Frost

We may be closing in upon mid winter's day but that hasn't prevented us from enjoying a cloudless day. In the back garden the temperature overnight only dropped to zero but as we climbed along the road to Backies, with the intention of visiting the croft in search of eggs, there was black ice on the road and....

....a hard frost along the path through the bracken, from which....

....a wren roundly cursed us for disturbing the tranquility of his morning.

In several of the frost pockets along the way we found this unusual phenomenon which we came across last winter for the first time - hair ice, otherwise known as ice beard or ice wool. It forms on damp nights when the temperature drops to zero, the thin strands of a fungus acting as the core upon which the ice crystallises.

It was a pleasant walk to the croft and then home through the forestry but there were no eggs available. We found the hens a little further along the road, huddled against a gate as if they were on strike and picketing it.

Dawn

This was taken just before half-past nine this morning, shortly after an 8.46am sunrise, looking southeast across the Dornoch and Moray Firths to the distant hills of Ross-shire.  We were about to set off for 'work' at the Alzheimers shop, had risen in the dark, and would only have an hour or so of daylight when we returned home in the mid-afternoon.

The days are short now and remind us of our one winter foray even further north, when we spent a few days in Finnish Lapland to celebrate a wedding. At least here the temperatures don't plunge at night to below -30C.

Happily, we're less than a week away from the shortest day and, although the coming months will probably see the worst of the winter, can look forward to the steadily lengthening days and to that glorious moment when something - perhaps a single snowdrop - tells us that spring is waiting to spring.

Tain Ducks

We made one of our occasional forays to the Royal Burgh of Tain where Mrs MW visited Lidl to do a big Christmas shop while I set off for a brisk walk to....

....the small but very neat park which is Tain's frontage onto its scalps, the muddy area which the people of the burgh used to exploit for shellfish. It, in its turn, fronts onto....

....the Dornoch Firth. On the skyline at centre in this picture taken looking north across the firth stands the statue of the Duke of Sutherland atop Beinn Bhraggie while the buildings running along the far shore are those of another royal burgh, Dornoch.

I visit the scalps at this time of year to see the ducks and waders, of which there are usually several hundred, but the tide was high so only one or two waders were visible. The relatively few ducks bobbing around offshore, two hundred at most, were keeping themselves segregated from a large flotilla of gulls.

The ducks were a mixture of teal and widgeon. The females are difficult to tell apart at this range and the males of both species have chestnut brown heads but the teal males have a green bar across the tops of their eyes while the widgeon males have a pale yellow bar running down the front of their faces.

We've seen a number of widgeon on Loch Fleet but this is the first sighting this year of teal - those are teal on the land while the distinctive yellow faces of male widgeon are visible at left and in the foreground.

The local mallard had more sense than to bob around in the firth's stiff breeze, preferring to join a swan on the park's ornamental pond where a platform is provided from which the local children throw them bread.

Fishermen

Every picture captures a moment in a story, even a picture as elegantly simple as this one. In the foreground is a wide beach exposed by low tide, its sands shelving very gradually out into deeper water. The two men are fishing for prawns, big king prawns that attract a good price at the local hotel where they are served to appreciative tourists. Between them is a net which, once they've waded out, they'll drag through the water. It was cool when they set out in the morning so they brought jackets which they have hung on top of two poles pushed into the sand.

Much further out, another fisherman is returning home with his catch. He sails an ngalowa, a dugout canoe with an outrigger to keep it stable and a lateen sail to speed it through the water. He fishes far out and alone through the night, using a long, hand-held line. His home is a small village consisting of a huddle of makuti-thatched houses, a few miles up the coast.

Both fishermen suffer from the same problem: their catches are dwindling. The prawn-fishermen's worry is that there is more and more competition from a growing population; for the ngalowa fisherman, it is the same but he also has modern, foreign fishing boats to compete with.

This is a moment in their story - and mine, because I took the photograph.

Geese

Almost daily I hear the calls from the skeins of geese as they fly north or south in their migrations over Golspie, and I stop to look up at them, envious of the freedom they have in their skies. However, we rarely have the opportunity to get close to them so when....

....we saw a flock of a hundred or so in a field near Loch Fleet we seized the opportunity. We were fortunate that we were walking through Ferry Woods at the time so used the cover of the trees to....

....move as close as possible without disturbing the birds.

They're pink-footed geese, which seem to be the dominant species here though we have also seen small flocks of greylags.

Watching them made me realise that, although they have the freedom of the skies, their life on the ground is very different. They are constantly on guard, wary of the many dangers that surround them and - because I can't believe the local farmers take too kindly to the geese eating their livestock's pasture - constantly being 'moved on'. So, at any one time, out of a dozen geese....

....only one or two were actually feeding.

Happily, when we returned from our walk some two hours later, they were still in the field, so perhaps this farmer didn't mind losing some of his crop to these beautiful birds.

Golspie Glen

A dreich dee today so we walked somewhere suitably damp - the glen cut by the Golspie Burn, called, rather grandly in the tourist brochures, the Big Glen. In a distance of half a mile the burn drops through a series of small rapids, the path crossing it in several places by well-maintained footbridges from which there are good 'photo opportunities'.

This is the highlight of the walk, an impressive fall almost at the top of the glen.

It's a long time since we last walked this path and I can understand why: as well as being damp, which it is even on a non-dreich day, it's dark and enclosed and, in the season, busy with recreational walkers - though today we saw not a soul.

The recent gales have brought down several trees though those which have blocked the paths have already been cleared by the small group of volunteers who nobly look after the glen.

The highlights of our walk were fungi, two rather fine brackets. This one may be turkeytail - Trametes versicolor and....

....this one might, just might be a hairy curtain crust, Stereum hirsutum.

We've noticed that, since the weather has turned cold, the fungi which live on rotten wood, as these two do, are dominant over other fungi, though it may just be that the 'other fungi' are more difficult to spot because they are lost under a mass of rotting leaf litter.

Shifting Sands

With low tide perfectly timed for just after ten this morning we walked to the south end of the village to take a brisk stroll along Golspie's sandy beach, to find the beach still there but the sand mostly missing. So much sand had been removed during the recent gales that, although we arrived only shortly after low tide, the sea was already up to the back of the beach so we were obliged....

....to take the much less interesting walk along the top of the sea defences between the golf links and the beach.

I do keep rabbiting on with my concerns about the local wildlife but, this time a year ago, we would almost certainly have seen some small birds amongst the grasses, perhaps a pipit or two and a pair of stonechats, but today we saw nothing but a few jackdaws on the greens, some gulls, and a couple of oystercatchers along the sand-denuded beach.

The effect of the recent easterly and northeasterly gales is illustrated by the beach below Golspie. The sand has been piled up against the jetty at the southwest end while it's been removed....

....from the northeast end, exposing the upper, cobbled storm beach and some of the original sea defences in front of the village. The power of the waves was evident when we walked along the promenade, seen at top left in this picture, which was covered in pebbles and masses of seaweed thrown up by the waves.