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AUGUST

Flocks of birds

A huge flock of housemartins and swallows swings above the buildings of Seahorse Stables, lying on the back of the dunes that lead to Lunan Beach.
It is a Friday, in later August, and I have to surmise that these are all this year’s birds gathered up to fatten up, and prepare for the long flight south. How long DOES it take to fly to Southern Africa on Swallow time?
It also seems that they are waiting, for the younger birds to leave the nest and join up with the flock. Back at the house I notice that another huge flock of martins appear to wheel about a nest under the gable end of a house at the back.
I can see a little black and white neck high up, mouth agape, and all the birds are flying up to the nest, then flighting off, trying to tempt those young ones out of the nest. “Come join us, now”, they twitter in house martin.
It is impossible to forget the size of the flocks of house sparrows hereabouts too. In my old house, in Charlbury, a small family group roamed the back gardens, but here they seem to be 50 strong at least, and thriving. If they are in decline nationwide then Angus seems a place to look for ways of reversing it.
Since we moved here it has seemed to be eternally windy. Ah yes, that must be it, this is a really windy spot. But Friday tonight it didn’t wind, and it didn’t rain. Those southern low pressures have finally stopped tracking this far north, and we can stand on the beach in tee shirts. The tide is out, and my daughter and I paddle in the shallow sand. There is a dip in front of the high tide line, which is deep enough for her to swim in when the tide is high. Otherwise, I can walk through water that is knee deep, then onto a rising bank of sand.
On an ebbing tide and an onshore wind the waves break on the farther edge of this bank, creaming surf whorls, mini pipes to be splattered by if you are seven years old and high on the refreshment brought by sea water, bubbles and sworls and sudden tugs, in and out of true.

The Beach

But that was another night. Tonight long fingers of settled cloud poke over the horizon from the south, and seem anchored there. We walk over to the river, paddling as we go across the ragged line of the swirling tide. It is out, but is it coming in, or staying out. Greenhorns us, we had better learn this stuff.
Now that the tide is out the Lunan Water cuts a scraggly path through the sand that its bed has now become. The sand reaches a long finger towards the cliff, where the dammed up Ice Age Lunan might suddenly just have cut through in a hurry to reach the sea. It looks more river like as you move further up, a sudden bend revealing a set of meanders, and you can feel that you can start to leave the sea behind.
We don’t want to really, feel the urge to climb up to the ruined castle on that cliff, but leave that for another day. The little one, she is so small seeming sometimes. She walks up to me, not quite up to my navel, but a perfectly formed small person. She wants to find the quickest, deepest part of the river and slalom down it. She wants a body board, she wants to go back ‘home’ (but she can’t – I think she grasps the magnitude of the move we have made, the bridges we have burned; but her past life, and past friends, still feel really real to her. Even though she said to her ’best friend’ on the phone, that she had already made new ‘best friends’. She does not yet want to acknowledge that, but, you never know, maybe the depth of her adjustment has been better than mine.
We identify a spot to get in, and she rolls and tumbles down the speeding water, searching for the sea.
I am distracted by the large numbers of birds which sit on the sand, on the other side of the river mouth. Gulls aplenty, I don’t really look hard, but Great and Lesser Blackbacks, Herring and Black Headed (now, sadly, only the chocolate brown head spot remains), and flights of screaming terns. I will have to come back to identify species.

Time to head back now, her sister has probably finished riding, a new pony, and supposedly forward going. Though, as a riding school pony, it is nothing like as forward going as the pony she has – temperamental old Reno.
We wander back, along the tide line, up and down through the holes and banks of the sands. Turn to cut back up the beach. The salmon net has gone. Well, was it a salmon net though, it was not set, wooden poles and all, at the mouth of the Lunan. Unless the salmon cut along the beach, then turn 270 degrees into the mouth of the net.. A mystery to explore over time.
Up the dune, back to the car park. Boy, it is steep. My feet get no traction, and my steps are tiny pitter pats, a weight heavy shuffle.
It seems more effortless for everyone else. I finally prevail, and stand at the top a minute, not so much to catch my breath (though that too) as to look across at the fields cut out of the dunes in the flat bottomland, full of horses and weekend owners now come to reclaim their steeds.
Especially on a night such as this, zephyrs calm, and the faintest intimations of autumnal light and longer shadows, at this back end of summer.
The swallows and martins, martins and swallows, they tweeter away to each other, wheel off in great flocks, settle town on telephone wires; sparrows flit among the herbiage around the edge of the stables, little surges of grey movement that catch at the edge of your vision and you turn to look. Ah, a sparrow……

OCTOBER

Buzzards
At Lunan Bay there is another family of buzzards, because this seems to be their favoured mode of living. If you see one buzzard there are likely more about.
That Wednesday afternoon the forecast was for rain later, but it was such a beautiful, blue, clear, windless day, that it eventually penetrated my thick skull that this was as good as it got, and that I should take some advantage, while the kids were at school, to get some of that air; that light, more pertinently.
I wanted to experiment a bit at Lunan, to see if I could put a walk together via the dunes and the beach, and I was prepared to experiment with the little tracks that I saw meandering along the back of the dunes, towards one end of the beach, the other half being broadly beyond the Lunan Water, the River Lunan, that I might or might not attempt to cross depending, as the SMT Guidebook said about Loch Nevis, “on the state of the tide”.
I did find the walk I was looking for, though it didn’t unfold as I thought it might. I explored a track that led off elsewhere, and put it together with a bit of the walk I was more familiar with. I heard a mew-li cry, and saw the buzzard. As I walked up the path by the knoll another buzzard floated up, and another, five altogether. Then I surprised one on the ground, or it was more important to be where he was. But he shifted, turning and twisting his wings to gain the energy to lift, to find the warming thermals above the beach. A half eaten rabbit, entrails red tubes lying parallel to each other, at 90 degrees from the carcase itself. A very neat eater, Mr Buzzard. They were probably all sharing it, or competing over it, he was the only one left, but there he went. Now there were six, rolling up into that clear blue sky. The next day it was all gone, skeleton, head and all. Who would take the time to crunch up heads, and chew down through sharp splintery bone, to leave no trace? Every time I pass that spot I look for a sign that that rabbit once existed, it seems to disturb me that I cannot see any sign.

The Salmon Nets
As the wind moved round into the North West the surf offshore at low tide has been quite beautiful. This Friday morning was the best yet, whipped up into a high crashing froth, glistening white in the gauzy sun trailing through a skein of thin cloud.
The tides are very low at this time in the morning, meaning I have to go a long way to do my circuit. However, it allows a great view of the timber pilings for the salmon stake nets still run out in the bay. The nets are not there at the moment, though they were when we first came. The season starts again in February.
There are 3 stations apparently. I can see the one at this end of the bay, and the one at Red Head, where the Lunan flows into the sea. There is another one at Ethie Haven apparently, at the other end of the bay.
I came across an article, an oral history really, in a book of such compiled by Tim Neat……..