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.

Winter in the Outer Hebrides seems to conjure two words in peoples minds – both of which seem to make us slightly odd to have come here in winter in most southerners minds. The first is dark, because surely this far north it will get light so much later and dark so much earlier. Oddly, it gets dark later than it does in say London, but I have to admit that it gets light about an hour later. This is because sunrise advances from SE to NW at this time of year so it is much later, but sunset comes rather more from a rather less oblique angle. And it actually starts to get light, technically the twilight hours, before and after sunrise/sunset much earlier/later than you would expect, so in the morning and afternoon you can get the most amazing sunrises and sunsets. The reason for all of this is that the sun is moving at a much more oblique angle to the horizon as it crawls over the horizon and heads for the heights at midday. I am sure there is a complicated way of working out how high it actually gets, but all I know is that in some complicated way our latitude 57.5 degrees north decimal and the tilt of the earth to the sun means that at this time of year it struggles up to get higher than about twenty degrees above the horizon, which gives very oblique and thus very weak sunshine.

Logically, weak sunshine can mean only one thing – cold. That would be true if we didn’t have the largest heat store on the planet running past the front door and in this case it really is nearly our front door. The North Atlantic Drift is a huge mass of water driven by the trade winds on the equator. It is in fact hardly imaginable how much water it contains – 150 million cubic metres are moved north every second. The movement north also means that water warmed in the Equator and the Caribbean comes north to flow past the Outer Hebrides. The result is that whilst London is currently 8 degrees celcius, we are currently in a balmy 10 degrees and all talk of freezing temperatures is only relevant to the south and east. But all this does depend on the wind direction, so last week when a huge northerly gale blew in from the Arctic all bets were off and we were treated to some magnificent hail storms that gave the Harris Hills impressive white tops. So we hope the wind continues to blow over the radiator to the west.

The temperate weather goes some way to explain the extraordinary richness of archaeological remains in the area, although the climate was much warmer up until about 5000 years ago (and the sea level about 30 metres lower meaning there is a whole lot of archaeology under the sea). What is left is amazing, but the most amazing is the Callanish Stones in Lewis. It is a huge set of stones, made from the local stone whose formation predates its use by man by over 3000 million years and thus makes it some of the oldest rock on the planet. As with many such stone circles, it is aligned with both the summer and winter solstices, some moon rises, as well as being aligned to a time when the sun runs down the outline of a reclining body of a woman traced by the hills of Harris. Were the ancients hoping to forecast the arrival of snow on the hills, or plant their seeds in the spring, or many of a huge variety of other events that are seasonal. We will never know, but I think they were hoping to predict the arrival of the greatest run of migratory fish in the islands. Nowadays these are important to two of the best salmon fisheries on the island, which are literally next door to each other. Both are fed by a run of salmon that has to negotiate the same narrows at the foot of the stones.

See, everything comes back to fishing.

After we first decided to spend six months in North Uist I started preparing a list of things that I really wanted to do whilst we were up here. A few covered the fishing and mainly centred around catching a big sea trout. I managed a 5lb beauty from Ard Heisker sea pool, only to be topped by my brother catching one of 6 1/2 lbs, a proper beauty that had been in Vallay Loch for about a week and was only just losing the losing the silver colour, but had the most wonderful lilac colour. Suffice to say that both fish were returned – no fish that has attained that kind of weight should be removed from the breeding gene pool.

What I hadn’t reckoned on is that one of the items on the list, one nearly at the top, was to appear rather unexpectedly during Poirot last week. Is it just me or is there always a moment when you realise that A. Christie has rather given the game away and your mind wanders. In this case my mind had wandered as far as looking, more in hope than expectation, at Aurorawatch UK – the must see web site for anyone remotely interested in seeing the Northern Lights. To see the Aurora Borealis, as they are more technically described you need a very dark sky to the north of you and a sun spot derived magnetic storm. The further south you are, the bigger the storm, but with the very biggest storms you can see the Northern Lights as far south as the Scilly Isles (but you are usually thwarted by the glow of urbanity). We certainly have dark skies up here – from the lights of the airport far to the south around a sweep of 180 degrees we cant see one light, except for the distant flash of the Monarch Isles lighthouse.so all we needed was a magnetic storm. We had already missed a fantastic display last month, when it was described as psychedelic. I simply thought it was the moon behind the clouds and gone to bed, which was a bit stupid as it was a New Moon that night.

We have the dark skies, so all we needed was a magnetic storm. And the only way of knowing if there is a storm is to look at Aurorawatch and see what their detector is saying. Most of the time it is rather disappointingly green, but this time I idly called up the web page on my ipad to discover that it was Amber. Possible aurora. Abandoning Poirot (body buried under folly, husband killer) I went outside and was faced with the most amazing light display I have ever seen. Against the inky blackness of the northern sky was an extraordinary veil of green, like diaphanous curtains hanging from the sky being blown gently in a cosmic breeze as they wafted backwards and forwards across the sky. As this was my first experience, i can’t say if this was a great display, but it really was pretty sensational. The light is caused by the magnetic storm exciting the oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere so they actually glow – hence the fabulous green glow. Occasionally the storm is severe enough to make them glow red, but only when Aurorawatch is reporting red status – severe storm. So in aurora world amber means possible green and red means possible red. Wonder if Poirot would approve.

The wind had been in the south for nearly a week, so migration had been on hold. Wednesday dawned with the wind raging against the north end of the house, drumming the rain against the window. Fishing was going to be an experience today. As you crest the Committee Road, the expanse of Vallay Strand is laid put in all its glory in front of you. The deep blues signifying the slightly deeper water and the shallower water running through all the variations of yellow until it actually becomes solid sandbanks as the tide recedes. The tide was running north against the wind, raising breaking waves as it rushed towards the Atlantic, but also churning the sand up, so that it looked like the water was half sand and water. I knew the tide ran strongly between us and the sea pool, but in this wind we needed to get to the other side to even have a chance of casting in this maelstrom. It was running too fast to cross safely – we were going to have to wait until it dropped further. As we waited rain squalls came in off the Atlantic which the wind drove into us like hail, even though we were cowering behind the only available rock. A quick step out into the unknown and deepest part of the ford, but soon across with the rods and then back for Duncan and Susan. I am sure they were beginning to wonder if wading chest deep into this seemingly endless expanse of water was advisable, but soon we were fishing with the wind. Another squall and then blistering sun, then another squall – we were going to earn any fish we caught. With the return of the sun came the sound of yapping small dogs from high above us – the northerlies had brought another visitor from the far north in the shape of the amazing Barnacle Goose. The first three parties were family groups of two adults and one or two juveniles who would have stuck together during their long haul from Iceland, as well as the flight down from the high Arctic of Greenland or Svalbard where they nest high in the cliffs. For years people wondered how the gosling got from these inaccessible nests to the lochs below where they grow up. It was thought that the adults carried them on their backs, but the truth turned out to be much simpler – they jump, encouraged by their parents into a day old display of freefall. So these juveniles had survived a long fall and a long flight.

Within 24 hours the three small groups I had seen were quickly joined by a vast group on Kyles strand in a long line of resting geese that stretched for at least half a mile of silent birds. For the next four days the weather has been Mediterranean up here, making a visit to Harris fishless, but perfect for more Barnacles to arrive (as well as numerous wheaters and a redwing – the arctic really is coming south) until the island seems full of them – we must have seen groups totalling 10,000 in the last two days. They seem to prefer to roost on sand, so we now have our own resident group of about a thousand who spend low tide on Loch Paible, gently yapping at each other and occasionally taking fright at anything, including the Tuesday helicopter from St Kilda. They have reason to be wary on the island, but they need to listen to the local ravens if they want an early warning.

Our ravens spend a great deal of time on the chimney pots of Balranald House, from where they survey the local area like the local tacksman who used to lived there. Nothing stirs without them investigating, especially if it is a bird of prey. So it is always worth checking out why they are making their chastening call. Last night it was really worth it because flapping back from a foray over the exhausted geese was a white-tailed eagle. After a long flight from Iceland the geese are prey for even the rather laboured flight of the sea eagle. It will no doubt return to test the geese’s wariness until they depart for their final destination on Islay, the Solway and the west coast of Ireland.

Mobbing of eagles by other birds is a great way of finding eagles, but sometimes eagles attract things that you might miss. As we lay in the sun high up on a hill above Kyles and the barnacles, two eagles circled above us, like vultures in a 50s cowboy movie. Bored with the lack of carrion, one called to the other and they were off across the valley to seek richer pickings. Watching them slowly disappear, they were joined by another dot hurtling in from above them. A peregrine disgruntled by their invasion of its air space decided to make a warning fly past. The eagles seemed unperturbed, but the peregrine did keep its distance, only once causing evasive action from the eagle.

It was the yapping of wary geese that called me out with binoculars this morning to see what the fuss was about – perhaps another eagle visit. The geese seemed to have misidentified a heron as a possible threat, so I swung on to our freshwater loch to see if the heron’s mate was fishing the margin. It wasn’t a heron that was fishing the loch. Amazingly, right in front of the house, an otter was happily chasing something around the bottom of the loch, appearing occasionally before diving and then reappearing at the end of a trail of bubbles. We watched it for fifteen minute before going back to our porridge.

The wind has now gone round to the south, so maybe the geese will stay with us for a little while longer. I hope the otter stays in our loch for even longer.

The otter is such an enigmatic species. In the 1960s it wasn’t an enigma – it was just rare, driven from most of its lowland haunts by the pernicious effects of organophosphate pesticides at the top of the food chain. At the time Scotland, and in particular the Hebrides, became one of the places where the population remained at prewar levels. They were also easier to see as they were both confiding and tended to stick to very open habitats.

Following the ban on the worst of the pesticides, otter numbers have taken forty years to recover, but they can now be found in every county in the UK. Not that you would know unless you are extremely lucky – they seem to have the uncanny ability to slink away in the most unbelievable way. Their ability to hide makes me think that you only really see an otter, when the otter wants you to see it. I have had the great joy to fish with otters quite a few times – they always seem indifferent to my presence, until I cross some invisible line and they decide that is enough and they simply disappear.

An otter is also quite a large animal to just simply disappear. Forget the idea that it is just a rather large stoat, most otters are impressively big, especially the male dog otters. This was driven home to me when we were on a walk over to Roisinis, where Bonny Prince Charlie had waited patiently for Flora MacDonald to appear with his sex change disguise before she had to row him over to Skye (thankfully not on her own). Two archaeologists appeared saying that they had just seen an otter that was bigger than the border collie sized dog that they had with them. So think labrador size and you’ll have the right idea. This is the other problem with otters – people are always appearing saying did you just see the otter. Otter, where? They will point in a general direction and lo and behold another otter has pressed the hyperspace button and completely disappeared.

In North Uist, there are otters everywhere, or should I say signs of otters everywhere. Otter prints, with telltale tail mark and their lopping double paw impression are on the beaches. You can find otter roads leading off the beaches onto the machair, usually heading for a freshwater loch where they wash off the saltwater and thus restore their fur to sleak and insulating cleanliness. Otter scats, are all over the place, not just on preferred areas demarcating their territory. Otters are just everywhere. Even around the house, with a holt in the loch and a trail leading down to the tidal loch, where Kate disturbed one whilst I was away.

So I had been waiting for an otter to decide to put in an appearance. As usual for me, I needed to have a fishing rod in hand to prove I was a fisherman for the supreme fisherman to allow a view.

A short walk across the soft sand of Geirran Mill and hidden behind a small promontory is one of the largest sea pools on the island. Standing at the top willing a fish to put in appearance to raise our hopes after a rather dour season so far, a large head appeared about halfway down. So large that my immediate impression was seal – even I was lulled into a false sense of perspective. A sublime, rippleless dive was followed by the appearance of a long, thick tail – that otter is the size of a seal. Forget labrador size, readjust the scale. This otter was huge. And quite unperturbed. It looked at me the next time it surfaced and then went back to fishing. Later I was to discover that the place it was fishing was rammed with small pollack, but I like to think that it was after the tastier sea trout that would occasionally launch themselves out of the water in a just you try and catch me aerobatic display. The otter just kept surfacing and diving, occasionally looking over to see if I was going to fish or not. Finally it simply bobbed on the surface looking at me, swam towards me and out on to the beach, shook itself dry and scamped towards me, like a lithe, four footed seal. It really was a king-sized otter. It scampered behind a boulder and completely disappeared. How do they do that?

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.