Monday, March 06, 2023
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.
