Christine's walking & birds blog

The small loch by the farmhouse held 21 whooper swans; they were asleep with their necks bent back when we arrived, which made me fear avian flu; but when we drove out, they were awake and feeding okay. I grabbed a shot from the car and by chance caught both an adult and an immature.

Driving out of the area we spotted an immature white-tailed eagle.

Yesterday, a walk up the quarry road and back over Ullapool Hill gave me mating newts in their usual puddle. The strong wind was ruffling the water, but I kept this pic of a male palmate newt as it shows the webbing on its hind foot. In another puddle, there was frogspawn.

The day before that, my first grey wagtail of the year was flying up and down the Black Water River at Silverbridge.

I'd had a short walk in lovely weather on my way to the railway station at Garve. The previous day, Greger had taken the bus to Inverness, where he caught an Ember electric bus to Edinburgh. Thanks to our travel cards, he travelled free all the way! He spent the night in Edinburgh, but decided to come back by train; he'd also applied for a railcard and so got a discount. Garve is as close as the railway gets to Ullapool, hence my drive to pick him up. He'd enjoyed going on public transport for a change, and was impressed by the electric bus; his only moan about the whole trip was that, on returning to the hotel after a meal at All Bar One, there had been no Vera on the telly! (We stay at Premier Inns quite a lot, and there's always a Vera to watch on ITV3 - although generally, we fall asleep and miss the end.)

A recent trip to Aberdeen resulted in the purchase of a new Apple Mac. The geniuses couldn't repair the old one, but they managed to transfer everything on it to the spanking new one - so that's solved. The main bird interest of the trip was the huge number of herring gulls in every town we passed through - for instance Nairn, Forres, and Elgin. On fields between the towns there were loads more following ploughs or just loafing on the grass. They are becoming a bit of a problem - particularly when they nest on house roofs. The nest we watched from our back window last year has been cleared away and a large orange ball (buoy?) placed there to prevent a rebuilding this year. The two adult gulls still spend a lot of time on that particular chimney stack, and yesterday, one was standing there preening - right on top of the ball!