Monthly Archives: July 2018

Eye to eye with nature

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It’s just past mid-July but driving down the wooded track under heavy cloud cover the scene has a hint of autumn. The bracken is drying and turning brown and the leaves are fading on the trees. These, however, are not the signs of an early changing season but the result of the ongoing drought affecting the country. The heat, strong sun and lack of rain over the last few months has starved the Glaslyn Valley of water and the usual damp woodland is parched dry. I stop before I leave the cover behind as I spot a fox sauntering across on of the track-side meadow. The grass is freshly cut into rows and it picks its way along the edge, stopping to catch eyes with me before purposely heading off into a neighbouring field.

Passing through the gates and under the oak tree by the caravan, I wander through the long grass down to the river. As I approach the bridge there’s a high pitched whistle and a darting away but the kingfisher soon returns and I meet eyes with nature again but this time only a couple of metres away. The moment lasts a second or two before it shoots off along the banks, round the bend and out of sight. The river itself has fallen even further than my last visit with rocks now peeping up above the slow and low trickle of the water, the flow much narrower than before.

As I head back to the caravan, my legs damp from drops on the grass from a rare shower, the field is bouncing with young life. In amongst the bushes are countless fledgling great, blue and coal tits with a few chaffinches too. The are chattering loudly as they flit between cover and squabble on the bird feeders hanging from the trees. There’s a family of woodpeckers, initially frightened off when the see me but they too return to feed on peanuts.

At the top of the fir tree, the nest is emptier than it was, I see only one chick when I first look and it soon momentarily disappears from sight. Not a first fledgling flight but its second, following on from his sisters’ the previous days. He soon returns and over the following hours he and the other chicks come and go, taking both short and longer flights, visiting the nest, perch and nearby trees, practicing their art while waiting for another fish to sustain their energies.

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The chicks seem to have grown so quickly this year, more than usual. They’ve gone from tiny hatchlings to fledglings in the blink of an eye. Maybe the amazing weather has saved them energy that usually keeps them warm or perhaps the fishing has been easier with the lower water levels – but they really do seem to have burst into their full-sized selves in no time at all.

With the cloud cover for much of my shift, it was nowhere near as hot as my shift a three weeks ago and I was glad I brought a jumper with me. It wasn’t cold but even average summer temperatures could seem a touch chilly compared to the recent heat.

Despite the lack of rain, bar a momentary shower, the area along the banks of the river still looks quite lush, albeit with a brown tinge. The grass has grown long and there are plenty of flowers still dotted about. However, there’s one flower I found that I didn’t welcome catching my eye. I’m not sure whether I’ve seen it here before, at the protection site, but the Himalayan Balsam isn’t a plant I want to see appearing along the banks of the river. Over the last few years, I’ve spent many days clearing this invasive species from other riversides. Some days it’s seemed like a losing battle; after spending hours pulling up the plants, there was always so much more to do as the lack of effort in previous years had allowed it to prosper and take over. Perhaps this is an opportunity for some practical conservation tasks in the Glaslyn Valley on top of the osprey work, bringing the community together to help prevent the Balsam from taking over like it has so much elsewhere. It would be desperately sad to see the lovely waterways of this corner of Wales dominated by a plant that shouldn’t be here.

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Himalayan Balsam

The ospreys are real success story in the Glaslyn Valley and a sign of what can be achieved by people coming together to help wildlife but the Balsam is just another sign of there being so much more to do to protect, conserve, restore and enhance our environment. It’s easy to get depressed about such things, not helped by constant news of climate change and politics, and their real or looming affects on nature and the environment, but every step in the right direction counts, no matter how small.

A bee day

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I spent a bit of this afternoon looking a the smaller wildlife in my back garden, well bees really. I don’t have many flowering plants in my garden but the lavender bushes are in full bloom at the moment and the bees are going mad for them.

This was the first time I’ve tried a spot of bee IDing and I found four different species feeding on the plants; common carder, honey, buff-tailed bumble and red-tailed bumble. The shot below is a common carder (I think)…

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Orkney: The wildlife

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One of the main reasons I went to Orkney was to see the wildlife and I wasn’t disappointed. I heard a long time ago how the Northern Isles are pretty spectacular for birdlife and they truly are; with the breeding season well underway, the sheer quantity of birds is simply breathtaking.

The greatest spectacle is all around as you travel through the islands in the early summer. The quantity of breeding waders is like nothing I have seen anyway else in the UK. It seems as if every field has its own resident pair of curlew and their calls ring out constantly. I loved going to sleep and waking up to those spiritful cries and, for me, there are fewer more evocative sounds of wild Britain. There are other waders, however, with oystercatchers seemingly as plentiful, constantly in a state of alarm or sheer panic, and redshanks, golden plover and lapwing are in good numbers too. I also saw some migrants still on their way north including lovely summer plumage dunlin, black-tailed godwit and sanderling.

The other big spectacle are the seabird cliffs, of which there are many and on a number of the islands. One my first day I had a good walk around Mull Head Nature Reserve on the north-east corner of the Deerness Peninsula. All along the coastal cliffs there are good numbers of guillemots (common and black), razorbills, fulmar and shags. I thought I heard the calls of kittiwakes there too but I believe their numbers reduced significantly at this site. This was also where I had my first head-to-head meeting with bonxies; the infamous harassing great skuas.

Out on Westray are the greatest seabird cliffs in the archipelago, at the RSPB’s Noup Head reserve. The huge towering cliffs have all the birds listed above but it is also Orkney’s only gannetry. This was the first gannetry I’ve seen and I spent a lovely lunchtime watching these iconic birds noisily come and go beneath me.

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One really interesting observation was the location of fulmar nests on some of the more remote locations. I’m used to seeing fulmar, like those on my favourite island, Ramsey, nesting high up on cliffs. On Sanday, however, I found them nesting at the back of beaches under the first tussocks of grass beyond the sand; surely a sign of the lack of predators and human interference.

I also spent a while at a puffin colony on Westray trying to get some shots of these most-photogenic of birds and I wasn’t disappointed…

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Elsewhere away from the cliffs there are good chances of seeing terns, and I had views, and close passes, of both arctic and little terns. There are arctic terns in a number of spots in Orkney but little terns can only be found breeding by the fourth Churchill Barrier between Barray and North Ronaldsay. This was the first time I’ve seen these lovely little birds but I made sure I didn’t approach too close to their small breeding colony.

I was also hoping to see a few birds of prey and I took two great memories from Orkney and both came from within a few hundred metres of each other on the southern island of Hoy. I had my first ever (albeit distant) view of a white-tailed eagle chick on a nest, which also happened to be the first to hatch in Orkney in over 140 years. Just a short distance away as I was walking down the public road back to the foot ferry at Moaness, I saw a pair of hen harrier mobbing a bonxie. As the intruder moved away, the male harrier spotted me and came over to check me out and move me on as I continued on my way. Normally, getting this close to a pair of hen harriers would be seen as interfering with them but there was little I could do given this was the only road in northern Hoy and there were plenty of other pedestrians and cyclists using that route.

Over the course of my stay on Orkney, I recorded 71 species of bird, which isn’t a bad total. This included a number of other northern specialities including red-throated diver, hooded crow, eider, twite and arctic skua. The relative of the bonxie, arctic skuas are a slimmer and more falcon-like bird and much less of a general menace, in fact they’re rather a nice looking bird.

I wasn’t expecting to see great numbers of hirundines but I saw good numbers of swallow and sand martin, as well as the unrelated swift. I don’t recall ever seeing so many sand martins and came across two nice sized colonies in beach-side sand walls.

There is, however, a sad element of a visit to Orkney and that is concerned with the changes in seabird populations. Only the week before I was reading in a national newspaper how numbers of many seabird species have plummeted over recent decades in the islands all around Scotland, probably as a result of losses in their food supply through over-fishing and climate change. It might be that my visit to Orkney was a last chance to see large numbers of cliff-nesting seabirds as, if their numbers continue to decline, there may not be many left when I next manage a visit to this lovely bird-rich group of islands.

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On my first day, I had an evening tour with Tim Dean, a local expert on all things Orkney wildlife including birds and plants. This really set me up for the week and he told me of some great locations to go looking for wildlife. He also introduced me to the only mammal I saw on the trip, a Cuvier’s beaked whale. Unfortunately, it had been washed up on the beach at Marwick Bay and had been deceased for quite a while. I have to say that Tim was one of the best local wildlife guides I’ve had a trip with in the UK and he really put in great effort before and during the trip to ensure I saw what I wanted. His contact details can be found here and I would certainly recommend him.

Orkney: Scapa Flow

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Scapa Flow is such an evocative name, one that conjures up visions of freezing, dark and windswept waters surrounded on all sides by bleak, cold, low lying islands. It brings visions of sunken ships in the deep and rusting hulks in the shallows and of waves crashing against rocky shorelines battered by storms. I have imagined it as a deserted place, as a place of the past, of former glories, once at the centre of a time but now a place more of history than the present. 

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With the history I know, it has sparked an interest in me for some time and it is one of the main  reasons why I wanted to visit Orkney. Across most of the UK there is little evidence of the two world wars, with the exception of fighter and bomber airbases and some remaining coastal defences but Orkney is one of the best places to see this part of our history in the flesh (well concrete and metal).

Scapa Flow is one of the greatest natural anchorages in the world and being so far from the European mainland, it was the obvious choice to be the home of the Royal Navy in both world wars. Some major events happened at Scapa Flow with the two most infamous being the scuttling of the German fleet in 1918 when it had been surrendered at the end of the war and the sinking of HMS Royal Oak by a German submarine in October 1939 with the loss of 833 men. There is little visible evidence of these two events now but on the islands surrounding Scapa Flow there is so much more to still be seen, left over relics of both wars. 

The largest remains from Orkney’s wartime past are the Churchill Barriers, the manmade causeways built at the beginning of the Second World War to reduce the number of navigable entrances into Scapa Flow. They now form the roads that link Orkney Mainland to a string of islands to the south east; Lamb Holm, Glims Holm, Barray and South Ronaldsay. Originally, block ships had been sunk in the narrows between the islands, some can still be seen, but at the beginning of the Second World War, many had fallen apart and this allowed the submarine to enter Scapa Flow and sink the Royal Oak. On the orders of Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, permanent concrete causeways were built, with roadways laid on top.

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During both wars, other major defences were built on the land surrounding the harbour with gun positions, watch towers and search light positions built along with the accommodation for the troops operating them. Much of these defences are still evident all around Scapa Flow itself as well as on other islands. There is also evidence of a number of airfields built to protect the harbour and islands from areal attack.

On one of the days I was in Orkney I visited Hoxa Head on South Ronaldsay where there still stands much of what was one of the main defensive positions; this one protecting the southern entrance into Scapa Flow. There are remnants of both First and Second World War defences with the latter being very well preserved. There is a good walk around the Headland which takes in all of the former military site and it’s well worth going. The photos below hopefully put across the stark beauty of the place and the sense of history.

Just to the north of Hoxa Head is the Italian Chapel on Lamb Holm. This was built by Italian prisoners of war who converted two Nissen huts into their own place or worship. The Italian’s were held on an airfield and during their time in Orkney were used as labour to build the Churchill Barriers.

Elsewhere in the area it is possible to see more evidence of the Orkney’s nautical history.  With its numerous islands and rocks, and challenging weather, Orkney is the last resting place of many unfortunate ships. One such wreck can be found on the east coast of North Ronaldsay, just south of Grim Ness Head. The Irene, a Liberian-registered cargo ship, ran aground on the night of 17th March 1969 after drifting inland in a storm. All of her crew were rescued from the shore but in trying to provide assistance, heading to the wrong location, the Longhope Lifeboat, TGB, capsized with the loss of all eight of her own crew. There is still a lot of evidence of the Irene on the shoreline with the much much of her hull gone but her boilers left behind alongside other major structures. 

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Orkney has its history in plain sight and much of its 20th Century military and nautical history is quite spectacular and set in stunning locations. In addition, like many of the Scottish islands, Orkney also has a huge range of sites from history well before the 20th Century and while I visited some, there is still so much more for me to see. To learn more, Stromness Museum is also well worth a visit.

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