Colony

Making coffee and pancakes in the kitchen looking our over the rocks, a huge heron spotted as well as The Seal and The Otter, all before 9am! Might have to take the rest of the day off from nature, have possibly peaked too soon.

But no, off out at lunchtime after a leisurely morning around the place to Scalpsie Bay over on the west of the island where we saw seals last year. We thought we’d done quite well previously when we saw perhaps a dozen of them bobbing around in the water, but this time it was a far more spectacular sight with around thirty or forty of them spread out in the shallows basking on rocks, swimming around and generally just getting on with life whilst us and a mere handful of other folk sat along the beach and watched them for an hour or so. In brilliant sunshine. In October. Loved it.

Off then up to Ettrick Bay for paddling in the sea, and waiting for the sunset (when we were here last year the sun set so late, and not to mention in the ‘wrong’ place, that we never actually saw one…). And I was ruing the fact that I didn’t have any swimming gear or a towel with me or I might have attempted an actual swim as the water wasn’t as cold as expected (hardly warm I’ll grant you, but not ridiculous temperature-wise). Maybe tomorrow, maybe...

A different kind of colony altogether.