggled to reach 16C and overnight it fell to 8C - the bumblebees have been on the flowers in the garden, particularly the michaelmas daisies, the buddleias and the various marigolds. They're only just functioning: this one was hardly moving and allowed the camera to come within a couple of inches of him.

Four Seasons

The fresh greens of the leaves of this wild rose are a memory of vibrant spring; the flower recalls the insect-filled warmth of a summer's day; the bright red of the hips promise food for the birds and other animals in bitter winter; and the picture was taken on a damp autumn day.