“Easter 2010” series of
articles
2010
2010 Mar
Mar 27 Sat 
Back to Scotland today. At a service-station I found a lovely rook:
Mar 28 Sun 
We ascended Craig Bheag (“big rock” in Gaelic), a mountain that overlooks Loch Gynack on one side and Kingussie on the other.
Contrary to expectations, the view from Craig Bheag to Loch Gynack (with not a road or village in sight) was complemented by a “Roadworks” sign. “Pathworks” would’ve been more appropriate, or “Path didn’t work that’s why people were up here mending it”!
The weather was sunny and not very windy or cloudy. It was a lovely day.
Mar 29 Mon “Frog Marsh March” 
The household walked up a valley near Newtonmore; it’s known as “the Glen” locally. The valley was a U-shaped valley making the transition to V-shaped with the help of a shallow stream called Allt a Chaorainn, a tributary of the river Calder, itself a tributary of the Spey.
We saw buzzardy aquiline birds in flight. Mum claims to have seen deer on that mountain yonder. Kelly (the dog) flushed a grouse from the heather.
For me, the two wildlife highlights (for want of a less cliché word) were having a cricket landing on my woolly jumper
and a frog/toad in the bog/road. The amphibian evidently liked me, because it let me take cool close-ups of it and even to stroke it! I wasn’t holding it in my hands (as the photos will testify); I was merely lying in the dewy heather pressing buttons on my camera, and stroking the frog/toad.
Mar 30 Tue
We ascended Craig Bheag (again) via the Kingussie Golf Course. The silly sign was still there.
Contrary to two days ago, the sun could barely be seen through the dense obscurities of cumulonimbus clouds. From the cumulonimbi (fluffy storm clouds), lochfuls of snow were descending. I often sank into snow-drifts. It was fun, despite the tiny teeny weeny wee fact that we couldn’t see much of where we were going and even less of where we were supposed to be going. We lost our positioning often.
We finished over 2½ hours of walking/running/crawling/falling/jumping/bumping-into-trees to find that the house that we were staying in was devoid of light bar a few smoky bees-wax candles that a local bee-keeper had lent to us. Heavy snow on the power-lines had once again brought Kingussie’s electric supply to a halt.
Mar 31 Wed “Ph0t0s”
I took zero photos today. Nothing really interesting happened today in my life.
2010 Apr
Apr 01 Thu
Today was also quite a lazy day. I “assembled” a wooden model of a chanticleer, though an important piece of the neck broke. I guess we’ll be having coq au vin tonight.
Apr 02 Good Fri “Song of the Ski” 
Cairn Gorm Mountain was open for skiers and snowboarders today. I know because I was there. Most of the queues were negligible (unlike last February), probably because of the date and the inaccessibility of the funicular to the top. The funicular had become stuck in the heavy snows! I made up some alternative lyrics for Funiculí Funiculá1:
Here we will ski down snowy Cairn Gorm
Where some thing dumbly is out-of-form
The train’s under the snow - we’ve to take the T-bar2
And not travel by Funiculí Funiculá.
I found that skiing is very much like horse-riding. Reminiscing about my own equine verse (not on Duncan’s Childhood Blog because it’s terrible), I thought:
Oh, I am riding a pony
Up down up down up down turn!
And it’s far from gloomy
Up down up down up down turn!
The “horse”’s name is Coire na Ciste
Up down up down up down turn!
But it’s not a horse: it’s a Cairn Gorm piste!
Up down up down up down turn!
When I wasn’t focussing on the snow in front and trying not to fall/injure some-one/kill myself/veer off-piste/bend my elbows/make up rubbish songs, I looked to the skies: I had my own demonstration of cirrus (wispy) cloud formation above Cairn Gorm’s summit. Beautiful.
Not having fallen or crashed once while skiing is a miracle; even when Mum ignored the “experts only” signs and led us across an off-piste gully called the West Wall, I still never fell. The West Wall is graded as a red run (difficult). My sisters and I are only cautious Intermediates! My knee was okay though (I hurt it in February).
Footnotes
1 A famous Italian song about a funicular railiway. Funiculí Funiculá doesn’t actually mean anything; “funicular” in Italian is funicolare.
2 On the T-bar tow, which has a T-shaped piece of metal which pulls skiers/snowboarders by the thighs up a hill.
Apr 04 Easter Sun “Silent is Golden-eye” 
A nice little area of Badenoch was re-visited today. I took some photos of the woods and lochans. There were at least seven frogs in the pools and lots of frog-spawn. Four ducks were swimming on one lochan: a pair of mallards and a pair of golden-eye! The golden-eye were quite far from me and near the centre of the lochan, so my photos aren’t very good, though you can tell the ducks are golden-eye.
And I think I saw a dotterel waddling in a field on the journey back, near Insh Marshes and Ruthven Barracks! I am excited. I’ll have to update my Index of Birds I’ve Sensed (IBIS, my avian life-list).
Lent is starting to seem like a good idea.
Apr 05 Easter Mon “Golden-eye I spy” 
I saw two pair of golden-eye on Loch Alvie whist I was in a car. A bird-book says that golden-eye are spreading across Speyside (i.e. this area of the Highlands).
And then we went to the Highland Wildlife Park
to see the animals within that Ark.
We saw a few Przewalski’s,1
The only herd in Scottish valleys.
Mum saw a pheasant in the wood.
I didn’t/couldn’t see the bird.
We also saw the mishmi takin
which exited the woods, then went back in.
Mercedes the bear was chilling out,
happy and care-free and without a pout.
Stop the press! What is that bird?
It’s a lapwing! It’s a herd!
Their bellies are white; their wings, dark green.
Good gracious, have you ever seen
so many wild birds so close to cars
and excited boys with cameras?
My camera said “click click click” chur-
ning out picture after photo after picture.
As well as lapwings in their dozens.
we espied their tricolour cousins.
The oystercatchers were rather great;
One pair even tried to mate!
The H.W.P. is like a bee-hive
with lots of plants and animals alive.
The sights were seen, the descriptions are scribed!
Footnote
1 Przewalski’s horses. Pronounced “prez-WOLL-skeez” by my Mum, “purr-zeh-WAL-skeez” by me, and “shih-WOLL-skeez” or “zih-WOLL-skeez” by Wikipedia. Take your pick.
Apr 06 Tue “Tiredness can kill: Take a Break: Have a KitKat”
A sought quietude entered today like a mouse onto a cat. The felid toyed with the notion of releasing the mouse, but gave in to the hunger and we flopped onto the sofa for a game of Monopoly.
I lost; a graph of my finances would look a bit like this:
