Mistle thrush

When I was walking near Dechmont Farm on Tuesday, I heard a loud racket emanating from a couple of trees beside the road. It was so loud that I could hear it clearly even though I had my iPods in my ears, listening to an audiobook. I craned my neck and could see two speckled birds flying about among the branches, and managed to take a rather blurry photo of one of them. The mystery was solved a couple of days later when we met up with Alison and Hugh for a coffee on our way to Ullapool. Alison is very knowledgeable about birds and she had a look at the photo and a short clip I had filmed to capture the loud noise, and later messaged me to let me know that they were mistle thrushes. The loud rattling call that I heard is their alarm call, although I’m not taking the blame for alarming them because I heard the noise when I was still nowhere near them. 

The reason for our trip to Ullapool is to check on the cottage and make sure that it is ready for winter, because we may not be back for a while. Currently the Scottish Government is advising people not to travel around Scotland, and we have obeyed the guidance. However it’s possible that from next week it will become illegal to travel out of our local area, so we decided to visit the cottage this weekend. We brought our food from home and have not interacted at all with local residents.

We went for a walk today up Ullapool Hill and then extended our walk by descending down to Loch Achall and walking up the hill behind Glastulloch. Just below the farmhouse we passed television presenter Ben Fogle, who was filming an episode of a Channel Five series called “New Lives in the Wild.” He said a very pleasant hello to us as we passed. On the other side of the hill we crossed a rather tussocky and soggy area to a farm track which eventually took us past the dump to the coast road leading back down to the village. It was a really good 15 km walk and we were treated to a beautiful sunset as we approached the coast road. 

I had a delightful bath while James very kindly made our dinner.