Christine's walking & birds blog

Just south-east of Ledmore Junction, Loch Borralan is often a good place for a bit of lay-by birding; but on this cold, grey day after a night of sleet and hail nothing much was around. The goosander pair was nice to see however, and Greger snapped them from the car.


We were looking for crossbills but were unlucky. The sun put in a brief appearance at Loch Craggie, where a pair of bullfinches flew into a roadside bush.


Snow began to blow in horizontally from the west, almost blotting out the moorland. Heading north earlier, we'd spotted two whooper swans feeding on Feur-loch (220m above sea level) in clearer weather. Now, in the storm, they were sleeping; and I stepped out into the terrific wind and driving flakes to get some sort of context shot of them - two white spots just right of centre. I wondered if they were the same ones that were here last winter, faithful perhaps to this reedy lochan right next to the road and yet still deserving of the description "remote".


In yesterday's Country Diary in the Guardian, Ray Collier wrote about whooper swans at Tarbat Ness on the Dornoch Firth; it was his opinion that whoopers have had a poor breeding year. Certainly we haven't seen anything like the numbers we saw last autumn, when whoopers seemed to be everywhere. We should never really take any birds for granted.