Christine's walking & birds blog

The reluctant northern spring might just be on the way. We walked up the quarry road to the accompaniment of uninterrupted willow warbler song; we lost count after twenty individual singers. Greger stopped suddenly and said "Was that a cuckoo?" From high on the hill beyond the upper quarry the bird cuckooed distantly again - and was silent. As we approached the sheep fields at the end of Loch Achall, a tree pipit was flying up in display and singing as he parachuted down to birches and alders.


We sat on the grassy bank to eat lunch and watched two wheatears, a male and female, hunting along the fence. A sand martin went careering over.

Coming back over the hill we failed to see or even hear the cuckoo again, and the focus of interest was the large but shallow puddle where, once again, newts were courting.


This puddle straddles the path, so you'd think the newts would be at risk - not so much from walkers, who tend to skirt it - but from the odd mountain biker who would probably splash through without a second thought. Also - what if it dries out? This male showed the webbed back feet and tail-end filament of a palmate newt.


The females, which tended to be darker, were also larger than the males, being swollen with eggs.


Making our way down through the blazing yellow gorse towards the village, we heard and then saw a chiffchaff, almost shouting his song as though to be heard above the willow warblers. And the last thing we heard as we passed through the gate onto the road was a blackcap, singing unseen behind the houses.

A sedge warbler was heard muttering away unseen yesterday, between bouts of diabolical weather; so today, again between showers, I returned - but heard nothing.

At Ardmair, there must have been 100 meadow pipits, mostly on the sheep fields with a few on the beach. This one seems to have found a grub of some sort.


A ringed plover was hunting in the same place, extracting and dispatching its prey so speedily, I could never quite snap or even see the creatures it was feeding on; but although their removal from the ground often involved a tug-of-war, they looked too short to be earthworms (could be crane fly larvae, or leatherjackets).


A female wheatear and a pied wagtail were also present; and the birds carried on foraging even when a sharp shower of hail swept across the bay. Meanwhile, the white (?) wagtail chased and shouted at all and sundry.


Two red-throated divers were calling and courting on the sea, too far out to be photographed; but a great northern diver was fishing a bit closer in.


There was a green cast to the diver's black areas that I hadn't noticed before, especially when it pulled its head back just prior to diving.


A drive round the harbour didn't bring any white-wingers; but along West Terrace, a swallow swooped down across the road in front of me and was lost below the bank towards the sea.

Yesterday, a possible white wagtail was on the beach at Ardmair.



Today, we took a walk along forest tracks at Rosehall. A probable sparrowhawk in the distance gave rise to hopes of a goshawk - but it was always high and flying away from us, and in any case I think the tail was too long.

Given the thin soil and the strong winds of the Highlands conifers regularly get blown down - taking with them a fairly small disc of earth and moss. But neither of us had ever seen this before - a group of six trees, all gone over together.


Seen from the other side, the huge clump of earth reared up way above us looked quite spooky.

 
It was still cold today, and fairly wet underfoot. No crossbills were seen or even heard, and the only concession to the arrival of spring here seemed to be a willow warbler, singing in birches near the pond. But on the way home half a dozen sand martins and a swallow were seen swooping above the River Oykel, while a wheatear was on the grassy banks of Loch Borralan.

We're staying round the house in this prolonged spell of cold, uninviting weather. In the garden yesterday there was a probable white-tailed bumblebee (male).


Oh my goodness! There are two black-winged stilts at Little Marlow gravel pits in my home county, Bucks. (They remained only one day, sadly).

This was the best day of the Easter holiday - sunny and mostly dry, although still with a cold wind from the north. We saw our first summer blackcap singing in Inverewe gardens - and two sand martins. There were two greenshanks on the beach at Gruinard; while one of these mergansers seemed to be displaying in flight.


At home, two redpolls were on and under the feeders in the garden.


There were also about twenty chaffinches, a robin, several goldfinches, and a dunnock - but no sign of the brambling.

Another depressingly cold day with showers of rain to heap on the misery. A short drive north gave me a willow warbler just inside Keanchulish Estate - not my first of the year as we heard and then had a glimpse of one in Longart Forest a few days ago. But this one sang more strongly and I had better views.


Still further north, a small green field with grazing sheep and a steep mossy bank behind held half a dozen meadow pipits, two pied wagtails, a mistle thrush collecting moss for nest-building, a male stonechat, and two wheatears.

Near Loch Craggie, there were tadpoles of varying sizes in the ditch and a few newts - including a newt tadpole, with external gills. I wrongly called this an eft in a previous post; but an eft is the juvenile newt in its next, terrestrial phase.

With rain forecast for the whole day on the west coast we went east, where we found the American wigeon still at Udale Bay. This bird is slightly troublesome for me, being a semi-twitch - but it is nonetheless a handsome duck.

Yesterday, we went to Inverewe Gardens; and from the high viewpoint in a cold and irritating wind, we saw some very distant ducks which I suspected were scoters. Today I went back to take a second look, driving along the single-track road on the opposite side of Loch Ewe and finding the odd useful pull-in. The little gang stayed out in the middle but I got better views today with my scope, and some marginally better record shots of (I think): three female and one male common scoter, two velvet scoters, and one long-tailed duck (drake).





I say "gang", but actually they weren't always together. The common scoters kept close company, while the long-tailed duck associated sometimes with them, and sometimes with the velvets. On one occasion, they all met up again (together with a pair of mergansers) and then the common scoters swam off; the duck started to follow them and then stopped, looking back at the velvets as if unsure where his loyalties lay. In the end, he went after the commons!

As often happens when I'm birdwatching, I forgot lunchtime. It was now two-thirty and I ate my sandwiches in the car. About to drive away, I spotted an adult sea eagle through the still-bare branches of the birches, flying high above the bay. It looked pretty impressive - and even more so when it turned and flew straight towards me. I was aware of a small bird zooming through the pic, but don't know what it was - except brave.


As I snapped the eagle, the rapidly wavering calls of a great northern diver carried up from the loch - ceasing once the eagle had passed over, although I don't know if there was a connection. This brief but magical moment provided some compensation for the fact it was only 11°C - half the temperature in the south-east of England!

Over the years, I've read time and again how birds migrate to the north in summer to exploit the insect-rich environment for rearing their young, with the implication that these are tropical species making special journeys to breed. It never seemed to explain satisfactorily why they come so far, at such risk; and in 2011, I wrote a few paragraphs on migration which put the question: "Is it possible that the ancestors of summer visitors once lived here in the north as resident species?"

I looked out this document because yesterday Greger (I had mentioned my theory to him at the time) handed me his i-pad and said I might be interested in a recent article in New Scientist. This relates how Ben Winger (great name for researcher into bird migration!) and his colleagues "built a mathematical model to reconstruct the geographical ranges of the ancestors of hundreds of living species of American songbird. They found that most long-distance migrants began in the north and started flying south for winter, as opposed to being tropical birds flying north for summer."

This was quite exciting. I'm a bit of a dunce where science is concerned; and feeling doubtful about my theory, I nearly deleted the piece. Other birders have probably come to the same conclusion about migration - but I have to say this is the first time I've heard of it or seen any mention of it in print - so, for once, I thought something out for myself; and, quite unexpectedly, here is some genuine scientific research that says I might just have got it right.

                                                                                 *

A white egg appeared to be impaled on the needles of the dwarf pine in the garden. At 3cm long, it's possibly a collared dove's egg.


We have collared doves in the garden all the time, but I can't say I've noticed them nesting in this pine; otherwise, it could, I suppose, have fallen from a nest and been speared by the (fairly sharp) needles which would then have bent over with the weight. But it seems unlikely something predated and then impaled it (I can only think of shrikes that do that) especially as the yolk has been left uneaten. The tiny insect on the bottom of the egg is probably a springtail; but whether that or something else is responsible for the square hole in the shell is a mystery. Later: a springtail isn't an insect as it has internal mouthparts.

Half a dozen mergansers were close in at Achnahaird on this bright but windy day, with some displaying from the males.


And with such glam ladies - all windswept crops, kohl-lined eyes, and lippie - no wonder they were smitten.


Only one wheatear was seen briefly, flying across the road as we drove uphill from Polbain. In one of the moorland pools by the roadside, where I saw a toad on Tuesday, strands of toadspawn were threaded through the weeds like a double rope of black pearls; while some frog eggs had hatched into tadpoles, wriggling, but not moving far from the main mass.