The birds distract me

While I sit here wondering how to begin recording all that happened last week I’m distracted by the most beautiful thing fluttering about in a Scots pine. It’s a great tit – yellow, blue, black and white all at once – and there it is again! Actually it’s a blue tit, not a great tit, as my RSPB pocket guide to British Birds shows. The pocket guide also says, ‘It’s a very lucky person who sees a golden eagle well at close range.’ Well, I saw a golden eagle very well, at close range, on the Isle of Skye. We were on our way to Kilt Rock, just past the Old Man of Storr, when Tony spotted it flying along a line of tree-tops. It was unmistakably a golden eagle by its size and coloration, and we viewed it perfectly through the bins till it took off with slow, powerful wingbeats before gliding out of sight. I was also lucky to see the lovely lapwing, visiting for the summer near a Celtic graveyard close to where we wild-camped on the sea loch on Skye. The lapwing has such an exquisite crest and coloration that I thought it ought to have a qualifying name like the African lapwings do. But just a plain-named lapwing it was, and fairly common in Scotland. Then there was the redshank, with its bright red legs and red bill fading to black, on a kind of estuary in Scourie where we saw a very bonnie sundown. The oystercatchers are as striking as the African ones are and their call comfortingly familiar. My best sighting of them was on the salmon-pink sand of beautiful Applecross beach. Oh and I hadn’t seen ptarmigan before, high up on a Corbett in Torridon being snowed on without complaint. Then there was Handa Island… where thousands and thousands of fulmars, guillemots and razorbills nest on magnificent sea stacks and cliffs 100 metres high. There were great skuas too and although the puffins hadn’t arrived yet, the eider ducks were there, protected from eiderdown fate. And did I mention the red-breasted mergansers at Lochinver, the ringed plovers at Achnahaird, the curlew and sandpipers near Achiltibuie, the wheatears in summer plumage at Ardveck Castle? I’ll stop. I still haven’t started on last week’s activities.