There be dragons and wild cats

I forgot to tell you in my last post - the result of Alexander's night of drinking was that he was sentenced to 7 years transportation in Van Diemen's Land.

In Kirriemuir we noticed a dragon on top of a church. We also saw one in nearby Forfar. It seems there is a local legend about a girl being sent to collect water from a well who did not return, so her father sent her sisters, one by one, to look for her until all 9 of his daughters were missing. Finally he thought he'd better gather a group of local men and go see what had happened. They found a dragon had devoured them all. I'm not sure how this came to be connected with the Christian churches, possibly as a memorial to the girls or the bravery of one of the local lads who killed the dragon. There are several different versions of this story.

We saw these strange towers dwarfing the city of Dundee. They are a reminder that the North Sea oil industry brings a lot of wealth to the eastern parts of Scotland. These are the 'legs' of jack-up oil rigs towering above the body of the rig. When they move the rig, the legs are jacked up into the air so that the rig can be towed. Impressively huge and ugly.

For our final full day in Fife we decided to be pure tourists and went to the Scottish Deer Centre. This is Harris, a red deer stag, who is very handsome and didn't he know it too. There are over a million deer roaming wild in Scotland but the environment can really only cope with about one quarter of that. There are annual culling (hunting and shooting) programs which sounds cruel but it helps reduce death by starvation which is the main cause of wild deer deaths.

The reason there are too many deer is because a few hundred years ago humans killed all the wild wolves. There were 3 grey wolves in the deer park, not in the same enclosure as the deer, obviously. There are people campaigning for wolves to be reintroduced into the wild in Scotland.

There were lots of other animals too. One of Santa's reindeer with very long antlers.

 Not the prettiest girl,  but one of the biggest, a European moose.

Three otters having great fun dunking each other in their pond. These are a smaller breed than the wild one we saw in the Outer Hebrides.

 Yum, fish for lunch. I had fish for lunch too, but thankfully mine was cooked.

 I did not know that lynx had short tails.

There were over a dozen raptors at the park which take turns flying outside as part of three falconry displays each day. This is an eagle owl which is huge. It can kill geese. We watched him flying. He particularly liked landing on picnic tables where people were sitting and has been known to steal hats.

The harris hawk was also interesting to watch, very fast and agile. He can catch his food in mid air.

Foxes are not endangered like many of the animals in the park. They are such pretty little dogs. I always think it is a shame that they cannot be domesticated.

This cat looks like my Cedric who was 6kgs with black stripes on his tail. But it is a Scottish Wild Cat, a critically endangered species due to interbreeding with feral domestic cats and habitat loss. Very sad.