Cottage Holidays throughout Scotland

To many people the first summer bird migrants of the year to look out for in the Highlands are the  ospreys or the swallows but there is another bird that is also early but often overlooked.  This is the wheatear that is not much larger than a robin.   Its most conspicuous identification feature is when it flies as the large areas of white feathers on the rump and upper tail contrasts with the black T shape of feathers on the tail.  The male has black cheeks with a white stripe over the eye and across the forehead.   The wings are black and when folded contrast with the blue grey feathers of the back.   The female, as shown in the photograph,  is duller and sandy brown with a less marked face and browner wings.  The photograph was taken in a stony field in Strathdearn on the side of the River Findhorn in early   March this year.

Wheatears are often overlooked as they haunt  rocky and stony places associated with unimproved grassland or moorland.  They rarely fly and feed on the ground where they are restless and always seem to be on the move in short runs and they have the habit of sitting, upright, on rocks and posts.   Their food is mainly taken on the ground and generally consists of various insects including moths, beetles and  flies but they will also take small snails and  worms.  They will also take, surprisingly, the berries of blackberry, rowan and elder.   One unusual feature of the wheatear is that it nests either in holes and crevice in walls or stony areas or sometimes underground and old rabbit burrows are often used.

Some of the early wheatears to arrive in Spring in the Highlands are, incredibly, only part of their way from their wintering grounds in Africa.  These are the slightly larger,   bolder coloured birds that are known as Greenland wheatears.  They are a race of the wheatears we see in the Highlands and they breed, as the name suggests, in Greenland.    As for the Scottish birds there are estimated to be  around 60,000 pairs that breed.  They are found in most parts of the Highlands and Islands including the Western Isles and the Northern Isles and can be found on even the remotest of islands such as North Rona and St. Kilda.  The number of breeding pairs appear stable but there is the worry that they had gone from some  areas that have been taken for afforestation and agricultural changes.   As with many other birds one constant threat is the hunting along its migration routes.   Some countries still eat them despite their small size and there they are considered a delicacy. Even in Britain they were at one time  trapped in considerable numbers for eating.   Charles St. John who wandered the Highlands in the 1800s wrote “I used to be adept at catching them in horsehair nooses as we used to consider them particularly good eating”.

In the Highlands the wheatear has long been associated with myths and folk lore.  They were considered to be unlucky because of their supposed connections with the Devil and, for some unknown reason, toads. Even to hear the bird was a sign of bad luck especially if it was perched on a stone, the bird’s common habit.    Not surprising then it has around twenty Scots names and three Gaelic names, the  commonest  being Clacharan which is shared with the stonechat meaning trembling one.      At one time, before migration was understood, it was thought that  the birds simply stayed underground for the winter months just as the swallow was believed to have hibernated under water.

Migration covers a wide variety of activities in wildlife in the Highlands including  in and around Inverness.  The  publicity last year of EJ, the ringed and named osprey at Loch Garten,  caused quite a stir as  once again it had returned to its nest site after the long haul of a few thousand miles to and from Africa.  Later this spring the swifts will be screaming  around their nest sites in Inverness and two of the colonies are, aptly, at the old Scottish Natural Heritage  Offices at Culduthel Road and Ardconnell Terrace.  On a different level the grey wagtails will  return to their nest sites along rivers and burns after many had move south, perhaps only a few miles,  or west to get away from the winter weather.   Swallows and house martins will soon be back and the first of this family will almost certainly be the sand martins that nest in banks of rivers and burns.

Another form of migration, often called movements as they are much shorter, involves one of the more enigmatic animals of the Highlands namely the common toad.   The migration of the toads, sometimes covering over a mile, started at the  end of the breeding season last summer.  The toads will have moved away from their sites in lochs, lochans and ponds.  Unlike the common frog they cannot absorb enough oxygen through their skin to stay submerged in  the water for any length of time.  They move out and find crevices in stones, in the ground or under such things as logs and when the  winter comes they hibernate there.  Most of them will move to the same area so that large assemblies can gather.   The weather, including cold and length of days, triggers them off and in the right conditions in the spring they may migrate over a   period of hours.

This is where many of us will  see  them in and around Inverness as their route often takes them across roads.  In the next few  weeks it will not uncommon to see them moving across a  road under cover of darkness, sometimes even during the day.  If large numbers are involved over short periods many  can be killed by vehicles in even one night.   Predators will also capitalise on this abundance of food from buzzards to crows and otters to pine martens.   In the urge to mate and fertilise the eggs as they emerge from the female toad there is often a frenzy of activity.  Some more amorous males will climb on the back of a female as she is en route to the pond and hitch a ride the rest of the way.  Once in the water there is another problem as  sometimes so many males attend a single female that a large ball of toads may form.  This takes place in the water and the unfortunate female may  drown as she cannot get enough air.

Such was the case with the toads in the photograph that was taken last year on the sides of Loch Farr, just south of Inverness. This was in the shallows near the boathouse.  It was adjacent to the road between Farr and Garbole and the  colony may well be the largest anywhere in the Highlands.  Reference books often say that toads generally breed in large, deep water bodies but this is not always the case.  For example near Ardersier there is a fire pond on the edge of a forestry  plantation. It only measures a few metres across and yet there is a colony of toads there that often goes completely un-noticed. There are two roads running immediately adjacent to the pond but there are few road casualties as the traffic is sparse.

Last week I sat in the spacious and comfortable hide on the south shore of Udale Bay in the Cromarty Firth and thought how fortunate we are that there are so many such hides  in the Highlands.  They are mainly bird watching hides although there is always the chance of seeing other wildlife.  There are also hides for watching otters such as the one on Skye and one on Speyside for watching badgers.  Some  of the bird watching hides are thanks to the RSPB such as the ones at Loch Ruthven famed for its Slavonian grebes and  Nigg Bay for its wildfowl and waders.  For many the most outstanding  one  is  at Loch Garten where the ospreys attract so much attention.

I was at the opening ceremony of the hide at Udale Bay in August 1993 and it is one of my favourites because at the right stage of tides it gives, at this time of the year, superb views of waders and wildfowl.  In the early days of being a reserve there were problems with wildfowlers but then a voluntary exclusion zone was agreed.  This was between the RSPB and the wildfowling organisations and clubs and full marks to all concerned that the problems were overcome.  The boundaries of the zone are marked with posts that have two yellow bands.  At one time, for very many years, it was a National Nature Reserve but according to my list this  no longer applies.

For my visit I had judged the tide all wrong as it is best when the tide is making or ebbing and the birds anxious to feed.  The tide was high and full but there were compensations as the majority of the waders and wildfowl were packed onto a small area of saltmarsh and wet grassland to the left of the hide.    The nearest birds were on open water and on the edge of the freshwater that flowed past the hide.  They were  eight  mute swans and two of them had cygnets with them that would have been hatched last summer and in all probability in the nearby area of reeds and sedges.   Looking at the number of adults and cygnets can give you an idea of the breeding success last summer but  you have to be careful with such analysis.  For example, what looked like adult swans with no cygnets were in fact  immature birds that would not have bred last year.  They lacked the orange beaks and had one or two brownish feathers.  This is not surprising as they do not breed until they are 3 or 4 years old.

There were so many waders packed together it was difficult to concentrate as there were lapwings, bar tailed godwits, oystercatchers, redshank, knot and curlew.  The ¬   ducks included teal, wigeon and  mallard.  What stole the show for me were the seven shelduck swimming on their own on some open water beyond  the other birds.   Shelduck are one of my favourite birds and their combination of colours is remarkable. What other bird has a combination of chestnut breast bands, blood red beak, pink legs offset by black “shoulders” and a bottle green head?  They look so aloof partly because of their size and upright stance.  How amazing that such   a large and colourful bird nests in burrows in the ground, often old rabbit burrows.  How do they survive with so many predators from  foxes to hooded crows and stoats to mink?   There are only around 1,750 breeding pairs of shelduck in Scotland and the 2008 Highland Bird Report classes them as “Uncommon breeder but scarce in north and west”.