A frosty walk

Happy New Year!

No, the camera hasn't arrived yet, but I've been wearing my boots around the house for nearly a week and thought the time had come to test them out on something a bit more lumpy than carpet.

I chose to go up the Campbells' farm tracks, which follow the Armadale burn and lead up into the hills behind. There were a couple of robins in the gorse near the gate at the foot of the track:



Further on up the hill I could hear a crow going absolutely berserk at something. It's a noise I've heard them make before when there's a buzzard about, so I scanned the sky but couldn't see anything that looked like a predator. Squinting into the sun, I located the crow circling over a small mound a couple of hundred feet away but still couldn't see anything that might have alarmed it. Until I got the camera out, that is:



Most of the rest of the walk was in the shadow of the hill, so not enough light for good pictures, but I did take these:





If I remember right, the mounds are evidence of settlement - I'll have to look on my map (which I've temporarily tidied up and can't find!). It must have been a pretty good place to live: sheltered with water and decent grazing plus the sea just up the road for fish.

And I think my ringed plover obsession of last year is being replaced with a buzzard obsession - here's another one:



One of my new year's resolutions is to take every Wednesday afternoon off and explore a new bit of the area, so that'll mean at least one post a week and hopefully lots more. I'm looking forward to it :o)

Lucky day

Ever since I drove past Dounreay last week and saw a buzzard happily devouring a freshly killed rabbit not 15 feed from the road, I've vowed to take my camera bag with me EVERY time I get in the car. I nearly forgot it today and very nearly didn't bother to go back into the house for it.

I'm glad I did. I have other shots taken today, but I'm so unbelievably chuffed with this one that it's going to have a post of its own! Nothing done to it other than cropping out some telephone wires from the bottom and a touch of sharpening when converting the RAW file.

Cold day

I wouldn't want to be on Orkney right now:



I had to go to the post office at Melvich today, so instead of turning the car round in someone's driveway, I went round the loop to see if there were any oystercatchers at Portskerra. There were:



And this is why I want that new camera and bigger zoom after Christmas; the bird is sharp but because I only have 6.3MP, I can't crop in to get the shot I want without the picture going grainy (this was only ISO200):



As I went back to the car, I spotted someone looking for their lunch:



And this is my favourite of the day:

Oh what a beautiful morning

It was much too nice to stay inside, so I walked down to Port a'Chinn, because I haven't been for ages. On the way I saw an enormous bird perched on a pile of stones in the field behind the salmon bothy. Got a bit closer and with the lens on full zoom managed to catch it:



I think that must be the buzzard which we've seen hunting over the hill behind our house. I tried to sneak round the house and get closer but by the time the rock pile was back in view again, he'd gone. I climbed up there to see if he was perched on a fence post, because I'd have seen him if he'd gone up into the sky, but not a sign.

The fishermen were out this morning and had left their salmon nets drying at the top of the cliff:





And just to be a bit arty-farty, here's the previous shot in black and white, which I think works a little bit better:



Then it was down onto the beach. Masses of rock pipits down there this morning:





I also found out which cave it is that goes through to the hidden waterfall and since it was low tide crawled through to have a look. It's been dry recently, so the waterfall was less than impressive, but I'll go back once we've had a few days of rain and take some pictures.

Up the Armadale Burn

I've found a cracking website called A Wild Land, which is all about the area I live in and has what look like some very good walks on it. Today I decided to stretch my legs on the first one: The Armadale Big Burn.

The website says that you can sometimes see buzzards riding the thermals and I could see one circling in the distance as I climbed up the track. A beetle caught my eye on the path and I stopped to try and photograph it, but as I did so I could hear 'Keeeeee keeeeee' coming closer all the time and ended up hurriedly switching the lens out of macro to take these:





That is as close as I think I'm going to get to a flying one with this lens - I shall keep an eye on the fence posts and see if I can get closer to a stationery bird.

As you can see from those two shots, the sky was a bit washed out, meaning it was a bad day for landscape photography, but a good day for macro. And luckily I came across absolutely the biggest dragonfly I've ever seen in my life:





Those two were taken with the lens at 300mm in normal mode, but this lens has a switch on the side of it that will change it into a macro lens between 200mm and 300mm. This was taken in macro:



I was looking out for a tributary coming down to the burn, because that meant I was getting near the broch mentioned in the walk guide. The ground started to get marshy and this little chap sprang out of the way of my boot:





I finally reached the broch and did the obligatory climb up to it:



The walk guide said to continue following the burn up to the loch at its source and, if you have the energy, to climb the mountain beside it. However, it had taken me an hour to get this far and looking at my map I could see I was maybe two thirds of the way there at best. That's the problem with taking me walking with a camera - I'll happily spend quarter of an hour following a dragonfly around.

I could see a farm track from the broch that I knew crossed the burn a little way on, so I walked down that to the water and then decided to turn back. There's a small copse of trees down there and in their shade, foxgloves grow:



I tried to get arty with the cotton grass:



And as I got back towards the road, I was rewarded with another buzzard: