Natural highs and lows

It is said that whilst on holiday there's the chance to do things differently, maybe staying up late and sleeping all morning, or skydiving, or eating and drinking oneself into an absolute stupor. We may have had the odd lie-in, and the occasional meal out, but the one thing we had less of on holiday was sky. No, we didn't go caving or exploring a nuclear bunker, our 'different' is habitat, rather than habit. At home, there are not, as yet, any trees in our garden, so the views are quite unrestricted, less for buildings and neighbours' planting. Consequently, the birds we see in, or from, our garden are not the usual garden birds. In fact, as I've been typing this paragraph, a Great Skua flew by, pursued by an irate Curlew. So our holiday indulgence is trees, and if possible a river. The cottage we were staying in is very much in the category of 'can't see the wood for the trees', mainly Scots Pine and Birch, and the birdage is so very different from...

During the previous blogpost I covered the mammalian part of the trip to Hoy, so today we will concentrate on other things seen on the walk last weekend. It seems longer ago than that, mind, as the day's warm sunshine has been replaced by more wintry weather. Indeed, later today, we're attempting a beach clean for Bag the Bruck in winds approaching gale force. But I digress. This particular Hoy trip was to be the first from our new home without using a car, for now we can walk down the hill to the harbour in Stromness and catch the foot ferry across to Moaness in Hoy. In a foreshadowing of the wonderful day ahead, as we pottered down Hillside Road, Blu the macaw suddenly shot out in front of us from behind some houses, before being chased homeward by a confused gull. At the pier, we met up with other folk joining the Orkney Field Club walk and boarded the mv Graemsay bound for Hoy. The crossing, in bright sunshine, gave us the chance to watch auks and Gannets who are returning ...

For me, a keenly-anticipated holiday can have a bittersweet moment as it becomes a reality. Although I am always ready for some downtime, travelling doesn't usually fill me with the same sense of gladness.  This year, my grumpiness was mitigated to obscurity by circumventing a ludicrously early start and treating the rest of the day as continuous birdwatching. We booked B+B on the mv Hamnavoe, so spent the first night of our holiday berthed in Stromness harbour, which meant that we didn't have to be up at stupid o'clock to pack the car and drive to the ferry. It also allowed me the opportunity to reprise a motif from a previous blog. Although there wasn't a kitchen sink or a pen involved, I woul d like to think that Dodie Smith would've approved. After a smooth crossing of the Pentland Firth, we set off from Scrabster, on the north coast of Caithness, at a leisurely pace, and turning west, not east like the majority of our shipmates. Just before Melvich, we took a t...

Maybe a bit too much alliteration in that title?  Anyway, it does lead us nicely into today's topic. Last Saturday, a week of beach cleans began in Orkney, the Bag the Bruck campaign ('bruck' being the Orkney dialect word for rubbish). The Orkney Field Club chose Orphir Bay as their designated bit of shore, with folk from peedie bairns to sprightly grandparents turning out to help remove some of the plastic pollution which has been gathering these past few pandemic years. In a couple of hours, we had amassed twenty or so bin bags full of bruck and lugged them from the beach to a designated pick-up point for the local council to collect. So focussed was I upon my wombling duties that I forgot to take any photos, but the bulk of the plastic waste was rope, string and creel gubbins. D ue to oceanic currents,   some of the detritus will have come from the other side of the Atlantic, but a fair proportion is likely to be from fish farming and creel fishing in Scapa Flow itself. ...