Christine's walking & birds blog

The light was brilliant and for once I wasn't looking into the sun  - it was just a pity about the fence. After the turn-off to Reiff the road rises steeply and at the summit is a rough pull-in. I walked over to the cairn for a bit of extra exercise and as I turned to go back I caught a glimpse of two huge birds zooming round the back of the small hill opposite - just behind my car. They soon appeared again and I sat on a rock to hide myself a bit and snapped a few pictures off as they interacted in the windy sky. Unfortunately the wind was so strong that I had a job to hold the camera still, which meant it failed to focus most of the time; a great opportunity wasted.  I wonder if these are the same two I snapped over Ullapool yesterday.

On the drive out of the area I stopped at a spot where I've previously heard the chipper calls of snipe, and walked down through the tussocky grass to the loch-side. Sure enough, long before I reached the water, a snipe species rose with a loud flicking of wings and flew out over the loch, zig-zagging as it went. It turned so that it was flying parallel with the bank and plunged down a couple of hundred metres further along. I think it was a common snipe, but can't be sure. I want to have more sightings of snipe this spring as last year they were a bit thin on the ground - for me, anyway.

Yesterday: Greger set off at midday to spend a few days in England. He'll be going to a Fully Charged event at ExCel London and also doing some recce-ing for future house-hunting. He'd rather go alone, as he knows that if I went with him we would just end up birdwatching and get nothing done! I can't get excited about moving. I don't want to stay but I don't to live anywhere else either. He wants to explore the continent a bit more and so it makes sense to live down there; as he points out, we are a long way away from everything. I suppose if everything you want is here, that doesn't matter; but even if that's the case for me, I still suffer from the cold. Yes, it's time.

I drove to Ardmair in the afternoon and then back to the village. No wheatears for me yet, but a chiffchaff surprised me singing near the children's playground in Morefield.

It was wary and sang an odd song - one regular "chiff-chaff" followed by a short string of indistinct, muttered notes. My first summer returner, although not necessarily a true overseas migrant like the wheatear. For all I know, it spent the winter in the Roundmoor Ditch on the edge of Dorney Common, flitting and hopping between the counties of Buckinghamshire and Berkshire.

A white-winged gull was in the river mouth - but I bet it's just that pesky viking again. Looks slightly different, maybe - it appeared larger than the herring gulls, for instance; but I don't think the bill is long enough for a glaucous.

 Two white-tailed sea eagles flew over the village heading east.