Winter visitors

Winter has come at least in part to the village. The moors are covered with a dusting of snow and it has turned cold enough to bring the blackcap to the bird feeders. Loth got a surprise when a sparrow hawk, so intent on snatching a meal from the garden birds clustering round the peanuts that it didn't swerve in time, clattered into one of the kitchen windows. leaving a ghostly silhouette of outspread wings on the glass.

The next day I saw a kestrel hunting like a sparrow hawk. Instead of hovering in the freezing wind, it was skimming along in the lea of a drystone dyke no doubt looking for voles or mice in much the same way as a sparrow hawk patrols the hedgerows for unwary tits and sparrows. 

Greylags

The wee lochan beneath the Lowrie Knowes - the Hillocks of the Fox in auld Scots - has its usual quota of winter visitors. There were whooper swans and grey lag geese along with a small flock of wigeon paddling around in the decreasing circle of open water as the ice crept across the surface.

Whoopers, wigeon and coots  sharing the small patch of open water

There seem to be an increased number of snipe and jack snipe presumably due to winter migrants but no sign of the large flocks of fieldfares and redwings that were a feature of previous winters, possibly due to the enthusiastic tidying up of the local hedgerows with scarcely a haw or a berry left on the clipped bushes.

Along the sea shore, a golden eye and a diver were seen fishing among the kittiwakes and the shags, The diver was too far out and too elusive to be seen accurately but it might have been a red throated diver. It looked smaller than our usual resident, the great northern.

All in all, its nice when old friends call back.

...winter and rough weather

Sunrise on the winter solstice !

The winter solstice was a washout. Sunrise over the sea looked like matt paint shade card...for shades of blue- grey.

The view to the horizon looked like Rothko painting

 There was a full moon on Christmas Eve and Aurora Borealis on Hogmanay but apart from these highlights it has been an unremittingly dreich month.

Luckily the downpours held off for the New year's day dip in the sea, a custom inaugurated by a few of us some years..come to think of it, some decades... ago which has grown in popularity.

Flooding hasn't been the problem here possibly because the winds have been from the south west. It is when the wind is easterly that the sea unleashes its full fury on the sea wall

The harbour was filled with foamy spume which covered boats and gear and blew over the quayside.

The relatively mild winter has kept the more unusual visitors away from the bird feeder, the woodpecker and nuthatch have only paid the briefest of visits and the long-tailed tits, goldfinches and black-caps haven't been seen. We are hoping it is the availability of food in the countryside that is allowing them to stay away. They only visit in severe weather giving the garden birds, the tits, sparrows, robins and wrens the run of the feeders when they can find food else where. The blackies have pecked their way through all the windfall apples from the eating varieties and are now started on the cookers. Presumably, they prefer the former for the higher sugar content but they obviously have a sweet tooth just like us or at least a sweet beak. One shouldn't attribute such characteristics to wild creatures but they do always go for the eaters first!

Strange weather, seasons out of kilter, makes for odd happenings. The daffodils we planted along the verges to make a golden gateway to the village are starting to bloom, The aconites are in flower at the same time as the Lenten roses. The pot marigolds are showing their sunny faces alongside the winter flowering jasmine...the only sun we've see this year.

The world seems topsy-turvy and that's without the elections and referenda to come this year.

2016 looks to be an interesting year.

There is an old curse... May you live in interesting times !

We shall see.