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.