AFC Meeting: To Rubh’an Dunain
Sunday 15th September 2024 was the last scheduled outing of the Field Club’s summer programme. Sadly, summer still hadn’t arrived by then!
Despite the persistent rain all morning five folk ventured to Culkein Stoer for the 10.30am start. The bunch that turned up included four club members and Jim, a visitor from Doncaster.
I’m going to cut the weather story short here and say that for the first five minutes of birding at Culkein it was still raining, then it went off and didn’t start again until we were putting our gear back in the cars nearly 3 hours later.
We even had our food sitting out at Rubh’an Dunain in hazy sunshine. Crazy!
So, before it rained again, we had a good look at the bird life on the sand and mud in Bay of Culkein.
Suddenly you see
To the unaccustomed eye the good number of small waders running about must all look the same. Give folk a look through a scope and they see things differently.
Suddenly you can see that the adult Ringed Plover, Charadrius hiaticula do have orange-coloured legs and a black face mask from which protrudes a short stout orange bill with a black tip. The juvenile birds are fairly easy to distinguish thanks to the adults still mostly being in summer plumage.
Wait a minute, there are other slightly slimmer, paler birds running about even more franticly!
This is impossible you start to think. Once again when you take a proper look you can see that these are Sanderling, Calidris alba which will have arrived in the past day or so from Iceland. Why are they Sanderling, asks the chorus?
Have a look and you’ll see they have a noticeably longer bill, still stout but all black. Their legs are clearly black, no orange in sight.
The dozen Sanderling we had were all juveniles with a hint of a cream collar and looking very ‘spangly’ across the back.
The other thing that can help with identifying Sanderling is their lack of a hind toe! Okay they need to be standing still on a firm(ish) surface to see that. It is a feature unique to Sanderling as all the other waders have a hind toe.
Larger waders
Two other larger waders put in an appearance while we were looking at the small ones.
First was a group of six Common Snipe, Gallinago gallinago. A group like this flying over a seashore and landing are most probably, like the Sanderling, migrants. Possibly also from Iceland.
The best way to know if you’ve disturbed a Common Snipe is the abrupt and fairly loud sound it makes when taking off. It is a disyllabic ‘ca-atch’ often described as sounding like a wellie boot being pulled from wet mud.
While we were watching the Snipe a second small flock of mid-sized waders flew in. These were Knot, Calidris canutus.
Just to keep the theme going these too were migrant birds. Their journey however had been a bit longer than the Sanderling or the Snipe. This group of 12 birds were all juveniles, i.e. hatched this year. Their ‘birth-place’ will have been some of the Canadian high-arctic islands. Their route here will have involved a refuelling stop in Greenland or Iceland.
Knot don’t spend the winter in Assynt but form massive flocks in a few select estuaries around the UK.
Risk!
These flocks are a fantastic sight whether the birds are feeding, roosting or in flight. The risk they face is of course human activity disrupting or destroying their wintering grounds.
In human terms it would be like you independently flying somewhere distant that you’ve visited regularly many times in your life. You know you’ll get a meal on the flight, when you arrive you know where you’re going to stay and you know the best restaurant.
Reality is since you were last there a new runway has been built on the site of your apartment. The restaurant has been closed down due to a polluted water supply which has also resulted in the beach being unusable.
Finally, your return flight a few months from now can’t be changed!
What else?
Okay, what else was in the bay area? A quick list included Redshank, Curlew, Oystercatcher, Common Gull, Great Black-backed Gull, Mallard, Pied Wagtail, and Rock Pipit.
Next stop was out at Rubh’an Dunain where we added a flock of c25 Twite to the bird list along with Gannet, Great Northern Diver, and an adult Common Guillemot that was still feeding a juvenile bird. The spectacular sight of two adult Whooper Swans flying in from the sea and over our heads was a reminder of the time of year.
To save you wondering the swans were also migrant birds arriving from Iceland.
That reminds me. Your holiday we mentioned above – no one told you about the changes to your destination and no one has made any alternative arrangements for you.
If you have ever been out at Dunain you’ll know how exposed it is. The effect on the plant life is very noticeable, everything is about 3-4cm high maximum. Most notable on the day was the Devil’s-bit Scabious, Succisa pratensis. Two days earlier some of us had been in a fenced and sheltered area where the same plant was well over 30cm high.
While we sat in the hazy sun at the point it was a chance to scan the sea for cetaceans. None were recorded but this spot can be a great vantage point for ‘whale’ watching.
Return walk
The return route took us slightly uphill past the misleadingly called lazy beds.
These corrugated ridges would better be described as cultivation ridges as their use was in no way lazy. The ridges at Dunain may be relatively recent, perhaps 100 years old but they are simply a ‘modern’ reflection of how hard it is to survive on this coastal land.
The soil here is so thin and lacking in nutrients that it requires to be built up and sweetened by shell sand, thousands of baskets of seaweed, dung and old roof thatch.
Hence the ridges which serve several purposes – they allow soil to drain; they allow access for weeding and they allow better productivity due to all the edges which get more sun and hence grow better.
A few low-growing waxcap fungi were just visible in the last piece of croft land we walked over before picking up the middle road that ends at the house known as Dunain.
As mentioned at the start it didn’t rain again until we got back to our cars.
It was, we all agreed, a brilliant walk to Rubh’an Dunain. Jim was particularly happy he had come along.
David Haines
NB half of the photos were not taken on the day and are from my files. Dates added to clarify things.