Christine's walking & birds blog

I returned to the area where I walked last Sunday, determined this time to get up two of the hills on the far side of Loch Glascarnoch which I first attempted on a wet September day last year. Having negotiated bogs and holes and peat hags, I was toiling up a rise of ground in the vain hope of finding it drier on the ridge when a pair of alarm-calling golden plover came racing down and over me. It seemed they didn't want me on the ridge, so I stayed low. The male bird landed and continued to call.


As I drew level he flew on a bit further.


He landed once more but remained silent, watching me off his territory.


And the next time I looked round he'd gone. Phew! But a red grouse erupting noisily from the grass shortly afterwards made me pat my heart again. After a few more tussles with peat hags and a steep climb I found myself walking on short, crisp, dry vegetation and there ahead was the summit of Meall Coire nan Laogh (666m).







Further round to the north are the rounded tops of Am Faochagach (Meall Gorm hiding the actual summit) and in the centre, the more shapely Carn Gorm-Loch which at 910m is only 4 metres short of being a Munro.






These apparently are the sepals, left when the (white) petals have dropped off.


At one point I heard something like a harsh trill. My mind leapt immediately to dotterel - but although I scanned ground and sky and listened for ages, nothing more was heard. Perhaps it was a flyover.
Never mind, onward to the top of Tom Ban Mor (742m) - looking north-west to Beinn Dearg and Am Faochagach (summit now visible with snow patches). Scanning the latter, I could make out a dark figure on the skyline. Judging by the car parks I'd driven past, there were certainly loads of hill-walkers out and about today - but he was the only one I saw.






The berries look like tiny ripening apples now, but in fact they will go from green to red to black before they are ripe. The plant is sprawling (cowberry is more erect) while bearberry has quite markedly oblate fruits rather than round. I thought at first these looked "flattened at the poles" - but as far as I can learn, the leaves are wrong for bearberry and right for Alpine bearberry. Confusing!


Reluctantly I set off down, a mountain hare lending interest to the descent. Pity the sun was directly behind it. A native species, the hare has adapted to survive in these special but often bleak places and forms a sort of mammalian counterpart to the ptarmigan - not compromising, not migrating, just changing colour with the seasons.


Going down from the lower hill I took what I thought was a more direct route towards the gate in the deer fence (I couldn't yet see it) and avoided disturbing the golden plovers again. Meadow pipits had been seen in several places, and here a pair of skylarks fed a fledgling. A tiny shrub that I almost stepped on was dwarf birch; the rounded, toothed leaves are distinctive. I'm less sure now of the plant I snapped on Little Wyvis, whose leaves were still in bud - so I'm glad I spotted this one.


There was evidence of work ongoing on the hillside; a sort of damning up of flushes and bogs, and great vehicle tracks everywhere. Down below the deer fence, lots of saplings have been planted - birch, pine, rowan - so perhaps they're trying to stop water pouring down the hill and washing them out of the soil. In a particularly wet patch, a frog hopped out of the way.

The fence came into view and I found I was on a bee-line for the walkers' gate; in fact I was so pleased to see it that when I got nearer I took a photo. I was nearly down! After the gate it was just a last struggle down some steep, wet, rough ground and then the plod back along the track to the dam.


It was by now very warm, and I was sheltered from the wind I'd had on the tops. There was only a gulp of water left in the bottle, my mouth was dry, and I had the beginnings of a headache. But there was a nice surprise in store - which I hadn't noticed on my way up. On the other side of the track, there were a lot of small red plants dotted along the bank of the ditch - growing here with moss and starry, yellow bog asphodel. I had to train the bins on them to see what they were.

The field at Gruinard held common blue butterflies, a solitary golden-ringed dragonfly, and several burnet moths - this one on a (probable) northern marsh orchid.


We'd stopped here the previous day during a drive south, and I'd snapped a pale wildflower which also looked like an orchid. Research back home suggested butterfly orchid - but which one? Greater or lesser? Apparently the pollen sacs in the greater form an inverted V, while in the lesser they are two parallel bars. I went back today to check, wondering how on earth I would recognise the pollen sacs. But - with my glasses on - I could see them quite well.



It's clearly the lesser butterfly orchid - always the more likely of the two as it prefers acid soils. There were probably about twenty plants scattered about - but the whole site is threatened by creeping bracken.

I walked quickly across the dam and along the track; I missed the start of the ATV track that runs up the hillside to a gate in the fence - but it didn't matter as it was channelling water down the hill like two parallel streams and was very little help to a walker. I squelched my way up beside it, pausing to snap plants on the way. I had sort of been aiming for these two tops, which are on the same ridge as Am Faochagach; but they're still a couple of kilometres away at this point with the going underfoot heavy, and in the end I left them for another, drier day.


Bogs can be a pain when you're hill-walking but today it was nice to just wander about and concentrate on these watery gardens in the sky. This is probably common haircap moss, cushioning a boulder like bright green stars.


Dark peaty water made a nice background for these bog cotton plants, their fluffy, whiter-than-white heads blowing in the wind.


Near the top of the ridge, a male red grouse rose from the tussocks and went gliding over the ridge. Meadow pipits were everywhere. Back down on the track, common sandpipers called from the loch-side and a family of stonechats scolded from the heather.  Sounds that were almost human drifted over the water, and a pair of ravens went flying across low with two common gulls in hot pursuit. The calls of both ravens and gulls now sounded more familiar, but half-heard, had possessed an eerie quality.

Back at the dam, I leaned on the wall and looked for birds; after a while the expected grey wagtail was spotted far below. The house martins were a surprise though - nesting under the dam wall, where the ravens had nested earlier. They swooped about at eye level and then dropped down to a puddle; at least one sand martin was also present and further off, three swallows hunted.


Closer to the road I watched an adult male wheatear foraging in the grass with a juvenile, while a willow warbler sang from the plantation. A distant cuckoo struck up; to my fretful human ears the fluty two-note song held a tinge of melancholy because, having thought cuckoos had fallen silent, I was simply reminded now that they soon would. As if he was of the same mind, the cuckoo stopped singing - or perhaps, like Keats' nightingale, he'd merely flown "up the hill-side" and on, until his song was "buried deep" in the next valley. P.S. Only two butterflies were seen: a small heath and a fritillary - probably a small pearl-bordered. No dragonflies.

The scaup were on the Cromarty Firth near Invergordon a couple of days ago.


A bit tardy in leaving for the north - or aren't they going to bother? An Eider with a single chick was nearby. But the walk and the search for terns we'd wanted to do proved impossible because of the rain. On our way home, we had two good sightings; a swift over the junction at Garve, and a golden eagle hunting along a distant ridge.

Yesterday, several young stags in velvet were browsing at Knockan Crag. When they show this little fear of us, they lack the wary charm of truly wild animals - but at least you can get close-up pictures. Again, rain stopped play.


Today, a drive out into Coigach remained just a drive - it was too wet to walk and birdwatch. A few juvenile wheatears were seen, and a snipe sitting on a fencepost in the rain caused me to pull in; but the bird flew before I could get a shot, and its next perch on a rock way out in the field was just too far for the Coolpix. At Ardmair, a sea eagle was spotted - but it was miles away, flying down Loch Broom and out over the Summer Isles in what turned out to be a brief dry interval between showers.  

I stopped by a road-side loch to see what was about. Across the road, a brown bird with pale wings flew up the hillside and alighted just beyond some people walking. A female ring ouzel - my first of the year.

I was about to continue my walk down to the water's edge when an unnoticed greenshank took off, followed by a common sandpiper. They flew along the shoreline and perched on boulders a short distance away. Retreating to my car, I heard a loud chacking sound coming from the bracken, and a juvenile ring ouzel emerged.


Now consumed by guilt (although I still grabbed a pic), I got back in my car and drove up the hillside to the car park, where loads of people were milling around. A repeated, ringing, somewhat melancholy whistle drew my attention to a male ring ouzel in a rowan tree on the cliff; I looked at the people passing me on the trail but this lovely call seemed to be going unheard and unheeded. The two adult birds must have had more than one youngster as they seemed to be visiting a patch of bracken on the hillside as well as the one by the loch; for the latter, they had to swoop down across the road, which was rather worrying. Good though, to see successful breeding.

Sgorr Ruadh

It was back to Achnashellach for us today, crossing the railway track and walking up through lovely forest and clear-fell and past the rocky Corbett to the left to reach the Munro just seen beyond - still boasting a couple of patches of snow and looking dauntingly far away at this point. The hill is 962m high, and we started from about 50m above sea level.












This is probably Antennaria dioica or mountain everlasting - a nice name, and a reflection, I have to admit, of how we were feeling (as in "this blooming mountain goes on and on forever!")




After lunch we made our way back down to the col by a slightly different route, and just above the largest of the lochans we encountered a pair of ptarmigan. They saved the day.