Christine's walking & birds blog

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.