Thursday, October 29, 2020

 A great northern diver was fairly close in to the rocks below Rhue lighthouse this morning.


There was a blast from the past as the old ferry - Isle of Lewis - sailed down the loch bound for Stornoway. It's standing in for the new ferry, which is away having a refit. 


A couple of fishing boats were out, attracting a cloud of gulls, and the fins of porpoises were seen now and then at a distance.


Two shags fished nearby, a curlew flew round the headland towards Ardmair, four Eider ducks zoomed past, and a black guillemot in winter plumage went speeding up the loch. The first spots of rain sent me home.

Yesterday, I was sitting reading in bed at 4 am, unable to sleep. From the front garden came a rather squeaky call, repeated several times. As I scrambled out of bed and rushed to the window I realised it was the call of a tawny owl - very welcome this, as I haven't heard a tawny in the village for ages. I opened the window carefully and could now hear also the alarm calls of a blackbird and other small birds. I couldn't see a thing, but hope the owl found a mouse or something instead!

// posted by Christine @ 12:49 PM 0 comments

Monday, October 26, 2020

I've tried several sites for crossbills recently with no luck, so I parked in the Ben Wyvis walkers' car park mid-afternoon and made my way up the track through the woods. The autumn colours were intense (would have been even better with some sunshine) but the mountain is missing from the picture - thanks to low cloud.


Actually, this is one of the sites I tried, although, as our main aim that day was to get to the top of Ben Wyvis again, there wasn't much time to birdwatch. Today it was quite nice to just stroll up the path, lingering and listening - and eventually I heard crossbill calls.


They were some distance away but there seemed to be at least 8 birds in the flock.

Earlier, I'd seen eight whooper swans on Loch Glascarnoch; also present were five Canada geese and a small flock of wigeon, while a dipper was busy along the rocky shoreline.

I really appreciated being able to be drive around and walk where I liked today. Earlier this year I moaned about Nicola Sturgeon - but I still obeyed the rules; and I think she handled the Covid crisis better than Johnson. We don't feel like going south to house-hunt, and I've accepted that we're staying put for the present. I complained about being cold for six years - I might as well be cold for seven! Meanwhile, lockdown could happen again, so the thing to do is to get out and walk and bird like a maniac here while I can.


// posted by Christine @ 12:36 PM 0 comments

Thursday, October 22, 2020

Achnahaird: The migration season is coming to its end, and I hadn't spotted any waders on the salt-marsh from the road, so while walking over the cliffs I paid more attention to the sea - and spotted my first long-tailed duck of the autumn.

There were two drakes; and then four long-tailed ducks went flying inland and across the headland. These later came back but carried on flying out to sea.

Driving home, I pulled in at Ardmair - to see yet another long-tailed duck quite a way out.


I don't know whether it was my attentions (although I was sitting in my car) or the arrival of a family running down the beach to have a stone-skimming contest that made the duck take off - but she merely seemed to relocate to Loch Kanaird. This was my first Ardmair long-tailed duck. 

We know we can see these ducks all winter "over east", but it's a nice surprise when you run into them by chance on the relatively bird-poor west coast.

// posted by Christine @ 11:22 AM 0 comments

Sunday, October 18, 2020

 A golden eagle was surveying the moors from a small hill almost a kilometre away.


When it took to the air I could tell that it wasn't the same bird we'd seen over Ben Wyvis last Wednesday.


About a dozen black grouse were flushed from the side of the track; five ravens crossed the sky going south, and my first redwing of the autumn flew from a conifer.

I was surprised to see this, in an area probably not much visited by walkers.


It's a ladder trap for corvids apparently. Such a trap is not illegal, but a DEFRA document on-line sets out a code of practice; for instance, the trap must be inspected every 24 hours. I think it's the first bird trap I've seen in the Highlands, and it's certainly the biggest I've seen - about the size of a small garden shed. 

The thing is - what do they want to trap? There are no rooks, jackdaws, magpies or jays around here. There are hoodies, whose numbers seem to fluctuate - I haven't seen one on any of several recent walks. Ravens are protected, although I think they can be culled under licence. But I wonder what the landowners are trying to protect from corvids. There's no driven grouse shooting here - not nearly enough red grouse - although estates might offer walked-up grouse shooting. Perhaps they're protecting the black grouse - although this would no doubt also be for future shooting rather than conservation purposes. There are no sheep grazing here, so they're not concerned about lambs. I'm really at a loss to understand what the trap is for.

// posted by Christine @ 11:12 AM 0 comments

Saturday, October 17, 2020

 The dead fish was quite visible among the wet seaweedy rocks at Ardmair as the tide dropped.




There's a photo of a flapper skate on the assyntwildlife website from four days ago, and looking at the sharktrust website I've learnt that this is also called the common skate - although it's a bit confusing as what was formerly known simply as common has now been split into flapper skate and blue skate.

Apparently both have two small dorsal fins, but the space between is longer on the flapper with 1-2 inter-dorsal thorns. I'm not too sure how to tell what's long and what's short, but the image below seems to show the thorns, so I think this is probably a flapper skate.


Using my walking pole as a rough guide, I'd say the skate measured about 4ft 6ins wing-tip to wing-tip.  It's always sad to see amazing marine creatures stranded and dead, but I never pass up the chance to have a good look close-up at something I'm not likely to see otherwise.

// posted by Christine @ 9:26 AM 0 comments

Thursday, October 15, 2020

Yesterday we did the Ben Wyvis walk that we twice put off in the summer. The weather forecast was quite good. The weather forecast was wrong.

We reached the summit cairn and trig point in cloud, and with no views and a coolish wind, we didn't hang about but turned round after taking a couple of pics and walked the 2 km back along the broad ridge - getting a glimpse of three birds flying along the ground which we thought were mistle thrushes. 

A single crowberry had somehow been missed by ptarmigan - of which there were no signs today; and it was too late to hope for dotterel.


Views opened up as we dropped below the cloud cover.....


.....and Greger, turning back to see where I was, pointed to something above An Cabar. A golden eagle was circling high above.



So high in fact, that it eventually disappeared into the clouds.

Back down at the car park a distant bullfinch provided another tick on what had been a poor day for birds.


The number of walkers present on Ben Wyvis today (it's half-term) ruled out the possibility of seeing ptarmigan. The upside was the sight of so many children making the ascent with their parents, all of them enthusiastic and cheerful. It's nice to see happy families out and about in the hills. The other good thing was a couple of friendly women who turned out to be even slower than us - we last saw them approaching the summit as we turned back. They're probably the only walkers we've encountered on this hill who haven't caught us up and overtaken us on the way down! We were pleased to find that we still have it in us to get up a Munro - but we're paying for it today with very stiff and aching legs.

// posted by Christine @ 2:08 PM 0 comments

Sunday, October 11, 2020

My first great northern diver of the autumn was quite far out on the sea, and catching among other things, flatfish.

It was more or less in breeding plumage, with the bill still showing quite a lot of black, and was the only bird of interest I managed to see on the Coigach peninsula today.


// posted by Christine @ 2:11 PM 0 comments

Saturday, October 03, 2020

It's wet and dreary today, so I've salvaged something I left in draft on 24th September and then deleted because of the poor pictures. But it was a beautiful, sparkling day spent on the ferry (our first "pelagic" since September last year), and I don't want to forget it.

We had to mask-up in the terminal and inside the ferry, but once out on the deck we could take the masks off. As we passed the last of the Summer Isles a flurry of wings revealed two white-tailed sea eagles sparring with a black-backed gull on Priest Island.


The next excitement was a minke whale - or two, according to some observers.



As we drew closer to land, I pointed out a large gathering of seabirds in the distance and said I would just shoot into the crowd and see if I could see any whales. This is hugely cropped.


The trouble is, when Greger called out "There is a whale out there!" I wasn't on that part of the throng - and instead of putting the camera down and looking with bins, I carried on madly clicking away and then found I hadn't followed the main mass of birds; Greger called out again "There it is!" but I didn't see it and I didn't pick it up on any of the shots! And then it was too late - the ferry continued to head determinedly for Stornoway as the ferry is naturally bound to do, the seabirds were left far behind, and I collapsed on the rail, cursing my clumsiness. Greger felt that it wasn't a minke he'd seen, and when someone later told us that a humpback whale had been out there he thought that made sense.

It was a very short turnaround on the Isle of Lewis and we sat on the big boulders by the harbour and ate our lunch before re-embarking. I began to see skuas on the return journey, but none of them came close. Bonxies were fairly easy to recognise at a distance, but once again I'm not sure if I snapped pomarine or Arctic skuas.



Most of the other observers on deck were more interested in cetaceans than birds, so I was left in peace to try and work avian matters out for myself. Once again I failed to see any storm petrels, and although last year I spotted my first Manx shearwater, these (and other shearwaters) were also absent today as far as I was concerned. Compensation of a sort came in the sight of several flocks of migrating pink-footed geese, straggling and bunching high across the blue sky to the north and south - and in the many common dolphins seen on both the outward and return journeys.

We left the ferry exhausted but felt it had been a worthwhile trip on a lovely day - although as we filed out of the boat I remarked to Greger that if anyone came up to me now and said "Did you see the storm petrels?" I would probably kill 'em.

// posted by Christine @ 7:21 AM 0 comments

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