Christine's walking & birds blog

If I'd known how windy it was going to be out in Coigach I would have gone somewhere else! But then I would have missed an entirely unexpected sighting - two red-legged partridges on the side of the single-track road. I snapped them through the windscreen, but when I tried to get out of the car they flew - not far, but out of sight.


It was a bright, sunny day, and the walk across the beach and machair was enjoyable. Dunlins and ringed plovers ran about on the short grass and seaweed, and lapwings wheeled in display.

Going back over the cliffs in the increasingly strong wind, I sat down to watch my first common terns of the year; and my first UK whimbrel of the year flew in and landed on a rock below. A tern buzzed it, and it almost lost its footing but otherwise didn't budge. It seemed a bit stunned. I knew how it felt.


Across the headland, there were even more terns, and it was just as windy. Among possibly twenty common terns, I reckon I identified at least one Arctic.


At the time, I picked it out firstly from the longer tail streamers; but the picture, though lamentable, shows the less powerful, more delicate head, neck, and bill of the Arctic and the neater black trailing edge to the hand. I think. Bonxies are back, swaggering across the sky like the bullies they are.

There were quite a few smart wheatears, too, quietly foraging among the sheep. I tried a walk across moorland which was pleasant underfoot as it's been so dry recently; but in the end the wind defeated me, and I drove home exhausted.