The Drummer

It's been raining here in Orkney, every blasted second of this miserable, grey, cold and windy July day. Sheeting down from low thick cloud from dawn, which happened at about 1am, until dusk which will occur very soon at midnight. Everybody has been walking around cloaked in Goretex with long sleeves, long trousers and even longer faces seeking indoor means of entertainment. Not an easy task on an island that caters far more for sheep than people. Still the roses look nice.

It was a different story yesterday. Then the sun broke through around midday transforming the drab  of the moors into sheets of verdant green; the sea from steely grey to bright vibrant blue; the meadows to carpets of buttercup gold. Beautiful.

At Marwick Head on Mainland watching fulmars ride the updrafts over high sea cliffs was exhilarating. The birds stalling into the breeze at eye level, demonstrating ably their complete mastery of the air, is one of those sights that would make anyone with any sense of aesthetics stop and stare. Marauding great skuas, Bonxies as they are parochially named, cruised the cliff face looking for an easy meal in the form of unattended chicks. Huge, steely-eyed great black-backed gulls did likewise. Ravens cronked overhead and kittiwakes kittiwaked. Guillemots brayed and the stately gents of the throng, the puffins, grunted in greeting to one another on narrow ledges overlooking a sheer drop of 200 feet. But all may not be well here, for despite scanning the cliff faces through binoculars it was difficult to find any chicks. Some fulmars seemed to still be incubating, but many pairs were simply sitting in their nesting nook with no obvious sign of eggs or young. It was the same story with the kittiwakes. Times are hard for our seabirds.

Later, we watched a distant short-eared owl hunting over the heather clad slopes of the uplands whilst more great skuas and the occasional smaller Arctic Skua patrolled its nesting grounds. The RSPB have many reserves scattered around the islands all well signed, many with excellent paths and hides. From one hide we had views of a red-throated diver tending a fluffy brown chick on a small loch where wild grey-lag geese gathered and more Bonxies cruised the updrafts.

On our after dinner stroll we heard a snipe drumming over an area of wet meadow, a strange bleating sound that I last heard about 20 years ago. It was so uplifting to hear this sound of territorial dominance, more so since we have pretty much lost breeding snipe from large tracts of my home county and indeed most of lowland England. All over Orkney the skies are full of piping oystercatchers, trilling curlews and in a small wet meadow by a minor road beside a loch, a lone snipe strutting his stuff. The first time me and my boyhood mates heard a drumming snipe we couldn't for the life of us think what the heck was making the noise. We thought it must be a swarm of bees and looked around anxiously to see if we were in imminent danger of being smothered. The problem with this theory was that the noise came in short bursts of a few seconds with longer gaps between. Not a bee swarm then, maybe some kind of frog? Eventually we espied a small bird flying over the small marsh in front of us and as it executed an almost vertical dive the weird sound again reached our ears. No binoculars adorned our necks in those days, we hardly needed them, but we knew enough to identify the long billed speck as a snipe. How weird that a bird should make such an unbird like sound though; little did we appreciate that the noise is made by air vibrating the stiff outer tail feathers that are fanned as the bird dives. One of the poignant sounds of spring that sadly no longer graces the small marsh where we first heard it. Needless to say that wetland has virtually disappeared along with the snipe that made it their home. But they still find a home here in the large areas of wet meadow and bog in the low lying land around the island perimeters and it was a joy to watch this one.

We plan a trip to Hoy tomorrow. We are promised better weather.