Wednesday, January 14, 2015


After working all morning we drove to Ardmair to eat our lunch in the car. It was sunny, but much more windy by the sea than it had been at home. We walked along the beach to the spit, where at least eight ringed plovers and two turnstones were dotted about among the rocks. But I couldn't see the purple sandpiper.

We stopped in the Morefield lay-by to look at some buzzards. A flock of medium-sized birds appeared over the hills on the far side of Loch Broom (a kilometre and a half away) and as I didn't have the bins to hand I snapped them with the camera. I was surprised to see when I uploaded and cropped the pictures that they were lapwings - at least twenty-six of them, flying eastwards. Was this a cold-weather movement? They are the first lapwings I've seen on the west coast since we moved here last April.


And then Greger's car wouldn't start - which turned out to be the battery. This was deja vu from October 2012, when the same thing happened to us up on Walbury Hill in west Berkshire. On that occasion, Greger was pleased to find that the new battery he bought was quite cheap. Now he knows why - although, once charged up, it was okay. (Later: actually, it was my fault. Because of the leather seats, I always use the seat-warmer when I get into the car. Then lay-by birding generally means opening the electric windows - in my car they're manual, so it doesn't matter. Add in the heater and the windscreen wipers, and you have a recipe for a drained battery. Oops.)  

// posted by Christine @ 12:03 PM
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