Blogging at 21:00 on Saturday 28th December from intended overnighting spot N 55.87244°, W 06.33966° / http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:55.87244%2C-06.33966
We managed to take the tiny (but outrageously expensive) ferry off Jura without issue first thing this morning (pic), but a flimsy wanting to go the other way was turned away by the ferry's skipper. Such was the water level that the linkspan to / from the ferry was pretty steep and poor old Mr Flimsy would have grounded out his tail thanks to too-shallow a departure angle.
And so, to Islay. The island was immediately obviously very different in feel to Jura: the omnipresent and unrelenting mizzle, though, remained the same!
The island's infrastructure is way more 'advanced' than Jura and there are simply far more people and all of their trappings here. It's not that the island isn't still remote and desolate, it is: it just isn't anywhere near as remote and desolate as Jura.
From leaving the port we casually took in a couple of cultural attractions (standing stones and ancient monuments) and then made our way to Loch Gruinart, a place that's renowned for its migratory birdlife. The area, for example, is known to host one of the UK's most important sites for Greenland's wintering population of white-fronted geese.
It's my kind of place. I spent ages in RSPB hides and just generally milling about with binoculars whilst Emma ran and then caught up with some (inscrutable) Emma things. Those Emma things did, however, include dealing with a highly unseasonable and utterly unexpected tick (read yet another full-truck-fumigation exercise).
From the RSPB hides we headed north to Ardnave point, where we basically spent all afternoon either walking or wildlife spotting from the truck. The species list for today is huge and the more notables are: huge numbers of white-fronted and barnacle geese, male and female hen harriers, merlins, knot and - totally unexpectedly - chough.
We saw a few individuals of the species sporadically but then, late afternoon, several dozen appeared and seemed to garrulously focus on a particular area of hillside quite close to the truck. It turns out one of the residents here has been feeding them for years and that this is the very last 'stable' Scottish population of this species. Wow!
As another pleasant surprise, the last couple of hours of daylight brought the first signs we've seen of blue skies on the whole trip. With this, though, have come howling winds...
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