Christine's walking & birds blog

On a dull day we went for a drive inland. The clouds were amazing, lying across the landscape in rolls and scrolls and stacked-up lenses.


A crossbill was seen on a distant conifer, and when we walked down to the shore of a loch, two brown ducks (female tufties? they seemed to have a white strip along the trailing edge of the wing) we'd failed to see went winging away the length of the loch, just above the surface. Watching them through the bins I saw them suddenly split away from one another like Red Arrows, while just below them a dark shape emerged from the water. It was a black-throated diver, and we heard it call.

A pair of goldeneye were at the far side of another loch, and a dozen or so whooper swans were dotted about - nine or ten of them close to the road. I was able to snap them from the car.



Yesterday I saw a stonechat singing and displaying; today it was siskins.

Saturday: The sun came out this morning and cheered everything up, so we drove to Achnahaird. We walked on the cliffs and through the dunes, then back across the shining wet sand; judging by the pools on the machair it had been a very high tide.

Ringed plovers and skylarks were the most numerous species. As I watched a drake merganser from the car park, a meadow pipit alighted on a rock in front of me - unfortunately with the sun behind it.


The merganser was just floating, not feeding, in the same spot. It's unusual to see one on its own, and I wondered if there was a female resting unseen on the rocks below.

A greenshank was still present at Badentarbat. A strip of sand is always exposed at low tide, but this was the lowest tide I've seen here.



Down by the water's edge, the beach was erupting in squirts of water, some arcing up to a couple of feet high. Many of the razor shells (razor clams) were visible, but wherever I pointed the camera, the next squirt would appear somewhere else. Oystercatchers were enjoying an easy harvest.