Christine's walking & birds blog

On the east coast of Scotland in winter you can, I believe, see rafts of scoters - but the west coast doles out its treasures one by one. They're all the more precious for that, and when I spotted a dark duck beyond the car park as I walked back from the beach, my spirits lifted and I hurried through the jumble of cars, campers, and people sunbathing in deckchairs to get out onto the rocks from where I snapped the red-necked grebe earlier this year. The common scoter (my first close, definite adult male) was about where I saw the grebe.



I sat on the rocks for some time, watching the scoter dive and then preen, and finally go to sleep. Now and then I would hear the raspy call of a dunlin, seemingly somewhere further out towards the water. I kept craning my neck to see over the higher rocks; until a small fluttery movement caught my attention - and there, now in full view, were two dunlin, trying to nap but having to edge ever higher as they were splashed by waves of the incoming tide.


My first female cuckoo of the year was on wires at the junction of the Achiltibuie road and the A835.


A male cuckoo flew calling onto the wires further away and eventually the two flew off into the Coigach area.  P.S. A lapwing chick was seen in the distance on the machair.