Christine's walking & birds blog

We rushed through the house and onto the front porch from where we had fairly good views of the bird; it was very high, and we thought at first it was a golden eagle (I peered up through the bins and remarked that it looked like a vulture - should have heard the warning bells). We never got a sideways view.


As it drifted off to the south over the village I took a last snap and then went in to upload the pics. And then I began to think that it wasn't a golden eagle after all, but a white-tailed. Juvenile birds have longer tails than the adults, and studying Forsman I finally identified this as an immature white-tailed eagle.

Our first bird was a redshank, down on the river.


Stonechats of both sexes and all ages (migrants?) were seen throughout the walk and these three were handily lined up against the sea.


Greger spotted an otter alternately diving and leaping out of the water, and two twite flew past and landed in the heather. A friendly man from Inverness doing the walk anti-clockwise stopped for a chat. We had lunch on the edge of the cliffs and watched some approaching fins far out, but couldn't tell if they were porpoises or dolphins. And then they were gone.

Rounding the first headland we could look across towards Rubh a'Choin, its point partly hidden by an island. Out on the headland, I could just see a woman with a dog. These and the man from Inverness were the only people we saw on the walk.


As we made our way along the north coast, the glaucous gull came cruising by. I'd been hoping it would put in an appearance, and then when it did I almost missed it.


The building shown on the map at the head of the deep narrow cove is a ruin. The rock scenery was amazing; but the haze in the distance didn't lend itself to landscape photography.


I heard gulls making a clamour somewhere, but could see nothing. Then, to the south, a white-tailed sea eagle went flapping steadily along mobbed by a large gull until disappearing behind a ridge.


The next thing was a cove full of seals lounging around on rocks the way seals do.
  

You can by-pass Rubh a' Choin itself, but I wanted to get closer to the island with the shags on it, so Greger had a coffee halfway along while I went exploring. On the far side of a vast sloping slab of rock a great black-backed gull surveyed the world from an undisputed vantage point. Beyond the gull there is a gannet - one of half a dozen we saw during the walk.


Down at the edge of the waves, a curlew and an oystercatcher were foraging in the seaweed.


When I couldn't go any further without walking into the sea, I sat on a rock and took some pics of the distant shags.


The end of the headland held some enticing tidal pools while the blocks of rock offered endless possibilities for scrambling; but it wasn't fair to keep Greger waiting so I made my way back and we continued round to Garvie Bay. We debated whether or not to wade across the river, and meanwhile I snapped a rock pipit on the sandy beach.


We decided against wading and followed the path instead around to a small reedy pool (Loch Garvie on a larger-scale map) which held no bird life at all. But further on, along the river, Greger pointed out a reed bunting. Eventually we came out onto the road and set off on the two-kilometre walk back to the car.

I could hear something exciting on the still air but couldn't quite pin it down. It grew gradually louder until through the mist we could see thirty or so geese, flying high over us to the south-east. From the slightly hysterical but lovely calls I thought these might be pink-foots, but I'm not sure.


I was just thinking "There can't be a better way to end a walk" when I looked up again to see a merlin, although I mistook it at first for a high peregrine.


What with the scenery and the variety of birds, this would - I remarked to Greger - go down as one of the great Saturday walks of all time. Yes, he replied, it would - if only this was a Saturday. It was just under 9km but quite strenuous, with a rocky and sometimes boggy path.


Other birds seen: herring gull, hooded crow, lesser black-backed gull, meadow pipit, raven, ringed plover, and starling.

I found the ribcage of the dead sheep that the glaucous and other gulls were feeding on four days ago. The hoofed leg had a strange sad beauty of its own.


At Badentarbat there was a black guillemot, the whitest one I've seen so far.


Great skuas don't always steal their food. A bonxie came flying inland, turned, and although I was distracted by something else, when I looked back it was rising from the sea with a fish.There seemed to be no other bird around at the time so I suppose it landed on the water and just caught one. Driving back past the Achnahaird viewpoint, I stopped in the lay-by and got the scope out for once; this was worth doing as I spotted seven golden plover far out on the machair.

When I got home Greger had completed a couple of useful tasks in the kitchen and tidied the garage, and he was sitting out the back in the sun with the newspaper and a well-deserved cold beer. He looked like a contented man.

The messy heap attracting the glaucous gull at Achnahaird is the remains of a sheep. However, the juvenile great black-backed gull wanted it all for himself; he chased the glauc with a cry that sounded like a donkey braying.


The sun was in the wrong place for the pics, but I had no time to make a circuit around the birds as four or five dogs were approaching. As an Alsatian raced towards them, the other gulls flew (although they didn't go far) but the glaucous walked/ran away. It always seems reluctant to fly until the last moment. Neither here nor at Badentarbat beach were there any migrant waders. Still, at least we did finally have some warm sunshine today.

A bunch of twite - twelve to fifteen - buzzed around the rocks. Four of them landed nearby as I watched the wheatear, and sat there for some time, preening and twittering. A sanderling was also on the beach, but there was no sign of the glaucous gull.


We went to Edinburgh last week for a couple of days, to shop in Ikea and John Lewis. We stayed at the Premier Inn in Newhaven, which is part of the Port of Leith. We went into town (using our free bus-passes for the first time) and spent an enjoyable morning sightseeing. A peregrine was spotted over the Scottish parliament building.

Back at Newhaven I walked out to the end of the quay. Great rafts of eider duck (and possibly some auks) were far out on the sea. Oystercatchers and turnstones ran along the edge of the waves below, and a gannet and a fulmar flew past. Eventually I looked across water to this inaccessible area where kittiwakes have evidently made themselves at home.


I was thrilled to hear the calls of Sandwich terns, both because I'd assumed it was too late for terns now and because I actually like the calls of Sandwich terns. This is, I think, a juvenile bird.