Christine's walking & birds blog

I left home early this morning to leave parking room for the guys coming to start connecting the solar panels up. At Achnahaird it was practically high tide, so I walked round the other side of the dunes - and spotted my first wheatears of the year. 

As I walked back to the car park across the low cliffs, the sound of pink-footed geese came faintly to my ears, grew louder, and eventually faded into the distance without my clapping eyes on the birds at all! There didn't seem to be anything much on the water, but another sound - a sort of peevish wail - alerted me to a pair of red-throated divers out in the middle of the bay. Two more skeins of vocal pink-foots approached from the south; they flew quite low and seemed to contemplate landing - but in the end I lost them against the fierce sun.

Across the headland there were two more wheatears at Badentarbat, sparring in a ditch. I sat in the car having lunch, and watched a buzzard hovering. A few minutes later, some gulls making a fuss made me look up to see several of them mobbing a raptor. Assuming it was the buzzard I didn't pay much attention to begin with - until I realised that the mobbers were great black-backs, which made the raptor a bit bigger than a buzzard!

The sub-adult white-tailed sea eagle flew strongly past my car and vanished over the moorland towards Ben More Coigeach.

On the way out of the area, I'd planned to pull in by the plantation to listen out for snipe; but there were loads of sheep lounging around there, and when I stepped out of the car they all ran towards me bleating piteously. They thought I was going to feed them. I felt a bit rotten about that, so I got back in - at which the bleating died away. If you want to know what disappointed sheep look like - well, they look like this.

However, I got a second chance a bit further along the road. Driving with the window down, I heard a distinct bit of a snipe's chipper call, rising from the moorland leading down to the loch. I parked when I could and walked back, without much hope of seeing the bird but wanting to hear the call again. But it must have been close to the road because it suddenly erupted from the grass and bog myrtle and zig-zagged away into the sky. Fortunately, it had already turned and was coming back towards the road as I set off back to my car, so I stopped watching it. And then I heard the thrilling sound of drumming (or thrumming, which suggests something less percussive) so I stood by my car and tried hard to locate the bird in the air again - with no success. (What the snipe does with its tail feathers is also called winnowing - which is rather nice.)