Country Diary: Loch Flemington

It may simply be my advancing years, but each spring there seems to be an even greater urgency to see the first summer bird migrants. Each morning, on the way to the village shop, which doubles as a post office (unfortunately, this service is soon to be closed), I search the boulder-strewn moorland in vain for the first wheat ear. There have been no male swallows in the village on overhead wires waiting for the females to arrive. No sand martins have been dipping under the river bridge and the insects around the willows have been waiting, like me, for the first warblers to arrive. So one day last week the decision was made that we would go searching for the first migrants and we chose Loch Flemington, a freshwater loch a few miles east of Inverness.

The loch has a narrow road running the length of one of the banks and the birds get used to the occasional car, so we use ours, stopped on the verge, as a hide. The first impression of the loch was the sounds of the birds as a little grebe was calling from a still growing sedge bed. Books describe the call as a "far carrying, whinnying song", but to my ears it just sounds like a trill.

Coots were fighting and calling as only coots can and one pair of wigeon were displaying, with the male making the typical whistling note and the female purring away. The female mute swan was asleep on her eggs on top of her huge mound of a nest, while the cob sat in the water nearby as if on guard. We had expected the sand martins and swallows to be hunting very low over the water, but there was disappointment as there were none to be seen. Then two golden eye flew in and, as I looked up, there were the sand martins and swallows feeding high. They were back.