Author: Gary Smith.

In Orkney, March ended pretty much as it began, breezy and wet. The early weeks of the month also brought what were probably the last frosts of the winter, just hard enough to sugar-coat the newly emerging leaves of London pride, a plant whose latin name saxifraga urbium, literally translates to stone breaker of the city – one of the first plants to colonise London bomb sites in WW2.

We had rain and gales aplenty but also some rare bright and beautiful days, blue skies and flat calm. Days that make you forget the wet and the wild and forgive Orkney of the worst that she throws at you. A sure sign of better days to come was the first haar of the year, they form when warming air passes over a cooler sea. A soft low blanket of grey-white that stole the sunrise and hid neighbouring islands from view.

In the garden the cupboard is still pretty much bare, snowdrops have faded, tete-a-tete daffodils have taken their place, swapping white bells for citrus yellow trumpets. It will be some weeks yet before the gardens dark earth is lost beneath foliage and flowers. Gardening in Orkney is a slow burn start.

In the back garden, the first of our Ribes are in flower. We grow white and pink varieties and of the two, the pink is by far the hardiest, tough enough to grow not just at the edge of the garden but beyond the shelter-belt, on the edge of the moor. The pink was already here, a single overgrown shrub whose offspring, via cuttings, are now dotted wherever there’s a space. A magnet, and a life saver, for early flying bees.

Beyond the garden, close to the shore, a willow coppice, planted three years ago on a patch of ground that never dries out, has come into its own. Each cutting has reached at least head height, many are ten feet or more, all are adorned with hundreds of catkins, plump and white, as soft as lambs wool. From a distance, especially when backlit by the morning light, they glow like cherry blossom, white against dark, just the look we had hoped for. As March turns to April the catkins, as per the photo at the top of this page, will flower, bursting open, morphing from white to lime green. Next will come silver-grey leaves that in Autumn will fade to a soft orange-yellow. One of those trees that never stops giving.

As the willows have grown and thickened, birds have been drawn to them, long-beaked woodcock lurk beneath them, hiding amongst leaf litter and sedge, coming out at night to probe turf in the meadow, leaving behind the tell-tale daylight sign of ground dotted with hundreds of holes. This year a pair of Dunnocks have made the coppice their home. They’re hard to spot as they flit from low branch to low branch but the male, as I witnessed one morning last week, will occasionally rise to a loftier perch and sing a claim to his territory.

When we’re gifted flat calm days, one of my favourite things is to walk to the top of the low cliff beyond the willows, to a vantage point where flat ground falls quickly away to a beach of sea worn stone. A hidden spot, thick with ankle-snagging bramble and wild rose. The best time is just after sunrise, as the birds begin to stir for the day and the bay, untroubled by a breeze, is as still as a pool of mercury. Patrolling Fulmars, who nest on the low cliff, fly water-skimming figures of eight, occasionally cutting the bays surface with the lightest touch of a wing tip.

In March I managed a half dozen mornings, a clear and flat calm hour or two where, as the sun climbed higher, the warmth on your face rose as if controlled by a dial. There’s no real aim but to just watch and listen, to see the day come to life. Shore birds come and go, bright-billed oystercatchers and diminutive redshanks dash past, following the tides edge at zero feet. Curlews rise from a shore of sandstone and bladderwrack, complaining loudly of your presence.

Out on the bay, there’s a trio of Long-tailed ducks, a male and a female followed by another male – tail end Charlie. He’s tagging along, hoping she may elope with him. Soon, elopement or not, all three will leave to spend the summer in the high Arctic.

As the day wakes the ducks and the waders come and go, but the one abiding thing is a bob of Harbour seals. There are around twenty in total, a number that give or take one or two, has been pretty much constant in the seven years that we have lived on this side of the bay. Perhaps it’s the number that this small body of water can comfortably sustain. Most days they’re either  hauled out on the rocks, taking a siesta, or out swimming in the shallows but occasionally, when the tide is neither ebbing nor flowing, you’ll catch one bottling, sleeping upright in the water, just chilling, at peace with the world.

For the past few weeks, from the moor beyond the garden, we’ve occasionally heard the call of Red grouse. Often described as go-back-go-back, for me at least, it’s more guttural; Ko-kerr-ko-kererrrrr. However the ear interprets it, it’s a sound of Spring. We first heard them in late February, my boots were already laced, a walk on the shores of South Walls was planned, a driftwood hunt. The grouse sang a siren song and off I went, driftwood plans forgotten, through the back of the garden and out onto the moor. They were once shot for sport here, driven by beaters towards lines of men and guns hidden in butts, half-sunken hides built of stone or turf. There’s what’s left of a butt on the patch of moor that came with the house, stone built and circular, set waist deep in the peat. One fine day, when I have a suitable sapling, I’ll plant a Rowan in its shelter.

The other method of grouse shooting is walking up, a man with a dog, usually a Pointer or a Setter, doing what it says on the tin, walking the moor, gun at the ready, bagging the grouse as the dog flushes them out. I did the same, with a camera instead of a gun and no dog for company. The grouse are easy to hear, hard to spot and even harder to photograph.

February rains have made the ground  spongy and sodden, walking uphill from the garden is akin to walking on a trampoline that has been covered in treacle. As the ground levelled I followed the boundary fence, heading for a makeshift stile. A covey of nine birds bursts from the heather, a blur of wing and bodies. I swung through them as you would with a shotgun, catching five of the nine as they topped the fence.

The birds were lost to sight over a brow but I heard them land. As they settle they have a different call, a low and gargled aaaa-kaa-kaa. Once over the makeshift stile, (two fence stabs and a horizontal piece of wood: imagine a one rung stepladder) you’re into the peat cuts, they’re silent now but would once have rung with voices as families cut fuel for their hearths. I’d marked where the birds had landed but they had already moved on, a quick glimpse of three birds on the edge of a cut and they were gone, disappearing into the heather. Fast on foot as well as wing. 

Beyond the cuts the ground rises again, there’s another fence, rising and falling with the contours, running arrow straight across the moor, a testament to the skill of the man or men who put it up. It terminates in a valley, a mile or two further on, on the shore of the islands reservoir. It’s a few years since I’ve seen any livestock up here, changes in farming practice mean the fence currently keeps neither nothing in nor nothing out. From the base of the fence three grouse burst from the heather, chestnut bodies flashing silver-white underwings. They glide away, heading downhill, back to the cuts.

As you climb higher the view opens up. A fence post becomes a handy tripod, with camera balanced and fingers crossed that it wouldn’t fall off, I tripped the self timer and walked into the frame. To my right there’s Hoys southerly tip, the headland of Brims, with the open scar of its now disused quarry. The source of the stone that built the ex croft house that we live in, ditto many of the other homes that dot this landscape. Above Brims, beyond the dark blue waters of the Pentland Firth, there’s a faint grey smudge, the coast of Scotland, the county of Caithness. To my left lies the island of South Walls and centre frame there’s the thin black line of the Ayre, the narrow causeway that ties each island to the other.

As the ground rises again more grouse are seen, a female appears, a moorfowl, she blends perfectly with the heathers and grasses. In April or early May, she’ll lay a single clutch of eggs in a nest so well hidden amongst the heathers, that only if you almost step on her, will she reveal its location. There’ll be perhaps 10 or more eggs, each speckled with blacks and red-browns, the colours of her plumage.

Her mate, the moorcock, appeared a few moments later, stocky and alert, darker in plumage with lipstick-red eyebrows. A bird whose image has adorned thousands of bottles of Scottish Whisky. 

Red grouse are unique to Britain and Ireland. Along with the Mountain Hare and Hen Harrier for me they’re an iconic species of open moorland. Their Latin name is Lagopus scotica, the first, lago-pus means hare-foot, a reference to feathered feet that give them traction when snow is on the ground, the latter means of Scotland, a bit of a misnomer as along with the Emerald Isle, they’re also seen from the moors of Cornwall through to the Northern counties of England. With dusk approaching I walked the same route home, the last frame of the day was taken back in the peat cuts. A pair of birds, probably yearlings, caught by the last light of the day.

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.

At home, in winter, Grey herons are a common sight on the shoreline of the bay. On good days they stand tall, long necked and elegant, statue-still. On bad days, like today, when the winds are gale force and the rain horizontal, they cluster, hunched and wet, in small groups in a sheltered corner, close to a burn that rushes peat-brown water from moor to sea.

On a clear and bright December afternoon, I watched a heron hunting close to the Ayre, a causeway that links Hoy to the island of South Walls. A narrow strip of tarmac that separates bay and open sea. Up here herons are wary of people, more often than not taking to the wing at the mere sight of a distant human. The bird watched me warily, as I quietly approached, through a bright yellow eye of jaundiced frogspawn.

I expected him or her to lift off, accompanied by a vocal and complaining craak, heading for pastures new. The bird though stayed put, knee deep in the shallows, amongst drifting floats of air-filled bladderwrack. I sat down, the bird stood motionless, eyes off me and back in the zone, looking forward and down, studying the water with a hunters intent.  Eventually patience, for both bird and photographer, paid off, the heron struck, a fluid snake-like strike with a dagger of a bill. Barely registering a splash on the surface of the bay.

Its prize in the end, was an unlucky Blenny, a small bull-headed fish whose pop-out eyes look far too big for its body. Common in rock pools and shallows, they’re seen throughout the UK.

I stood up, pushing my luck and edging closer. The bird took flight. In the air they’re all extremities, all wings and neck and legs. A jumble of oversize parts, out of scale for the body they’re attached to. A heron is around the same size as a Whooper swan, an adult whooper weighs in at around 10kg, a grey heron, despite its similar size, is, at less than 2kg, a featherweight in comparison. They were once served up in medieval banquets, if you were hungry and fond of heron, you wouldn’t want to be last in line in the serving queue. 

The bird  flapped lazily away, landing a hundred yards or so distant. The light was fading and he or she picked a lucky photo-friendly spot. The only piece of shore still lit by the last, dying rays, of a midwinter sun.

Over the past couple of months, on moor and shore, we’ve watched two of the islands mammals, Mountain hares and the pups of Grey seals, change their coats. For both it’s a means of survival, for the Hares supposed winter camouflage, for the Seals a chance of independence, to leave the shores that have bound them since birth.

In Orkney, Mountain hares are found only on Hoy, and were likely introduced by the Lairds for sport. They’re a creature of open moors and low hills, places where trees lost in Neolithic times will seemingly never regain a foothold. They share their open and  sometimes bleak habitat with many others, from their nemesis, the White-tailed eagle, through to low flying moths and butterflies, that seemingly live a life governed solely by the direction of the winds.

They start to shed their blue-brown summer coats in October, a process that sees them, as per the photo above, at first turn piebald, and then, to a not quite fresh from the wash, white. The change is genetic, wired into their DNA and in a warming climate, a serious disadvantage. Despite the dump of post New Year snow that we have just had, in winter the moors and hills here are, for the most part, soft shades of russets and browns. As can be seen by the photograph, piebald is a good early Winter camouflage, after that, as the moors fade and their coats whiten, they literally do stand out like the proverbial sore thumb.

The hares though have a survival trick. Whatever the time of year, with the wind behind you they’re nigh on impossible to stalk, but put the wind on your face and walk quietly towards likely dips and hollows and it’s possible to get within a few feet of a hare sat tight in a form. In summer, if the hares nerve breaks, it will run, covering a hundred metres or so before pausing to look back, its warm weather coat blending perfectly with the heathers and grasses. In winter though I’ve seen a different trick, a quick leap to one side and, as if through an invisible portal, they’re gone. A closer inspection will show not some Leporid sorcery, but a short burrow, curtained by grasses and heathers, that at a distance is almost invisible to the eye. A mere foot or two long but enough to give safety from a swooping Eagle (or a nosy human with a camera).

Grey seal pups are born from mid October through November here. The Geo’s of South Walls, with their beaches of sea-smoothed cobbles, are a favourite spot for mothers to haul out and give birth to creamy-white pups. The pups for their first month of life are shore-bound, covered in Lanugo, a sheepskin-like coat of white fur that keeps them warm but not truly waterproof. Every year some are lost when a storm driven tide pulls them to an early death. Many more survive though and it’s fair to say that those puppy dog eyes make it impossible to pass by without raising a camera to your eye. To avoid disturbance a long lens, in this case 600mm, is essential.

At a month or so old they shed their fur and develop their adult waterproof skin, turning from white to shades of grey, blue and black. Beneath the skin, after weeks gorging on their mothers high fat milk, lies a thick layer of  insulating blubber, they’re ready at last to answer the call of the sea. A danger with this rapid growth is entanglement, twice we’ve seen half grown seals with an ever tightening garrotte around their necks, one seal got lucky, after a bit of a wrestle we cut the net from its neck, the other not so much, seen in the water, out of reach. An unwritten beach-combing rule is to drag rope and old net out of the tides way, stick a rock on it and let the grass grow through it.

My favourite shot is the one below, a well grown pup catching the last rays of a winter sun. Swim, feed, sleep and repeat, a tough life 🙂

The first days of the New Year have brought snow and bitter Northerlies. The winds aren’t out of the ordinary, but the snow is unusual for Orkney. At home, tucked low in the lee of the hill, we’ve got off lightly, six or eight inches so far, enough to top your boots and hang icy clinkers from the bottoms of your jeans. 

Elsewhere, in less sheltered spots, the drifts were stone-dyke high. Impossible to tell where fields ended and roads began. From where I’m sitting I can see, a mile or so across the bay, a farmer laboriously clearing snow from a single track road on the linked island of South Walls. He’s been at it since dawn and will continue all day, forward a few feet, tip the loader bucket, forward a few more feet, rinse and repeat. The roads are being cleared so that the islands doctor and nurse can make home visits, the very sensible advice to everyone else is to stay put.

The days have been bitter but beautiful, the skies grey and brooding one minute and full of fiery life the next.

There’s not much to be done outdoors, top up the bird feeders, make sure half apples are out and that birdbaths are ice free, after that come in and and read or catch up with a TV series, better still watch the birds on the feeders.

Unlike the snows of King Wenceslas, our snow isn’t deep and crisp and even, it’s marked not just with our boot prints but with the prints of blackbirds and sparrows and numerous others. Rarest of all were those of a Red grouse, a visitor from the hill seen briefly from the kitchen window, whose tracks led down from the moor and into a thicket of bramble and honeysuckle.

Along with the grouse other welcome visitors have included a couple of Song thrushes, a bird that arrives each Spring to weave beautiful mud lined nests, they’re not often seen here in Winter. Reed Buntings are also being seen in the garden, they’re common just a stones throw away, where they nest amongst new willow coppice and the briars of a deep boundary ditch that runs at the edge of the meadow, but rare in the garden, crossing the stone-dyke threshold on only the coldest of days.

In the meadow itself we’re experimenting with cutting regimes. Up to now we’ve gone down the traditional route, mowing in late Autumn when the wildflowers have set seed. This year, spurred on by an article aimed at encouraging Twite, a small and threatened red list finch that is often called the upland Linnet, we’re leaving the mowing until Spring. The idea is to leave standing seed heads over the winter. So far I’ve seen just a handful of Twite but close cousin Goldfinches have got the memo, for the past few days, in addition to clustering on niger feeders in the garden, they’ve also been dancing from seed head to seed head, flashes of red & gold against bright white snow. Part two of now officially named Project Twite 🙂 will be the sowing of seed rich annuals on a triangle of ground left bare by the workings of an excavator, which was laying cable and water for a friends new build that sits along the way. We’re a little bit spoilt to have all this space but this is an ex crofting community, out here, if you were so inclined, it would actually be quite difficult to buy a wee house without land.

On Saturday we had the Wolf moon, rising to the NNE at around ten minutes to three in the afternoon. The master plan was to capture it rising over the snow covered island of Flotta, ideally with the islands wind turbine in the frame. Heavy snow showers obscuring the horizon soon put paid to that idea, but I caught it later on, floating in a pool of ink-black sky.  Through the viewfinder the moon looked cold and frozen, at the time we had a wind chill in double figures, I knew just how it felt 🙂

It’s hard to believe that the Solstice is here. We have barely noticed that winter is already halfway through. Spring is spinning towards us. Although the short days have never bothered us, for the first time since we made Orkney our home, the winter gloom has passed by unremarked. For the next few days the sun will rise at just after 9, setting again at a quarter past three, after that the days will slowly but surely lengthen. Decembers weather has been as expected, mild, wet and often wild but we’ve had bright crisp days as well and, just the once so far, a sprinkle of snow that gave the islands hills a dusting of icing sugar.

Weather permitting, Jacqui has been busy putting the garden to bed. In our old garden, some 400 miles or so further South, many of the plants were left to over winter. Up here most, if not cut back, will turn to mush. A combination of rain and and salt laden winds soon puts to bed any thought of picture-perfect frost whitened seed heads. It doesn’t mean though that the garden is bare, just pared back, waiting for warmth and longer days. 

Not all plants though get the winter memo. A Himalayan poppy has decided that now is a good time to flower. Meconopsis do well here, they prefer cool, moist and slightly acidic soil, a perfect fit for a garden at the edge of a peat moor. They normally flower in late May, throwing up tall green stems topped with short lived electric blue flowers, this one though is a few inches tall and despite flowering blue in Summer, is a shade of soft mauve-pink.

In addition to cutting and clearing, Jacqui has also been splitting and potting on anything that has outgrown its space. Some of the new plants go into cold frames, others will over winter in old fish boxes collected from the shore. In summer, once well rooted, they’ll be sold online or at the garden gate.

Garden birds are coming and going. We’ve seen an influx of Greenfinches this week, a flock of perhaps forty birds. They vie for feeder space with winter resident Goldfinches and, after a few fisticuffs, both sides have come to an unwritten truce, sometimes the greenfinches dominate the feeders and the goldfinches get to pick up the dregs dropped on the path, sometimes the roles are reversed, the goldfinches get the feeders while their olive green cousins slum it on the gravel.

Two other closely related species that are here in numbers are Rock doves and Collared doves. The former are avian hoovers, arriving daily at dawn to clean up anything and everything. They remind me of Black Friday shoppers, all rush and sharp elbows. Once sated they lurk for a while along fences and dyke tops, just in case more food is put out. 

The collared doves in contrast to the rush-rush Rocks are gentle souls, they’ve multiplied here year on year, we started a few years ago with four, last week gave  a count of  thirty-odd. Now that the trees are bare, once hidden nests can be seen, a thin and often precariously sited platform of twigs that somehow stands up to our inevitable curve ball Summer gales.

We’ve had our fair share of rain and in the wider landscape the ground is sodden. At this time of year hardy Shetland and Shetland cross sheep are put out on a South Walls headland. Part of an environmental scheme that helps keep the sward short and allows low growing wildflowers, including the elusive Primula scotica, to thrive. At a bottleneck gate, where they funnel from one area of heath to the other,  the ground is poached to mud and a temporary pond has formed, a true test for just how waterproof your boots really are 🙂

A sure sign that Spring isn’t too far away, is the return of Fulmars to the cliffs. One day last week, not far from the temporary pond, I watched them rise and fall on the up-draughts. They’re pelagic birds, nomads of the sea, returning to land only to breed, laying a single egg in May in a scrape of a nest that the same monogamous pair could have used for decades. With a stiff easterly coming in off the sea, the birds were riding the wind, perhaps just for the joy of it. They’re of their own world, seemingly oblivious to ours and come so close that you can almost reach out and touch them. To do so though would be like breaking a spell.

Below the fulmars wings, there are steep sided geo’s and rocky shores. On a day where a cauldron of surf seethed and boiled, courtesy of a recent gale,  I watched three Shags, each seemingly plucking up the courage to enter the water. In the end they went in together, bobbing like corks in a washing machine, dashed to and fro by the surf and like the fulmars above them, perfectly at home in their world.

The third week of November brought the first snow of the Winter. It didn’t last, snow rarely does here, a day of snow followed by a day of sleet and after that normal service resumed, back to our usual breezy mix of bright days and wet days. The gales that brought the snow also brought a surprise visitor to the garden, a Bohemian waxwing, a bird that, like the winds it arrived on, was born in the North.

At home they’re arboreal, a bird of Scandinavian forests, both coniferous and deciduous, and are occasionally seen here when an “irruption”, usually caused by a lack of Autumn berries in their homelands, will see them push further South. In the 12 years we have lived in Orkney we’ve witnessed just two such irruptions, the best was a few years ago and brought 35 birds to the garden. They stayed for almost a month, stripping Rowans of berries and eating us out of supermarket apples.

This bird though, an adult male given away by the sharply defined edges of the species unisex black bib, was alone and late. The rowans, stripped in October by Fieldfares and Redwings, are long since bare. Apples though are still put out every day, a treat for winter-resident Blackbirds and the occasional visiting Blackcap, and it’s to these, like bees to honey, that Waxwings are drawn. We hoped his arrival would bring an Earful, the slightly odd collective name for a flock of Waxwings. A term that’s believed to come from the second word of the birds latin name, Bombycilla garrulus, garrulus – to chatter.  Bombicilla is silk-hair, a reference to the birds feathers and crest. Their common name comes from a wandering lifestyle and red tipped wing feathers, the colour of medieval sealing wax.

No more arrived and we think he was likely an accidental visitor, pushed south by the winds that brought the snow. Waxwings have been rare in Orkney this year, one here, two there, only a handful of reportings. The bird stayed for ten days, feasting on half apples set on old rebar, placed a few feet from the kitchen window. Arriving in the pre-dawn gloom and not leaving until dusk. They’re very tolerant of humans, Jacqui is busy putting the garden to bed and as she forked and pottered, often within a few feet of him, the biggest reaction she got was a turn of the head and a raising of a pink punk-rocker crest. They’re beautiful birds with fine plumage that lives up to their silk-hair latin name but it’s also fair to say that they have a slightly grumpy and quizzical look to them, on the photo below a “what you looking at” thought bubble would be appropriate.

The bird left us on Friday, on the coat-tails of a gale from the South, perhaps a coincidence but more likely instinct, riding the winds back home to the North. I hope he finds his Earful.

At this time of year gales are pretty much a given. Southerlies tend to be warm, Northerlies bitterly cold. Usually, from whatever direction they arrive, sheets of grey rain will ride in on their coat-tails, overtopping ditches and turning the ground to boot sucking clart. Occasionally though they coincide with the magic words – sun & showers. On those days it’s good to be out. One such day came at the end of October, with a Northerly blowing at 60mph the logical place to be was the sheltered and Southwest facing coast of Brims, as the crow flies a couple of miles or so from home.

To get to the shore you go over an exposed headland. The wind hits side on, with streaming eyes you adopt a gait of head down – lean sideways, walking like a half shut penknife. More than once a gust pushed me in the direction it wanted me to go rather than the direction I was aiming for. Beyond the headland  there’s an undulating landscape of low coastal grassland, cropped tight by Sheep and shaggy coated Cattle. In Summer it’s lit with wildflowers and snow white tufts of cotton grass. Today, after October’s rains, it’s miry, on OS maps it carries the name Rotten loch, earned perhaps from the brackish black water that rises up from each boot step. Despite the name it’s a home from home for hidden wisps of Snipe who prod and probe the saturated ground.

Beyond the grassland there’s a shoreline of shallow Geos, a mix of sandstone and black basalt, formed when Orkney sat far closer to the Equator than it does today. The basalt rises from the shore as if lifted by a wave, above the high water mark it’s dressed with Lichens, below it, washed twice daily by the tides, it’s dark and slick. The rain comes and goes. I’ve got a camera around my neck with a telephoto zoom, a wide lens is in a pocket. When the rain arrives I tuck the camera inside my coat and turn my back to the weather. Way over in the distance a group of cattle follow suit, heads to the South, arses to the North.

After a while I find a place to sit, sheltered by a bank, facing South towards Caithness. Gannets are fishing offshore, in Orkney they’re Solan Geese, from the old norse, sula. In old english they were the Ganot, a gander or a goose. As the weather turns and another shower blows in, a half dozen birds come within camera range and are photographed through a gauze of backlit rain. They’re large birds, a metre long body sporting an almost two metre wingspan. At a distance they’re white, up close they have eyes of pale blue-grey, black tipped wings and a head and neck dusted with ochre yellow.

As the rain continues, I watch them dive, when a fish is spotted there’s the briefest inflight pause, they dip their heads and stiffen their wings, almost a hover, a split second later, down they go. At first they form the classic W, slanting in, wings half closed, eyes on the prize.

At the last moment they become a missile, a tube of feathers, feet at one end, dagger like beak at the other. Hitting the water at 60mph and barely causing a splash. My reflexes couldn’t keep up, from dive to impact is a couple of seconds – when I chimp the screen on the back of the camera I see far more out of focus misses than in focus hits. Other birds are seen, wandering Black-backs and pleeping Oystercatchers. Greylag geese rise honking and complaining from the mire, upset by my presence. Two fence lines away a Hen harrier flies at sheep’s back height, ducking the wind, but for today at least the Gannets are the star attraction.

As the day wore on the showers thinned and the skies turned blue. On the walk home I watched a young Gannet hunt close to the shore. If an adult at a distance is white, a youngster is sooty black. Up close they’re mottled grey-brown, the colour of a Basking shark. As with the adults, just before diving, the bird had a tell, an almost imperceptible pause of the wings and a tilt of the head.

In Orkney, October marks a change. Summer is a memory. The days shorten rapidly, regular gales are a given, ditto our sometimes biblical rain. An unwritten rule says that bright dry days are to be grabbed with both hands. There are many upsides though, misty days bring a soft light, storms bring a white-capped life to the sea. Grey seals give birth to doe eyed pups and there’s the musical and beautiful yap of wintering Barnacle geese. One of the best gifts that October brings is the chance to spend a quiet couple of hours watching and photographing the Mirrie Dancers, the Northern Lights.

We’ve had a few teasers, an app tells of imminent displays – you go outdoors and see a blanket of unbroken grey cloud. Occasionally though it all comes together. Saturday past was such an evening, the sky velvet black, shot through with scattergun pin-pricks of light. Clear and still, a true silent night.

I stayed close to home, the frames above and below were taken in the garden and the meadow. In the frame above I used a fisheye, a lens that gives a 180 degree angle of view, wide enough to take in both the Milky Way to the West and the beginnings of the Auroras glow to the North. The downside of a fisheye is uncorrected distortion, those trees on the frame edges aren’t really growing on a slope. For the frame below I’d walked down to a pond in the meadow, disturbing a pair of what I think were Mallards. A splash of wings, a silver ripple on torch-lit water and they were gone, lost to the dark.

The aurora ebbed and flowed, the nights finale came as I walked back up to the house, dozens of light pillars erupted, green topped with red, filling the Northern horizon and stretching hundreds of miles high. For twenty minutes or more they shimmered and danced, a silent orchestra of light.