Firwood Cottage, Nethybridge: Our Uist holiday

Hello and sorry to have missed the last two weeks. As we waved cheerio to Ian and Eidith on the Saturday, we packed our own bags and headed west on the Sunday - Inverness, Loch Ness, a brief stop at Eilean Donan (right), Kyle of Lochalsh, across Skye to th

e port of Uig in time (just!) for the CalMac ferry to Loch Maddy on North Uist. A short drive to Solas and we were at our cottage, home for the next two weeks. Lapwings, snipe, oystercatchers all visited the garden and the first bird over our heads as we unpacked the car was a male hen harrier - what a place to find, well done Janet. The Uists have to be seen to be believed, waders are everywhere and in amongst the drumming of snipe you can hear the trilling calls of dunlin, and alarm calls of curlew and redshank, indicating that were were visiting just as all of these birds had young, most of which were just about to fledge.

So no wordy diary this week, but a few pictures of some of the highlights and a wee complaint to t

he Western Isles Council about the lack of deck-chairs on their beaches!

Colour. A lasting memory of any visit to the Uists is the sheer blaze of colour and the scent from the flowers wafting in the breeze. Corn marigolds and buttercups were the main yellow colours.

Views. Huge, open vistas to the west with tiny specks of houses dott

ed along the skyline. More hilly/mountainous to the east with peat bogs (still cut over for fuel) and heather and eagles! Crofts are still the main agricultural holdings, mostly small scale and some managed to help the corncrake population as well as flowery meadows to support some of the country's rarer

bumblebees. Not bees again - sorry, but just a wee mention of one of them.

Beaches. Just a few. Real problems with visitors, occasionally we met someone on OUR beach! Couldn't get a deck-chair anywhere! Walks along the beaches were always different, sandy, shelly, pebbly occasionally rocky. Common gulls, arctic, common and little terns overhead, ringed plover ru

nning ahead of you, leading you away from nearby chicks. With every tide the shoreline changes and we were happy walking for mile after mile intrigued by the natural art created by the mix of wind, water, seaweed and shells. And the shells differ from beach to beach, limpets on some, razor shells on another, cockles and winkles on others, the mix of shells here were seen on

Eriskay. It is from the breaking down of these shells that the famous flowery machair originates, the shells create lime rich soils which support the amazing variety of flowers.

On one of outing we popped in to see Bill Neill, a wildlife artist based in South Uist ( http://www.swla.co.uk/SWLAmembers/neillw/NeillW.htm ). Bill is

an expert on the bees of the Uists and has a link to our last trip to the islands last year, when a small bee that I managed to catch, turned out to be the Northern Colletes bee (Colletes floralis). This bee lives in the sand dune habitat along the coast, living in loose colonies and digging into the sand to create a breeding chamber. The bee is very rare and its main stronghold is the Uists. Having caught the bee Bill checked out the general area of the capture on Eriskay, and found a small breeding colony. http://www.snh.org.uk/scottish/species/invertebrates/colletes.asp So part of the visit this year was to look for more colonies as we wandered along the sand dunes. On Eriskay we located 9 colonies, another one on the Balranald RSPB reserve, and holes at two other sites that look like t

he bees excavations, but, without any sun during the visits, no bees were seen. Watch this space!

How about that! Whilst waiting for the ferry from Berneray to Harris, an otter popped up right by the causeway joining Berneray to North Uist. We went, without the car over to Leverburgh in Harris, had an enjoyable walk and retu

rned on the ferry in mid-afternoon. Otters were still visible, and, thanking Janet for her patience, I disappeared onto the causeway to see if I could get a picture of one. An adult appeared, diving for butterfish, close to the ferry, and each time it dived I got into a better position amongst the rocks on the causeway. Unbelievably, the otter surfaced amongst the seaweed covered rocks just below me and continued fishing. Eventually it hauled out of the water and I got the picture I had hoped for. We also had an otter in the garden of the cottage!

It is nice to see that a few more of the derelict "black houses" around the islands are being

restored either as tourist accommodation or, better still, as places of residence. One of the earliest restoration projects took place on Prince Charles's favourite island of Ber

neray, in the form of the youth hostel (left). Close to the youth hostel a group of four properties have been restored and elsewhere there are more to be seen. The thatch has been sourced sustainably from the lime grass growing on the local sand dunes. I have no doubt the houses are now much more comfortable to live in that when the previous inhabitants lived there.

A few butterfly species were seen, red admiral, painted lady, green-veined w

hite, common blue and dark green fritillary, and at one stop Janet spotted this pair of six-spot burnet moths. The orchids are also just about everywhere on the machair but I won't try to name them all correctly, various forms of common species have developed on the islands. The frog orchid (left) is usually found on the shorter cropped grasslands on the dunes. In some of the damper fields we came across varying quantities of lesser butterfly orchids. At two sites there were so many butterfly orchids that we had to stop and do a count to add to the information Scottish Natural

Heritage is gathering on the numbers and distribution of this vanilla smelling orchid.

One of the main incomes on the islands comes from the sea, lobsters, scallops, fish farming and fishing. At almost every small

harbour we visited there were piles of lobster pots showing that, with the rocky make-up of the west coast, lobsters must be plentiful. We have always wanted to try lobster but have been put off by the enormous cost of ordering lobster in a restaurant and, without "training" knowing how to break up the shell to get at the meat. Visiting one harbour Janet spotted a shop and found that within a smallish lobster could be bought for a mere £4! So we bought one and, with guidance from the

lady in the shop, set off home to try our first lobster. It was delicious, but we were a little worried when we compared the amount of shell shed to extract a smallish amount of meat.