Monthly Archives: September 2013

A clash of seasons

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Last week summer returned to the islands – if you have to describe heaven it is standing on the hill at Cletraval looking down on the Lochs and machair laid out below and with enough breeze to keep the midge grounded. The sun coincided with the Autumn equinox on Tuesday, but oddly the day and night weren’t exactly 12 hours each until we got to Thursday. So halfway to winter and still summer doesn’t go away, but a few signs of both appear fleetingly.

Summer still has a toehold, as we still have swallows. And not just flying south, but still feeding nestlings, even in the the bleak winter weather of the week before. I was sure it would have gone by now but a week later, bathed in sun rather than rain, it was still flitting into the old fishing hut every five or so minutes, to be greeted by the chattering of chicks, eager to be fed before the insects dry up. These were not the only late brooding swallows. Four fledglings were sitting in a rank on the machair sheep fence, for all the world looking like they were waiting for a bus to take them to Africa. As an adult appeared above them they instantly flew up, eagerly expecting another mouthful of food. So another brood only just out of the nest and with a lengthy journey ahead of them.

As we watched the swallows, a wink wink call from above our heads announced the arrival of winter – this time pink footed geese from the Arctic. These were a small group and suggested that we would be seeing more over the coming days, but the wind settled into the south and everything has decided to stay in the Arctic and enjoy the 12 hour days whilst the weather is good. Even the bumblebees are enjoying the late flowering scabious, gathering nectar before they die and their queen hibernates for the winter.

The vagaries of climate at this time of year is probably why people built henges. The benefit of knowing this was the moment to organise for winter or plant for spring is obvious. On Cletraval a ripple from the past suddenly appeared, as the standing stone on the committee road began to wander south across Langass hill, until as you reached a point near the aisled house, it lay perfectly in the cleft of the hills and exactly over Barpa Langass in the distance. Why they decided that this alignment was so important, we will never know, but at some point somebody stood on the exact same spot 5000 years ago. I expect they also wondered if the sea trout had appeared on the beach yet and would the small number of geese be replaced with thousands. Had the riches of Autumn finally turned up. Five thousand years later the answer was they hadn’t – yet.

Ancient Carabhat

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The great thing about Kelly kettles is that you can take them anywhere and, as long as you have a source of fuel and freshwater, they can supply a cup of tea in minutes. Well that is the theory anyway, but on some damp days they can be difficult to get going and on really damp days, when you really need a cup of tea, they can literally be a damp squib. Usually an audience doesn’t help, but I think that I am getting the hang of it. Even when the audience is three Lancastrians who have just been fed on piccalilli from Yorkshire.

And it does help when the you are in a place as sublimly beautiful as Carabhat, an enormous Loch in the bottom half of the island, which is teeming with trout that for the most fleeting of moments feel and fight like monsters. It was also something of a draw for ancient man: although the OS map shows only two duns, seemingly dividing the loch into yours and mine, the north part is completely strewn with them. As we drifted along, we passed one island after another, all of them obviously inhabited at some point in the past. One of the draws was definitely the migratory fish, that now sadly have all but disappeared from the loch. They must have been here in numbers, as the stream from the tidal Oban nam Fiadh is guarded by an ancient fish trap. The hill to the north is covered in Chambered cairns and on the far side a stone circle. It was from that side of the island that the moorland fire descended on Carabhat, burning a huge swathe of the hills. It also ragged over Beinne na Coille, a hill that rises 68m above sea level – very much a hill and from the roadside not even that conspicuous. But in the fire ravaged north, there is a particular outcrop of rock that is hugely attractive to a pair of golden eagles. So attractive that as the kettle boils an eagle appears for the umpteenth time that day and swoops up on to the rocky ledge, disdainfully looks down on the strange group standing staring up at it, perhaps worried that the smoke issuing from the kettle presages another threat to the nest. Can you ever get bored of seeing golden eagles? Maybe only if, like London, you are bored of life. They are simply masters of all they survey and perhaps the most accomplished effortless flyers from one end of their territory to the other. With scarcely a wing beat, they climb, soar, glide and stoop from one likely spot to another in the search for prey. The Carabhat eagle had spent the day appearing suddenly over our head, then gliding to a tiny dot over a far hill, then returning to see how the fishing was going, before gliding off back in to the distance, seemingly bored by the lack of action. As we drank tea, it simply sat peering down at us, its golden colouring suddenly illuminated by the appearance of the sun.

The golden colour is distinctive but identifying your first eagle can sometimes be difficult, particularly if there are buzzards in the area. The buzzard has become very common in Scotland, making up for a crash in its numbers following the crash in its favourite food after the scourge of myxomatosis. It is often known as the tourist eagle, as at a distance it is easy to mistake a buzzard for a golden eagle. But when you actually see a golden eagle it becomes obvious what is a tourist and what is a golden eagle – the wings and tail are so much longer and it is just so much bigger. It is just so much more of an eagle that I always think – now that’s an eagle!

There is another eagle interloper that has been reintroduced to Scotland recently: the white tailed sea eagle. In this case bigger, I think isn’t better. When you see a sea eagle the description of a flying barn door is very apt, but it is an ungainly barn door. All flaps and effort. Since the sea eagle has been reintroduced they have taken to the Outer Hebrides with some zeal. Some say that they have ousted the golden eagles, others that they live comfortably side by side.

What I do know is that golden’s don’t like sea’s in their vicinity. Suddenly the golden eagle looks up and my eyes follow its. Directly above the eyrie, an enormous flappy giant appears. There is an immediate reaction from the golden that launches into the air and surprises the sea eagle from beneath. But sea eagles are pretty confident in their enormous bulk, so there is little aerobatics, but the golden eagle makes one last flypast, before returning seemingly satisfied to its rocky perch.

It was a single moment that must have happened so often over Carabhat in ancient times, when both eagles were so much more common. It is only in the past ten years that you have again been able to see both eagles in the air at the same time. If things are going really well you will have also been able to make the Kelly kettle work and have a cup of tea in your hand.

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Humans and animals

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A week to reinforce the difference between North Uist and London and to show that the tentacles of the Outer Hebrides go much further than you think. Two days standing in the Atlantic was also rewarded by the capture of the first silver tourist – a wild salmon fresh from the sea – caught in thirty minutes of fish madness when Ardheisker seemed to come alive with fish. Why is it like that? Do the fish move around the vast expanses of the sandflats behind Baleshare or do they sit in the same place, moribund until some miniscule change in the tide, or salinity, or barometric pressure, or some other aspect of the environment entirely hidden from human sight. Much has been written in the quest for an answer, but none has come. Probably best left as a mystery of the natural world – for now.

The Arctic continues to drain south, with everything hurrying to Autumn. Wheaters seem to be a continual presence at the moment, but their slightly more solid build suggest that they are birds from Greenland. They certainly know winter is coming as they stay for a short time before moving on south. The males have also started to moult into their much draber winter cloths.

On Wednesday, we had gales and rain, but that didn’t stop two swallows joining me – incongruous in such bad weather. I joined their journey south – the shock of going from driving through Mediterranean weather to Benbecula and then driving through tropical weather on the M25 was almost too much. The next day there were more people on one tube train than on the whole island!

So what of the tentacles of North Uist. New Naturalist authors and editors may be a select band, but the Outer Hebrides seems a common theme. At lunch I discovered one author had spent three years on South Uist looking at what was then a rare population of non migratory Greylag Geese. More of these fly past our window every day than were found on the whole island – they now constitute a major threat to the pasture that produces the essential winter forage in these islands. One of the ex editors also used to own the school house on the deserted Monach Islands – whose lighthouse looms on our western horizon at night.

What really struck home was a session on Bird populations, with much discussion about the changes in farmland birds. The close association with human activity has obviously evolved over hundreds if not thousands of years. But now we are changing the way we behave so quickly that nothing can keep up. The corn bunting seems to be a classic example – it has become almost entirely dependent on our slightly untidy farming habitats over the last four thousand years. In the last fifty years we have become much tidier: here in the Hebs almost all forage is cut as silage and nearly all seed is combined, as it is so much less laboutnintensive than the previous stock and stack method. It is also so much tidier. Te poor corn bunting can’t fi d enough seed in the winter and the population is in serious decline. Compare that with the whooper swan that depends on man for nothing, unless it fancies a snack of lowland potatoes. Their lifestyle doesn’t depend on the vagaries of human culture to the corn bunting extent.

One last thought on adaptation. I had always wondered about sparrowhawks skill in ambushing its prey by flying along one line of terraced houses and flipping over into the next. Then I saw a female sparrowhawk do exactly the same thing – but this time in the sand dunes of Uval. I wonder if they used the Iron Age village in the same way.

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Northerners comes south as southerns go north

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Balranald, North Uist

A week into the adventure and the wind is as as we southerners remember it. Warm, strong and from the west. Just getting used to being back in the Outer Hebrides, with single track roads and a rhythm of life more suited to the seasons and the tides than the normal nine to five. The house has a fabulous view over the west side of the RSPB reserve, as well as a view over tidal Loch Phaibeil (Priests Loch) so we can see both the coming and goings of the birds and the water. The machair is now at the end of the flowering season, but there are still loads of flowers to try and identify and we have even managed to catch up with the very end of the flying season of the great yellow bumblebee which satisfies all three of the words in its name.

On Tuesday the wind went into the north. The Arctic had been waiting for this plug to be pulled and within a day we were inundated by birds that had been waiting such a tail wind. The first sign was hundreds of godwits, some still in the last vestiges of their brick red breeding plumage, feeding feverishly on the huge expanse of Vallay Strand, intermingled with the slightly shocked local Oystercatchers, who were herded around the strand by the massed ranks of the godwits. Dunljn in breeding plumage, ringed plovers and a whole host of sanderlings joined the throng from the north, all feeding feverishly after nearly a day in the air. It wasn’t just waders that had left Iceland for the winter: as I went to the car on Wednesday evening, the trumpeting call announced the arrival of two swans on our loch – a pair of whoopers from the far north. The first of many wildfowl that will appear and the very first of an invasion of swans – we found another 21 on the Lochportain road on the way to a fondue party on Friday. Our pair have taken up residence on our loch – they are feeding there now and then will clamber out to sit on top of one of the tussocks, like two small splashes of snow in a very green landscape.

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The silver tourists have yet to arrive, because it has been very dry up here and they need the lure of the taste of freshwater. A couple of days have been wasted casting for them and I had a titanic struggle with one on Monday. But it had other ideas – one massive jump, a shake of its head and it was gone. The tides come right again on Tuesday, so more standing around waist deep in the Atlantic. We decided that it would be easier with a net, or even with a Bronze Age fish trap which was much favoured here. The richness of the fish probably explains why the whole place is dotted with archaeology, but I guarantee that they didn’t use a rod and fly.