The inconclusive experiment which formed the narrative for the previous post did eventually lead to a definite conclusion. That’s definite as in a ‘sort of, for now, all things considered…’ version of definite.
And, to be more accurate, two conclusions…
The first is that I’ve decided to go with the (Panasonic) TZ60, at least for the time being; more about that below. The second being that – beyond the occasional snap, or the odd group shot for those of a sociable disposition – I’m finding that walking and photography don’t really mix.
Photography can be a pretty selfish pastime, and asking a companion to hang around on a cold, wet day while you switch lenses, compose, select settings, focus, can feel more than a bit self-indulgent. Introduce a tripod into the mix and you could easily precipitate a divorce.
Anyway, to the TZ60…
It is undeniably a more ‘pocketable’ camera – not least because of the fully retractable lens – and that was always a primary consideration. It also has a viewfinder – a small one, admittedly, but useful nonetheless on those sunny days when the LCD can be difficult to read. The overall results in the comparison didn’t overwhelmingly favour either camera, which is borne out by the dead-heat in the trial.
It’s unlikely I’ll be using the camera at anywhere near its full (30x) zoom: the field of view narrows appreciably as the focal length is increased and I find obtaining sufficient steadiness for focussing simply too difficult. A fortuitously situated fencepost or wall will sometimes help with that, but I’m certainly not going to defeat the object of portability and weight saving by carrying a tripod. That decision was also made easier by the fact that I now rarely photograph much wildlife.
The plan is to shoot in both JPEG and RAW: the JPEGs hopefully to give a reasonable outcome for reference; the RAW files to allow the option of some post-processing. That should give me an incentive to persist with exploring the many functions mysteries of Adobe Lightroom.
The Panasonic battery was dead to begin with (that’s probably enough Dickens references for now). Fortunately it turned out to be reluctant rather than moribund and eventually the percentage charge crept beyond 50, which would be enough.
This post is about an experiment. Latterly I find myself either reluctant (certainly) or unable (quite possibly) to lug around the kind of weight I would once carry as routine; particularly so if any of that weight regularly spends the whole day in the pack, undisturbed. The one exception to that being drinking water on hot days, where I never mind erring on the side of caution.
If I’m going to carry binoculars – which is always the first preference – along with all of the other kit and clutter needed for a longish day, it has become increasingly apparent that I should be looking at the possibility of saving weight elsewhere. So I decided to start by considering the options when it came to lightening the load of camera gear.
One obvious solution would be to make use of the camera on my phone, but I really dislike touchscreens and cling to physical buttons, dials and things that go ‘click’, like some kind of polycarbonate comfort blanket. Hence, the experiment…
The comparison: two lightweight ‘pocket’ cameras – a Panasonic TZ60 and a Sony Alpha 5000 with Sony’s small 15-50mm kit lens. The latter only just qualifies as pocket size, being some 60% heavier and not having the Panasonic’s fully retractable lens. The TZ60 dates back a few years to the heyday of ‘superzoom’ compact and bridge cameras, with their promise of everything in a single, convenient package; it was a hand-me-down from my son when his tastes moved upmarket. The a5000 is the smallest of Sony’s interchangeable lens, mirrorless cameras and was picked up, scarcely used, from Ebay for just under £100.
The rules: Jpegs only, no RAW files, no editing; this is about what the camera’s hardware and processor can produce undoctored. Match the settings as closely as possible, point and shoot.
The settings: Everything shot in aperture priority mode, with apertures and focal lengths matched as closely as possible. So, for example, with the a5000 fully zoomed to 50mm, the Panasonic’s zoom was set to 2X as the nearest equivalent. Shutter speed and auto iso are as selected by the camera.
The pictures:
1). Taken from the high ground to the west of the Uath lochans (Inshriach): mostly mid ground and distance; not much foreground. I definitely think the Panasonic has done a better job here; possibly the texture in the background is slightly better with the Sony, but in all other aspects the TZ60 wins for me.
Taken with the Panasonic TZ60
Taken with the Sony a5000
2). Another shot from the high path above the Uath lochans: this was just an attempt to capture a flavour of the richness and complexity of the woodland vegetation. The Sony edges this one for me; the general richness of the greens and the feeling of damp undergrowth is much closer to my recollection on the day.
Panasonic TZ60
Sony a5000
3). Lochan Mor, sometimes known colloquially as ‘the lily lochan’ and situated about a kilometre north of Loch an Eilein. Not much in this one but on balance I think the result from the Panasonic represents the whole of the scene – foreground to background – a little better overall. That said, the very closest of the lily pads in the immediate foreground are sharper in the Sony image. Close.
Panasonic TZ60
Sony a5000
4). Loch Vaa, a stone’s throw from the A95 and the Highland Main Line, not much further from the A9 and surprisingly quiet and secluded. Again, little to choose from what is admittedly a pretty nondescript composition, but this time I think the Sony just edges it overall – mostly on the basis of separation and definition, plus a slightly better capture of the surface of the water. The flat, featureless sky, in both images, is a pretty accurate representation of how it appeared on the day.
Panasonic TZ60
Sony a5000
So, after all that we have a score draw, a Desmond! Was it therefore a waste of time, battery life and SD card capacity? Not entirely, although I was probably hoping for a clear-cut, conclusive outcome.
That said, I think I’ve come to a decision; more about that in the follow-up post.
About the cameras…
The TZ60 has an 18.1 mp sensor, an aperture range of f3.3 to f6.4, a 30x Leica zoom (28-840mm 35 mm equivalent), and weighs 240gms with battery and SD card
The a5000 has a 20.1 mp APS-C sensor, an aperture range of f3.5 to f22 and – paired with a Sony 16-50mm OSS lens (24-75mm APS equivalent) – weighs about 386gms including battery and SD card
Not that SD card capacity is ever much of an issue for me, but in general file sizes seem higher for the a5000, even if that isn’t always reflected in resolution.
It’s considerably better; just something to bear in mind when looking at the images.
It had taken us 5 years to return to Ardnamurchan; something not entirely of our making but, for all that, still too long. The images hopefully show at least some small part of what the area has to offer; the words are mostly about my ongoing struggles with shot selection, composition, and the sometimes comical interactions between Lightroom menus and a man of a certain age…
A quiet Loch Shiel from Acharacle jetty in late evening light; Beinn Resipol disappearing into cloud.
Ardnamurchan Point, surf just picking up!
Loch Sunart, viewed from the shoreline east of Resipole. Ideally I would have liked to get lower and have more of the trees outlined against the sky…
Camas an Lighe – sometimes known colloquially as The Singing Sands – near Gortenfern, Ardnamurchan
Looking across Kentra Bay from the track near Arivegaig.
Kentra Bay, Ardnamurchan, in fluctuating light.
Narrative…
Occasionally I’ve been guilty of congratulating myself on taking a decent photograph. The reality is that on most of those occasions the camera has done that – I just happened to be holding it at the time! Hence the desire to improve – not only the use of the camera, but also an exploration of the mystical world of editing (or ‘post processing’ as the professionals seem to prefer). Indications so far suggest that this is going to be a long haul…
About the images…
All of the images were shot as RAW files, then lightly edited: the objective being to get the closest representation of the scene as I recalled it, with minimal enhancement.
Mostly I’m shooting in aperture priority and sticking to the middle of the range (f10, f11 or similar) to give reasonable sharpness in the fore and middle grounds, and allowing the camera to select shutter speed and ISO. When occasionally shooting in manual mode I still rely on auto ISO, simply because I don’t have the skill to instinctively balance three separate settings.
Image 1 (Loch Shiel): Some increase in the temperature to bring out the gorse on the far shore. For this shot I used a Sony A5000 with the 18-105 G lens, zoomed to 42mm. I set the aperture at f11, the camera chose 1/80th – which seemed reasonable for the shot – and an ISO of 160.
Image 2 (Ardnamurchan Point): Same camera/lens combination as above; zoomed to 70mm, 1/200th @ f11, (Auto) ISO 100. Minimal editing in Lightroom: small correction to compensate for overexposure; temperature lowered slightly; blacks enhanced for the foreground.
Image 3 (Loch Sunart): Sony a5100 this time, still with the 18-105 lens; zoomed to 80mm; f11, 1/125th, auto iso (250). Just one adjustment to the blues, with a view to compensating for a slightly flat sky.
Image 4 (The Singing Sands): Sony a5100 again, with the 18-105 at maximum zoom; 1/200th at f11; iso 500. A bit of beach, some sky, some sea, a solitary tree clinging on in defiance of the hostile environs, minimal editing to just bring out the shadows in the rocks. The sky was mostly thin cloud and as flat as it looks in the shot.
Image 5 (Kentra Bay from near Arivegaig): Sony a5100+18-105G lens, zoomed to 60mm; 1/100th sec at f11; iso 125. Pretty much as shot, other than some slight enhancement to bring out the blue tones in the sky.
Image 6 (Kentra Bay): Kentra Bay, Ardtoe, Ardnamurchan, taken in fluctuating light. Sony A5100 with the 18-105G lens; 1/60th at f11; auto ISO chose ISO 100). Temperature increased slightly to ‘warm’ the sand and vegetation; highlights taken down to remove some glare.
Hiatus: noun [usually singular] a pause or break in continuity in a sequence or activity…
When it comes to blogging, there are – as is the case in many aspects of life – constraints involved when choosing a low-cost option: features, flexibility, enhancements and – should you keep at it for long enough – capacity.
In this case it was the media allocation, rather than the narrative content, which threatened to overspill the assigned space; particularly inconvenient as I had decided that as the interest in writing – which had been on the wane for some time – continued to further decline, any future posts would, in the main, be ones where the story was primarily told in pictures.
The convoluted history of this blog and its antecedents can be found on the backstory page; the page is intended primarily as an aide-mémoire to supplement my declining powers of recollection, but it’s there for anyone who wishes to read it.
Moving forward, the intention is to somehow break free of the hiatus and reignite the enthusiasm for adding new posts, if only sporadically. But the boredom with the writing seems unlikely to abate and I suspect that anything added from hereon in will be more about the pictures than the words. That being the case, the roll of links to other blogs and sites has been revamped and will include more pathways to the content of photographers (landscape mostly), including some who I have begun to follow via their websites and Youtube channels.
Truth is that, even on the bad weather days, I’m happier to be out with the camera than I am sat at the keyboard, agonising over the placement of a comma.
There; I could just have said that and eliminated the need for all of the convoluted buildup!
So, here we are, the longest day already depressingly imminent.
The year so far has been a chaotic whirlwind of caring duties; the seemingly endless repetition of those things generically known as ‘jobs’; outings and breaks hurriedly arranged (and therefore often inadequately prepared); rewilding bits of the garden while simultaneously unwilding others.
Forests; canals; some hills; Slimbridge multiple times to see the first arrivals of the Bewick swans and the final few stragglers prior to departure; Welney to observe the Whoopers gathering in the meadows, feasting on winter wheat before their long flight to Iceland and beyond; Mull a couple of weeks back, which needs to be done justice in a separate post sometime; a spring steam gala; a spring diesel gala; catching up on the news late in the day, realising it wasn’t ‘news’ at all, just more of the same…
And one photograph…
Taken on one of our local outings – a buzzard about to be mobbed by a couple of corvids. Rob was disappointed that the approaching jackdaws were out of focus, but I pointed out that when a moving object is shot at 1/640th of a second and 400mm* he was probably being a little too self-critical.
* I only know this because Adobe Lightroom detects all of this information from the jpeg or raw file and displays it alongside the image, which hasn’t been edited by the way. Mostly we use Lightroom for its cataloguing capabilities; editing is a longer, steeper, learning curve.
October followed September, which seems to be the way of things, and the SVR diesel gala was upon us – blue/grey smoke where a couple of weeks previously there had been white steam. Listening to the thrum of the Maybach diesels, the whistle and growl of the English Electrics, is a nostalgic experience. It is also an inescapable reminder that things you are old enough to remember as new technology are already deep into their years of preservation.
“Youth calls to age across the tired years: ‘What have you found,’ he cries, ‘what have you sought?'”
Absolutely, Dylan (Thomas, that is, not Bob)…
Slipping from sunlight into shade: a Class 50 – one of the great workhorses of the diesel era.
An English Electric Class 40 ‘Whistler’ slips through a clearing between Arley and Highley
A Class 35 ‘Hymek’ undergoing restoration at Kidderminster depot, and looking better with every visit.
Like a scene from Swindon 50 years previously – two Class 52 ‘Westerns’ parked at Kidderminster
The Class 40 waiting to depart Kidderminster
The unusual and rare (only one in preservation) Class 17 ‘Clayton’ waiting for its signal to depart Hampton Loade
Autumn in the Wyre Forest – which partly overlaps the route of the preserved railway – is seen by many as the best of the seasons; for me it’s just about a dead-heat with spring. The summer migrants have mostly departed and it’s time for the leaves to turn and fall, and the bracken – which has to be judiciously controlled – to die back and expose more of the forest floor. There is any amount of variation, from subtle to vivid.
And of course autumn means it’s rutting and mating time for the forest’s population of deer: fallow mostly, but with smaller numbers of roedeer and muntjac. Throughout October and into November the stags are often visible, albeit at a distance, and invariably audible. Females and youngsters meander in small groups nervous and circumspect…
Autumn golds, Wyre Forest
Autumn reds, Wyre Forest
The forest floor
Group of deer, watching from a safe distance
A return visit to Upton Warren – the last of the year as it would turn out – revealed a few changes: some departures, some new arrivals, and the odd variant still surprisingly hanging around for longer than would normally be the case. A single avocet had elected to stay behind after all of its peer group had departed and seemed in no hurry to move on; likewise a solitary little egret.
Worcester & Birmingham canal, a short walk from Upton Warren
Little egret, still around in October
Female teal – Upton Warren
Female mallard enjoying a splash
Relative tranquility at Upton Warren; spring will be a different story
Pair of teal – Upton Warren
A trip to the Shropshire Hills was blessed with the best of autumn weather and, as with Upton Warren, family circumstances would dictate that it would be the last time we would be making it to the top of Pole Bank in 2021. There was a single, fleeting flash of a merlin, which seemed to cover the entire length of Ashes Hollow in about 5 seconds, and later a solitary kestrel which was a bit more obliging.
Watching, and listening to the stonechats perched on top of the gorse and bracken, we were surprised to see a male whinchat still around; another seasonal visitor apparently in no hurry to depart. In its defence it’s a fair old slog to sub-Saharan Africa just as the weather’s taking a turn for the worse, and for a bird roughly the size of a robin. You could understand the hesitancy.
Hovering kestrel
Stonechat
Whinchat – the distinctive stripe above the eye is the defining feature
The autumn garden is an ever changing mix of final tidying (which is never really final), graft, and backache, punctuated by pleasant surprises like occasionally getting to at least some of the autumn fruits before the birds. And the pair of collared doves – regular visitors, and infinitely less irritating than the wood pigeons which mostly seem to delight in spilling seed from the feeders.
Those should be the final words on 2021, at least as far as the blog is concerned: an odd year in some ways, but no more so than others of late…
So, we’re back from Scotland and, as always, there’s that feeling that it would be easy to lapse into melancholy. But two hundred miles of the M6 would test anyone’s sense of perspective and is no basis for rational judgements. Truth is it’s still the middle of August, daylight hours are long, temperatures mostly warm, meaning there are good days to be had before the gloves and insulated jackets need to be fished out again.
We’re fortunate enough to be able to improvise some good walking ‘from the front door’ when that’s all that available time will allow, and the Wyre Forest and Severn Valley are no more than 20 minutes by car. We will usually visit one or the other most weeks throughout the autumn and winter. The back end of summer and early autumn will often find us a little further afield and we can be parked at the foot of the Long Mynd within an hour of leaving home.
Two junctions down the M5 we have the wetland nature reserve at Upton Warren – located between Droitwich and Bromsgrove and sitting right in the shadow of the BBC longwave transmitters at Wychbold. Unusually for an inland site two of the four pools are saltwater – a legacy of underground brine extraction in the locality – and attract varieties which would not generally be expected away from estuaries and salt marsh: avocet, lapwing, redshank, dunlin and sandpiper regularly breed here. Spring and autumn passages often bring green and common sandpiper, more dunlin and greenshank.
The freshwater pools attract common tern, a variety of gulls, oystercatchers and lapwing, and there’s always the possibility of a sighting of a variety of raptors, including peregrine (which nest locally) and seasonal incursions by hobby and marsh harrier. It’s a good place…
Avocet, Upton Warren
Staffordshire & Worcestershire canal
Wood warbler, Wyre Forest
Mute swan, River Severn
Little egret, Upton Warren
Curlew, Upton Warren
Map of Upton Warren and surrounding area
It’s a place for sitting and strolling, rather than energetic walking, but even on the most inclement of days you can enjoy a sandwich and coffee in the shelter and relative comfort of one of the hides.
Late September usually means it’s time for the Severn Valley Railway steam gala, although schedules have been less predictable for the last couple of years – another consequence of the pandemic and a substantial financial hit for preserved railways, whose fortunes tend to follow the trends in tourism and hospitality. Gala days are a good opportunity to combine riding the trains with walking a few miles alongside the tracks and timing your arrival at the best spots for capturing a few photos. It probably goes without saying that over the years we’ve assembled a handy catalogue of food spots, with options for all weathers.
A Class 31 diesel, spruced up and parked ready for the forthcoming diesel gala
The incongruous sight of HST power cars parked up and awaiting onward transit at a rural station on a preserved railway.
Arley SVR station
Former BR Standard Class locomotive 75069 originally designed as a lighter weight option for use on secondary routes, so well suited to the SVR.
A busy scene amid the most tranquil of settings: gala day, Severn Valley Railway
In most years, the autumn diesel gala follows a couple of weeks after the steam one – sometime in early October. It will form part of the next post.
And so, to end: I doubt I’ll ever grow tired of listening to this one more time…
Inevitably it became time to move on from Tomatin, a place of many and varied bridges, not least the iconic railway viaduct…
The short hop southward to our new base between Boat of Garten and Nethybridge left us with a little time to kill; never a problem in the highlands! As we passed close by the Strathspey Railway station a rising plume of steam suggested that there might be a waiting train, which did indeed turn out to be the case – a former LMS ‘Black Five’, similar to those which were a familiar sight (and sound) on our local line back in my schooldays – wheel-slipping the night mails out of Dudley Port before the diesels elbowed them aside. By mid afternoon we had parked up at Whitewell and walked the familiar trails to Loch an Eilein.
Once settled into the cottage we discovered that we had the company of Greylag Geese and brown hares in the neighbouring meadows. The geese we occasionally see on our local waterways, but hares seem to be increasingly a rarity for us in recent times.
Being sometimes creatures of habit we decided to revisit a couple of the biggish hills which separate Glen Feshie from Glen Einich – Carn Ban Mor and Sgor Gaioth. Mostly the route follows good, well engineered tracks which felt comfortingly familiar, and it was only when typing this post I discovered that it had actually been 4 years since we’d last walked these hills. Another reminder – as if more were needed – of how quickly the years roll by!
Climbing away from Glen Feshie, and gratifying to see the regeneration doing the same
Loch Einich and Glen Einich, with the southern shoulder of Braeriach to the east (right)
The chimneys of Achlean Croft, just at the point where the climbing begins
An easy descent at the end of a hard day, with views west as an added perk
Summit shelter Carn Ban Mor – lunch spot with a view of the most southerly buttress of Sgor Gaioth
The myriad watercourses which plait their way through Glen Einich
Shifting shades and cloud shadows
Loch Einich and the Moine Mor
Mostly this final week was spent on familiar ground – ‘familiar’ being a singularly inappropriate adjective to describe landscapes which can vary dramatically within the space of a single day. So we meandered the hills and trails of the northern Cairngorms, sat and ate our food wherever the midges would allow, scanned the lochs and lochsides for red throated divers, the pinewoods for crossbills, crested tits and red squirrels. Back at the cottage we would find that a juvenile yellowhammer had moved into the garden and that we could actually pick out the line of the preserved railway in the distance.
And we made time for one final mountain escapade before returning south: Cairn Gorm via the appropriately named ‘Windy Ridge’ path, which seemed determined to demonstrate on the day that its name was merited. Strong sideways gusts appeared to have an unerring instinct for striking just when we were least balanced, and the regular low passes of helicopters, underslung with heavy construction materials, moving across the hillside added its own particular frisson of excitement.
Having reached The Ptarmigan restaurant and funicular stop we decided to avoid the engineered walkway up onto the summit plateau and make use of a track which begins just a few metres to the left (when looking from the bottom). This path is clearly marked on both OS and Harvey’s maps but appears to be very lightly utilised; that said it is easy enough to find and follow – just taking care to avoid the obvious fork which descends east into Glen Avon. Route finding might not be quite so straightforward under a covering of snow.
The engineered and handrailed path to the plateau is the one marked in red on the map; the alternative is the blue track. The path reaches the summit adjacent to the weather station, which is a visible way marker for the last 100 metres or so of the route…
Weather station Cairn Gorm
Cairn Gorm summit – just below the cloud base
Late on Friday we reluctantly dragged ourselves away from the hills and then early(ish) next morning, and with even greater reluctance, we turned south onto the A9 with 400-odd miles ahead of us. Sooner or later the tab has to be picked up; that’s the deal.
Although it wasn’t the principal reason for choosing Tomatin as our base for the second week, the Findhorn and its environs would figure prominently. It is, by any comparison, an enduringly lovely river, from its source in the Monadhliath mountains all the way to its outflow on the Moray coast.
The minor road heading south through Findhorn Bridge quickly becomes ever more minor as it branches southwest towards the road end at Coignafearn Old Lodge. It’s a slow 10 miles, but it does have the compensation of shadowing the river for virtually the whole way and, if you have a spotter in the car, the possibility of sighting raptors is just about as good as you’ll find anywhere. Golden eagles, buzzards, osprey, peregrine and merlin are all to be found in the area; I’d be surprised if there weren’t hobbies from time time, considering the numbers of dragonflies and small birds regularly on the wing.
The Findhorn valley – close to Coignafearn old lodge
The Coignafearn estate has become something of a ‘go to’ spot for us in recent times: most often we’ve followed the track to the west of the river and improvised a few variations on the day. What we hadn’t quite appreciated is just how close we were to the headwaters of the Findhorn as we traced some of those paths: I’m still unsure of the exact spot where the braidings of many secondary watercourses coalesce to become the river proper, but consensus seems to be that it is somewhere in the steep-sided glen where the river Eskin flows in from the west.
Just to visualise where this remote spot actually lies, a straight line drawn due west from Aviemore until it reached the eastern shore of Loch Ness would measure slightly less than 50 kilometres. Were it possible to walk that line (and the map suggests that the terrain would be ‘varied’) the source of the Findhorn would lie very close to the halfway point. It would be unlikely that you’d be bumping into many others along the way.
Red deer stags grouping together along the skyline.
As well as the watercourses, paths converge around the nearby Balbeg bothy, but so far we have managed only to connect some additional loops rather than piece together a completely circular route while staying to the west of the river (a circuit utilising the hills to the east of the valley is certainly possible and quite well documented online). OS maps suggest that there are trails which we have so far failed to pick up, but what shows on the map isn’t always obvious on the ground when the vegetation is at its most lush. It’s, at most, a minor frustration in the scheme of things, and a reminder that wild places don’t necessarily disclose their secrets without some effort.
Balbeg bothy: spectacular location, nearest Waitrose (Stirling) 137 miles
Before the week was out we would return to the same starting point but head off in precisely the opposite direction before crossing the river via the vehicular bridge beneath Creag Fhionnlaidh. A switchback climb led us over many false crests before we reached what appeared to be the highest point in the immediate locality and settled into a sheltered spot for lunch. These are tightly packed summits around the 700-750 metre mark: not quite matching some of the spot heights in the main massif a few kilometres to the south, but as vantage points go they stand comparison with some of the best.
Parked up near to the bridge – an escorted party on wildlife safari. Thankfully they were having a good day.
The winding course of the infant Findhorn as it heads north
The picture below shows the beginning of what turned out to be a good path: meandering, undulating, eventually topping out on the higher ground to the east of the river. Once the plateau is reached there are views across Speyside and to the familiar outlines of the northern Cairngorms – just sufficiently distinct to be identifiable on this particular day…
Sandwiched between the two trips to Coignafearn we found ourselves at the furthest extremity of the Findhorn as we set out to walk the sweeping curve of Burghead Bay from the direction of the estuary. This wasn’t part of some cohesive project to explore the course of the river from source to sea: it was simply that Tomatin is reasonably handily placed to give access to at least a couple of sections of the Moray Coastal Trail.The trail is something over 70 kilometres in its entirety, but lends itself to being walked in bite-sized chunks.
Almost as soon as you step onto the sands and begin walking in the direction of Roseisle Forest and Burghead the beach transitions from quiet to virtually deserted, apart from the wildlife…
Findhorn beach, looking towards Roseisle Forest and Burghead
With that in mind Burghead Bay is another of those places probably better served by a few photographs than any number of words from me would convey.
A few days later we would return to the Moray coast, making Nairn our starting point and walking the East Beach and RSPB reserve at Culbin Sands. A worthwhile day on its own merits, it also unlocked another piece of the Moray Coastal Trail. As with Findhorn, this isn’t a beach where escaping the crowds is an issue…
Which isn’t to say that the place is deserted…
And there is nothing quite like the arrival of a Peregrine to inject a sense of urgency into an otherwise leisurely morning…
RSPB reserves seemed to be a feature of this second week, and we dropped into the one sited at Loch Ruthven. It was an opportunity to see the Slavonian grebe – which we managed to do – and to look for the Black-throated Diver, which sadly eluded us.
Looking back along Burghead Bay towards Findhorn from near to Roseisle County Park. The site of the former RAF base (Kinloss) is beyond the dunes to the left.
Cleaned and smoothed by the forces of nature
Solitary Ringed Plover inspecting the soft sands at low tide
A small group of Ringed Plovers skimming low over the shallows
And blending in as only they can (when there are eggs or newly-fledged young concealed among the shingle it’s important to watch every step). I believe there are eight in the photo.
Arctic terns can be very attentive parents
And equally aggressive defenders of what they consider to be their part of the beach
Forming up into squadrons, if that’s what it takes
This black-backed gull had managed to bag itself a flatfish for lunch.
One of our estuary and wetland staples – an Oystercatcher in flight
The forest runs very close to the beach as you approach Burghead
Inevitably the effects of storms, erosion and the power of the tides leads to occasional losses. These can provide convenient perches for birds and humans alike.
A distant flock of waders flying low over the dunes; we think they were Black-tailed Godwits
Just a few more steps? 