In Orkney, the last weeks of January, and the first days of February, were wild and wet. In mid January the wind set in from the East and never veered or paused, bringing Groundhog days of wet and gales that varied only in the intensity of the rain or the strength of the wind.
A booked trip to mainland for a supermarket shop came with the warning that once on the boat your car might not get off, so bad was the swell and the risk of docking back on Hoy. The passenger only boat that serves the far end of the island, and runs from Moaness to the island of Graemsay and then on to Stromness, fared much worse. With a low lying pier and an easterly swell the last count for cancellations was something like 49 in the space of a few weeks.
The weather broke, thankfully, on the 10th of this month. A couple of welcome settled days of blue-sky sunshine, followed since by our usual mixed bag, bright days and grey days, and just the once, while I was up on the moors, a day broken now and then by sheets of gale-driven hail, pellets of ice that stung like pinpricks. As I turned my back to a curtain of hail, a Golden plover came up through the valley, gold against white, a summer breeder here and a sure sign, that despite the hail and the bitter northerly, Spring is spinning towards us.
When I’m walking on the moors, the animal I can’t resist photographing is the Mountain hare. I saw a few that day, snow is rare here and for once, with hail on the ground, the hares, still dressed in their white winter coats, looked a perfect fit for their environment.
On the the way down from the moor I photographed a distant South Walls landscape, a patchwork of stone dykes and small fields, lit by a burst of late afternoon sun. Sheep were being folded on neeps, sown in late Spring for the purpose of bringing ewes through a long and cold winter. The ewes are moved every few days onto a piece of new ground, the precious muck that they leave behind enriches and fertilises the soil. Next year, as part of a traditional rotation, the field will be barley, or pasture.
Not far from the neeps and sheep, there’s a field of oat stubble, with the islands wet ground it will stay unploughed until late spring, indeed stubble here sometimes doesn’t get ploughed at all, cereals are often under-sown with grass and simply green to a ley the following year. The field is a magnet for many species of bird, from finches through to greylags. It’s a favourite spot for long-beaked waders, Curlews and Oystercatchers and diminutive Redshanks, whose bright legs that give them their name, are barely long enough to raise them above the stubble.
A flock, or clattering, of Jackdaws are there most days, feeding amongst hollow stems scissored off by the harvester. Heads down with beaks in the soil the birds form a carpet, a loose and slow moving drift of feathery grey-black, seeking seeds and unlucky invertebrates. They say if you watch nature you’ll learn something new everyday, that days lesson, when I watched them lift off, was just how bright and jade green their eyes are.
Another sign of an impending turn of season, is that greylags are once again being seen in pairs. At home, for the past two years, a pair have nested in a rough corner of sedge and briar, close to a pond in the meadow and barely a stones throw from the shore. Sure enough, last week, a pair were on the pond. A few weeks from now the female will lay her eggs and the male, ever wary, will stretch his neck and honk and complain as you go about your business in the garden.
In the garden itself, the first snowdrops have opened, tete-a-tete daffodils are pushing through the damp earth. Willow buds are swelling, ready for a catkin explosion. It’s early days but the garden is slowly and surely awakening from its slumber.
A robin is singing daily in an edge of garden larch, reclaiming his territory. House sparrows are checking out des-res nest boxes. Up on the moor, albeit on a cold and wet day, a wren paused now and then, from a spider hunt in the heather, to rattle out his shrill staccato song of Spring from a stock-fence perch.
A garden in Orkney 