Peacocks & Martins

The signs of spring seem to start as a trickle: a lesser celandine; the first primrose; a pair of pied wagtails. Now, suddenly, they're becoming an avalanche.

We found this peacock butterfly in the grass by Trevor Potts' campsite. It's the first butterfly of the spring, and he seemed drunk with the excitement of it, getting up to flap a few wobbly feet before crashing back into the grass. Yet he was in beautiful condition after a winter hidden in a crack in a tree or a rock crevice, all ready to mate and produce the first caterpillar brood of the year.

Then - even more exciting - as we were walking along the road below Meall mo Chridh, we spotted sand martins flitting low over the marsh grass. They usually beat the swallows and house martins back here by a few weeks, but there have been reports of the first swallows already.

Some of our sand martins nest in the small quarry on the Sanna road, just up from the fire station. There's a vertical face with a layer of sandy soil just below the peat, with several of their brood holes in it.

These little birds, a mere 12cm (5") long, have just made a 5,000 mile flight from their winter quarters in southern Africa. Many have died on the way, their tiny, desiccated corpses scattered across the sand dunes of the Sahara. They've come so far - yet they manage to navigate their way back to the same holes they left in the autumn of last year.

As we arrived home we were reminded that some of our most spectacular wildlife stays with us all winter when a sea eagle flapped lazily across the croft land of Ormsaigbeg.