The surface of Loch Euphort was a perfect mirror, reflecting the ridge of Eval to make a kite on the edge of the loch. Still water makes it so much easier to see anything that is sitting on the water, or feeding under it, so I thought we might just have a chance of seeing something. What I hadn’t banked on was seeing a perfect illustration of a monster.

The easiest way to find the monster is look for the rings of bright water, as they surface, which is a bit of a give away for what these animals actually are. What I have never seen is two otters feeding quite so calmly, completely unperturbed by anything, even me shouting otter to the rest of the group who were further up the hill. Dive, chase, dive and then pop up like corks out of a bottle followed by a monster impersonation. This is because an otter completely at rest, not moving, or bothering about anything has a most remarkable similarity to the three bumps of a Loch Ness monster – head, body, tail seem to be independently buoyant. If you can completely confuse the size, then there were two monsters in Loch Euphort yesterday. Let’s hope they breed.

Our loch is a rather insignificant affair, nestling at the back of the house. It was fringed by a strong growth of reeds. I say was fringed, because over the last two months we have had a resident pair of whooper swans on the loch and their favourite food seems to be reed tubers. Getting at the tubers is quite a laborious affair, so nearly every daylight hour is spent upended as they root about on the bottom, only occasionally coming up for air. One of the pair seems better at upending, as it grazes almost perfectly still. the other waves its legs in the air in a rather ungainly fashion. It might just be the female and thus slightly smaller than the male, so not quite able to upend to the required depth. The resident pair are often joined by a number of other swans – a group of five seems to visit most often, but another pair were on the loch as it got dark. The resident pair never seem to be aggressive towards the visitors. But i have noticed that they stay firmly in the shallows leaving the centre of the loch to the visitors. Maybe the feeding is better on the fringes. Whenever another group appears, it is signalled by the haunting trumpeting call of the whooper swan which is alleged to be where swan song comes from, as dying swans are supposed to make the haunting call. At present it certainly is the swan song for the reeds.

The past month has seen a wild period of weather. Low after low has cascaded off the Atlantic bringing winds that have rarely dropped below 30mph and at times the house has howled and creaked as gusts of over 100mph have flowed around it. So far only one tile has slid down the roof, which considering we have had gales from every point of the compass has been good going. The final storm managed to not deliver quite the highest of winds, but was an absolute record low for the UK – the weather station recorded 934 hpa, which is in the hurricane category. Lowest for 127 years. Luckily there wasn’t an area of high pressure near it otherwise we would have had hurricane winds as well. What we did have was a couple of hours when the wind dropped away to an erie silence, before returning like a an oncoming train. The windy weather finally broke on Boxing Day and everybody leapt at the chance to get out on the beach, or moor, but this was again because a low pressure system was sitting right over us – Another calm before another storm. The oddest effect of the low pressure was that the low tides have been higher than predicted and this has meant that on the Kyles strand the water has hardly ever disappeared at anything other than low tide, leaving an expanse of water rather then the normal sand for most of the day. The wader seem a bit confused by this – I went down to Arheisker this afternoon and there were groups sitting on rocks waiting for the tide to disappear and open up their larder. At the moment they must be feeding voraciosly under the cover of darkness.

The storms have also taken large chunks out of our dunes, exposing rocks that we have never seen before. Inevitably they have taken other tolls. A group of huge Greater Blackbacks were clustering at the far end of the beach and such clusters usually mean only one thing – a dead animal. This time it was a seal, although we have also seen a porpoise, supplying much needed food for the gulls. The gulls casually flew out to sea to await our passing. They had done a good job on half of the corpse, leaving just the skull and backbone and will probably have finished off the rest in the next day or so.

The good weather has also resulted in the geese getting out and about. They normally spend the night on the deserted Kirkibost Island. During the storms they had either stayed put or flown the short hop over to the Kyles grazing – three days ago in a Force 11 they were filling three fields. There were mainly Greylags and Barnacles, but there were three plainer, darker geese standing aloof from the crowd, with tell tale white bases to their beaks – white fronted geese. Today there were geese everywhere. Over Balranald a group of about two hundred was joined by a solitary light bellied brent goose. It must have joined them at some point on the barnacles journey south through Greenland and Iceland, but is a bit further north than you would normally expect to find brents at this time of year. They tend to spend the winter further south in my normal stomping ground of East Anglia. Our local tidal loch also has a group of wintering shelduck, but these are found all around our coasts in winter. They nest in a burrow, so are always found near to rabbits, which basically means everywhere, so can’t be classified as from any particualr part of the country.

Even more barnacles appeared over our heads as we turned the corner to the entrance to Loch Paible. Even with the storms and the passing of nearly a hundred years the entrance looks exactly as it does in Seton Gordon’s painting of the same place from the twenties. A famous Scottish naturalist, Seton Gordon spent his early career on the Uists photographing the local birds and reporting on the wildlife. His writings are a mix unchanged nature and changed ways of life on the island. He describes walking to the entrance of Loch Paible, a walk that we take a lot and it seems not to have changed very much. What has changed is that there are no sea trout currently in the loch, but that will also change when they return to feed in the summer. By that time the geese will have left for the Arctic, another season will have come full circle and our footsteps in the sand will have been washed back into the Atlantic, to join Seton Gordon’s.