Christine's walking & birds blog

Greger is housebound with a very bad cough. He's been urging me to go out birding as much as possible, and so far I've been staying close to home. Today, however, once I'd done the shopping, I drove out to the Coigach area. There was a dusting of new snow on the tops of the Coigach and Assynt hills, and the wind was chilly; but the sky was mostly blue and there was a fair bit of sunshine. Two golden plover on sodden ground near the dunes were my first for the year. I wish I could have produced a photo to do them justice, but I never get a crisp shot on green/yellow grassy ground (she says, as if she gets crisp shots the rest of the time).

I backtracked a bit and turned to walk through the middle of the dunes, so as not to disturb them. A couple of wheatears were on the machair.

The other side of the headland produced a displaying wheatear and three common scoter - and a dead guillemot on the wide grassy strip above the beach. Five whooper swans were on Loch Raa.

Driving back out to the main road I parked by the plantation and walked back to look at the snipe pool. Two bog bean plants were in bud.....

.....and as I snapped one of them, the call of a snipe came from the loch behind me. Some call it the "chipper", others the "chipping" call; either way it was really good to hear it again.

Further on, where the road widens out with a long passing place, I glanced over the short grass at the side of the road and remembered, a few years back, seeing a golden plover there. And wasn't that a plover standing against the water right now? 

Other birds noted: a pair of shelduck, a buzzard, skylarks, meadow pipits, and several willow warblers singing. I called in at Tesco for a few things I'd forgotten this morning, and got home to find Greger worse. I think it's bronchitis, which he's suffered from before. The good news is that he hasn't lost his appetite, and we broke our rule of alcohol at weekends only and had a couple of glasses of white wine.

At high tide, in between showers, a very bright wagtail was feeding along the waterline on the river spit. I'm not sure if the line between the black nape and the silvery mantle is crisp enough; but the rump appears to be wholly grey and the flanks "clean". I think it's a white wagtail.

A redshank was also present. 

Yesterday: A willow warbler at last!

It was a little way up the quarry road, with the chiffchaff still singing nearby.

The lines (from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) came to me as I spotted a long-tailed duck on the wind-ruffled water in Achnahaird Bay.

My first sand martins of the year! Two or three of them zooming around conifer tops at the bottom of the quarry road - and a chiffchaff still singing there, although distant. At Ardmair, a great northern diver was mooching about offshore.....

My first chiffchaff of the year!  It was a short way up the quarry road, its singing heard from the car as I drove to the walkers' car park.

Yesterday: a walk at Silverbridge brought no crested tits, but it was pleasant to be walking among pine trees once again. Birds seen: great spotted woodpecker, goldcrest (at last!), siskin, coal tit, great tit, blue tit, wren, robin, grey wagtail, red kite, chaffinch, and crossbill. One mystery: a sharp, unfamiliar call made me look up - to see two birds flying across heading north-east before lost to sight behind the tree-tops. The shape of the birds made me think of plovers; but their flight seemed too unhurried and anyway, the call might have come from a different source.

Yesterday was mostly wet so I stayed in and caught up with various domestic tasks, which made me feel very virtuous. Today started bright and sunny so I drove to Ardmair hoping....and there they were, my first wheatears of the year!

 A sparrowhawk was sitting on rocks at Ardmair on this bright but very cold day.

It lifted off and flew up the beach towards me, just skimming the fence and disappearing over the camp-site.