Christine's walking & birds blog

Yesterday: It was a beautiful day, though still warranting a hat when in exposed places - which is most of the Coigach peninsula, really. A sedge warbler was heard singing from the car and then carefully tracked down for a snap in loch-side vegetation.


Present nearby were a pair of stonechats and a pair of reed buntings. Walking back to the car, I heard but couldn't spot a raven. A few gulls circling above drew my eyes even higher - and there was the raven, mobbing a sea eagle. The brilliant white tail of an adult eagle was conspicuous - but the birds were too high in the endless blue for me to find them in the camera; and with the raven soon falling silent, I assumed the eagle had moved away.

Compensation came in the form of four great skuas (which had been preening and loafing on the loch) taking to the air and spiralling ever higher. It's possible they were exploiting a hatching of flies - but they didn't seem to be feeding. Perhaps they were pair-bonding. I reflected that even bonxies can be beautiful as I watched them soaring, tails often fanned, wing patches lit by the sun.


Later, two cuckoos flying across the road and onto rocks on the moorland above, brought me to a halt in someone's driveway in Polbain; but I failed to get any decent shots of this fight between two cuckoo-ing males. A wheatear on the beach in Old Dornie made it easier for me.


A walk round the machair at Achnahaird brought only one dunlin with a ringed plover. Walking back along the cliff-tops, I half-saw a brown bird lift off from the ground ahead and fly down to the rocks. It was the whimbrel I'd been hoping for, and it had been standing just in front of me! I walked back and eventually spotted it on the beach, which for the moment was empty of people.


Driving back along the single-track road I pulled in for a while to let some traffic clear. As I stood enjoying some chiffchaff song from a nearby plantation, an unfamiliar call issued from the rough grass at the side of the road. I walked carefully along the verge only to see a snipe rise from a roadside pool, fly up the slope, and apparently land not far away.

Just as the skuas had been compensation for the eagle, so the little pool made up for not getting a picture of the snipe. These pretty, pinkish white flowers with their filament-like hairs seem to deserve a nicer name than "bogbean".


Bogbean's scientific name is Menyanthes trifoliata - information provided by my parents' old book on wild flowers; while the website plantlife.org.uk offers this brief but poetic description: "A flower of dark, moorland waters."