Nigel's Nature

 It was Mayday and the warmest day of the year so far, in my neck of the woods at least. On this occasion, the woods were a classic Atlantic oak woodland that cloaks a west-facing slope above the river Cree. Hence its name: the Wood of Cree! An RSPB reserve, it is famed for a suite of migrant songbirds that favour this habitat. I headed up the track from the main car-park and found myself among the trees in magical afternoon light. Swathes of bluebells were in flower, although not quite at their peak. Clumps of Stitchwort, Wood Anemone and Lesser Celandine added splashes of white and yellow. A verdant shag-pile of moss carpeted much of the ground, turning stumps, boulders, and fallen logs into amorphous hummocks. It takes plenty of rain to support such fecundity but this day was dry and sunny. The vivid green of freshly unfurled leaves highlighted the understorey of hazel and hawthorn with deeper pools of evergreen where thickets of holly grew. Above, the oaks were still bare, risi...

 When I lived in Bedfordshire, an occasional challenge was picking out the Scaup among a flock of Tufted Ducks. At Loch Ryan in Wigtownshire, I had the opposite challenge: picking out the Tufties among the Scaup! This was back in February when several hundred of the latter were wintering at this site and one day a couple of female Tufties appeared. The Scaup are mostly gone now in mid-April.

 A calm day at last gave reasonable viewing conditions here. Winds with an easterly component had persisted for more than a week, producing choppy water across the loch and a bitter chill. Today the tide was high mid-afternoon, so my focus was on waterfowl and seabirds rather than waders. Goldeneye were notable off Balyett/Innermessan, in the south-east corner, with a minimum estimate of 30. Other duck included the usual suspects of Wigeon, Scaup, Red-breasted Merganser, Common Scoter and Eider. Numbers of the former two species have dwindled recently from several hundred earlier in the year. A loose group of seven Red-throated Divers   were quite distant, but their pale necks stood out in the overcast light. Amongst them, a single Great Northern revealed itself by the typical horizontal cast of its heavy bill, compared to the more slender appendage of its congener held at an upward tilt. A few Slavonian Grebe were about, still in winter plumage, unlike the Great Crested who...

 Despite tricky conditions, I finally caught up with some of the Greenland White-fronted Geese that winter around the airfield, after several failed attempts in recent weeks. It was mercifully dry with sunny spells but a very strong and bitterly cold south-easterly wind made things decidedly uncomfortable outside the car. My afternoon visit began as usual at the flooded fields north-east of the runways. A pair of Shelduck and a small flock of Golden Plover were present. Nearby I found a flock of Pink-footed Geese, the first of many. These latter birds were very flighty, disturbed no doubt by all the muck-spreading that was going on. Tractors pulling trailers of slurry buzzed about constantly as they spread their toxic sludge over the fields. At times the air was full of skeins making their distinctive ang-ank calls. A rough estimate came to 5,000, but no sign of White-fronts among them. Local experts say the two species tend not to flock together, in this area at least. I checked ...

 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...

 Rain clouds gathering from the east on a chilly breeze, brief glimpses of the sun. The tide was at its lowest ebb when I arrived at 2.40pm. I headed upstream first as no dog-walkers were visible in that direction. As usual, several Redshank tiptoed enthusiastically on the riverine mud as they pecked at food items, while a single diminutive Dunlin scampered about among them. More redshank were in the shallows, along with a couple of Greenshank and Little Egrets. Some Curlew used their longer legs and bills to hunt in deeper water, where a few Red-breasted Mergansers waited for the current to reverse and bring them some fish from the open sea. A small flock of starling rose from the strandline where heaps of decaying seaweed grow ever larger each time I visit. There were smaller birds with them, about 15 of which were Greenfinches. When three others alighted on a fence I could see they were Twite. This is a scarce but regular species along the Wigtownshire coast outside the bree...