Christine's walking & birds blog

A bright sunny day was forecast and so it proved, although the wind at Achnahaird was stronger than I'd bargained for. My first two wheatears of the year were round the back of the rabbity dunes.

A greenshank foraging in the seaweed at Old Dornie was another first for the year; it was chased off by a pair of curlews but returned after a swift aerial tour of the harbour. Driving on towards Altandhu I was surprised to see a bunch of barnacle geese walk out from behind a pine tree that hid part of a field, and managed to pull up in a handy passing place. 

 The Iceland gull was still at Ardmair this afternoon.

Otherwise, things were very quiet.

 The whooper swans (at least twenty) were on Loch Raa in the Coigach area.

It was good to see them as whoopers have been absent from Loch Glascarnoch for some weeks. There were two shelduck on the salt-marsh at Achnahaird but no golden plovers, and three or four meadow pipits at Badentarbat - my first for the year. Earlier, I'd been surprised by a chunky reddish-brown bird flying towards the car along the roadside - probably a woodcock. For a second I thought I'd have it on the dash-cam - but then remembered that I'd taken the memory card out to check the footage for a probable merlin seen a few days ago just north of Ullapool and hadn't got round to putting it back in. Unfortunately, there was no sign of the raptor anyway - the dash-cam had been angled down too much, and the bird had been flying quite high.

I drove to Ardmair and for a change, pulled into the lay-by at the nearest end, by the houses. Glancing over to the fields, I could see something pale down near the sheep trough (which was sort of behind me) and realised this rather muddied bird was an Iceland gull.

I can't count the times I've sat in my car in the rain at Ardmair, trying to snap something on the sea with the window open and getting myself, the car interior, and the optics soaking wet. This would be expected with prevailing westerlies; but now there was an interesting bird on the other side of the road - and blow me down if the rain wasn't coming from that direction! There was much swearing and wiping of lenses, but such an encounter on a dull day, I reflected, wasn't to be sneezed at. The gull was evidently worming, as one picture caught it with something longish and snaky in its bill.

Yesterday: We drove south down the coast to Aultbea. Once again there were loads of black-throated divers on Loch Ewe, with more individuals showing advanced breeding plumage than last time.

Closer in, a great northern diver surfaced with a frighteningly large crab (well, it would frighten me if I had just caught that in my mouth!).

The diver took some minutes to dissect the crab and swallow the pieces. In the natural world there are no concerns about killing prey quickly and humanely, which is what we do. I hope.

There was a fresh fall of snow overnight but the roads were clear as we drove up to the dam, where our usual walk brought only a pair of ravens. Later, from the intake tower on the loch, I watched the approach of a red kite from the south against the backdrop of a white Ben Wyvis. 

A raven flew out from the loch to have words with the kite, which after a bit of aggro carried on past me. It then dived down onto the bank where it seemed to find something in the grass. Taking off again it jinked about in the sky as though catching insects on the wing; perhaps there had been a hatching-out of some sort in the strong sunshine (even though it was still very cold).

A solitary red grouse was almost the only bird we saw on our walk - the other being a raven on the dam.

As usually happens with red grouse we were alerted by a pleasing croak as the unseen bird took off and flew up the hillside through the plantation, to survey us from a more comfortable distance. How nice it is to be moved by encounters with wild creatures and then to leave them alive - instead of wishing only to kill them and still their voices forever.  

Greger brought his posh camera along today and my first response on lifting it to take this photo was the daft exclamation "Oh! I can see!" I'm so used to the less-than-perfect viewfinder on my bridge camera that it always comes as a shock to use Greger's DSLR, which I swear gives not simply a real-life picture through the viewfinder, but even an enhanced one!

The puddles along the track where the sun was only just reaching were solid ice. A week ago, I heard purring in a ditch a little way up the wind-farm road and caught a glimpse of two frogs; and out in the Coigach area later there was a single clump of frogspawn in one of the roadside drainage pools. Hmm. Bit too early, perhaps - but it illustrates the over-riding preoccupation with life on earth to procreate. Never mind the individual, just keep the species going - an urge that's been present in life since life began. Or it wouldn't still be here. Very odd. 

It was a beautiful day, but very cold. We delayed going home because we have no heating or hot water, as we forgot to order in oil until there were only a few centimetres left in the tank - and at least after our walk we could drive around in a warm car! For the last three days, two oil-filled electric radiators and a two-barred electric fire have been moved round the bungalow from room to room in an effort to keep warm; but the only substitute for a hot shower is a flannel wash at the basin! And all this at the coldest time of the year. Last night, something like -14℃ was recorded at Altnaharra which lies to the north of Ullapool and inland so it's bound to be colder; but we know it was at least -6℃ here. Still, we're not complaining; we know the oil will be delivered eventually and that we can afford to pay for it. Others are not so lucky.    

Snow and ice had been forecast and in fact it was snowing when we left home; but we decided to go for a drive and see how far we could get. At Braemore Junction we pulled in and had coffee and Danish pastries, and while Greger read the paper I took a short walk, recalling how we'd seen crossbills here the year we moved to Scotland (2014). I walked over the road to have a look at the new visitor centre for Corrieshalloch Gorge, looked back - and there on the top of a larch tree, just in front of the car, was a crossbill!

Having taken an insurance shot from a distance, I walked back and pointed it out to Greger.

Despite the plumage colour, I think this might be a male bird. It had been singing off and on, and now I heard some more song from the other side of the road, where a second bird was spotted on a snowy pine.

We were looking into the sun which made rather a silhouette of the bird, but this could have been a female. The song, though nice, seemed a bit limited, and when I got home I read this in BWP: "...female also sings, but perhaps only subsong or similar....".

By now the snow had stopped falling and we carried on to the dam, where we took a short walk by the loch. Greger spotted something fly out from the shore onto the water, which turned out to be a goosander; and on the walk back four ravens were very vocal and active during yet another snow shower.

Although the road was clear, we decided to head for home as the snow was falling quite thickly. Along the loch-side, in Ardcharnich, work is being done on the road surface and bridge where my car (and no doubt quite a few others) came to grief in a pot-hole a few years back; and as we pulled up at the traffic light I saw a male stonechat fly up the hillside just above the road.

Yesterday: We drove south down the A832, and found that some of the worst pot-holes have been patched up since our last visit.  From a lay-by at First Coast I spotted five common scoter, quite a long way out.

We had lunch by the sports field in Aultbea, where birders were looking at something through a telescope. They left as a shower of rain passed over, and I went out to see what I could see. There was what I thought was a white-tailed eagle standing on the skyline across Loch Ewe, and I snapped off a few pictures. Back at home, I appeared to have photographed a bird with two heads - from which I deduced that there had been a pair of eagles! All pics binned. Slightly closer than the eagles, twenty-two black-throated divers were hanging out together on the far side of Loch Ewe. What nice sociable birds they are.

Not quite so sociable were two (I think) cormorants. One had caught a fish (probably a sea scorpion) and the other one had taken a fancy to it.

There was quite a tussle over the hapless fish until finally one bird flew off with it - although whether this was the original finder or the other one, I've no idea.

From the lay-by at Mungasdale we could see about 130 barnacle geese grazing on the fields beyond the small bay. At one point they paused in their feeding and stretched their necks up, and I was worried that I'd disturbed them; but a faint racket of gulls from Gruinard Island alerted me to the presence of a white-tailed sea eagle.

Getting on to it belatedly, I grabbed a shot as it flew strongly north towards the Summer Isles.....

......and perhaps that's one of the best ways to see this huge raptor - far away and making light of the immense distances which can delight and frustrate the human observer in equal measure.