Nigel's Nature

 Sunny spells, light westerly, low tide 3.09pm Disturbance was the unwelcome theme of this visit. Upheavals to the beach were immediately obvious when I arrived. Judging by the wide deep tracks, someone had brought heavy machinery to take away a lot of the accumulated heaps of seaweed from the tideline. And in the process, they also uprooted pioneer plants, such as Sea Rocket and Common Orache that were beginning to colonize the sand, and disturbed the naturally stratified deposits beneath, doing untold damage to the whole foreshore ecosystem. While it may be laudable in principle to make use of fertilizer that is not derived from fossil fuels, any net gain is rather undermined if you trash the environment while you do it. To add insult to injury, some narrower tracks suggested that more joy-riding had also happened, although by motorbike this time instead of the 4x4 that is still stranded mid-channel like a metal hippo. Indeed the new tracks passed by that flooded wreck and cont...

 My attempt to see the American Golden Plover, found recently at West Freugh, was unsuccessful due to a hunting Peregrine. The juvenile AGP has been associating with a flock of about 500 European Golden Plovers in a muddy field to the east of the M.O.D. airfield. To pick it out from among its congeners, you need the flock to remain on the ground long enough to spot a slightly smaller bird with pale greyish plumage, rather than golden. However, on this occasion, the birds were flighty and spent a lot of time airborne. When some 50 or so did settle, I got my scope onto them and almost did a jig of triumph. There indeed was a smaller paler greyish bird. But hang on a minute, there were in fact four of them. Something not right here! I looked more carefully and zoomed in a bit to discover the quartet were actually Knot. There were also some even smaller Dunlin scurrying about. Before I could continue scanning for the AGP, the whole lot took off once more, as did the plentiful Lapwing a...